CYCLONE DAVID Chapter 1. Lord Howe Island - Gateway into Hell

 

•  My t-shirt, felt soaked to my underpants. The warm tropical rain was beating almost horizontally into my face and had soaked through the toweling, tucked under the collar of my hooded sailing jacket. It was just after 4am in the morning and the night was pitch black on deck. I’d been awakened an hour earlier by the thumping of Valhalla’s lead keel against coral heads.

• We had made landfall late, the afternoon before, on our fifth day of a slow uneventful sailing leg from Auckland, NZ. When we encountered what I can only describe as eerie weather conditions. The sea was relatively calm, but most of the afternoon we had battled sudden squalls, very unusual for way out in the Pacific. No sooner would we get all the canvas up and we’d be pulling it down again. Small banks of clouds would suddenly appear in the clear azure sky and rush towards us, hammering us with the squalls they carried in their bellies. But not just from one direction, they came at us from different directions, as if Valhalla had suddenly become a squall magnet. These conditions lasted only a few hours before we were confronted with what appeared to be the offending cause. On the horizon, a black speck appeared, but rather than gradually stretching out along the horizon as we approached, as was normal when making landfall, the speck magically grew taller and taller. 
  

• Balls Pyramid, a vertical polished geological rock formation, the highest in the world’s oceans, unexpectedly rose up before us, five hundred and fifty meters. The coal black, sea- stack, a remnant of an old volcano caught us by surprise. We had spotted it on the chart, as a rock, to avoid, but in those days of no computers or internet, you might only see a picture of Balls Pyramid in National Geographic Magazine. Needless to say, we weren’t prepared for its mystical majesty. At the angle we approached, its pyramid-shape was like the name suggested and the top was shrouded, as if hiding a wizard’s castle, in a ring of clouds. White squall-clouds sped towards and away from it like busy aircraft at an airport.

• We were on course for Lord Howe Island, about twelve nautical miles North-West of our position, intending to break our journey ashore, before sailing on to Sydney. Mt Gower, standing almost nine-hundred meters tall on the island, was also clearly visible on the horizon, behind the stack. We were motor-sailing now, anxious to get set in a good anchorage before nightfall.

• In Nineteen-Seventy-Six we didn’t have weather fax, satellite-phones or other fancy navigation aids. We trailed a walker-log, for measuring distance traveled and navigated by compass and sextant bearings, no radio, only an el-cheapo weather-vane that measured the speed and direction of the wind. A note on our Admiralty chart for Lord Howe read, “visiting boats should be prepared to weigh anchor on short notice, unstable weather in the area”. A warning I’d never seen on any other chart before. We thought this explained the weird weather. How wrong we were!
  
• The chart and pilot book also confirmed what we’d been told about anchorage, that ‘The Lagoon’ on the Western side of Lord Howe was too shallow for Valhalla’s nine-foot draft. So, we made for Ned’s beach on the North-Eastern tip of the island, which appeared to be a perfectly good anchorage. It was coming on dusk as we arrived in the bay, a difficult time to visually gauge distance. It was around about low tide as we arrived and after sounding the bottom depth, using a bolt on the end of a lanyard, we dropped the pick in what I decided was clear water and we ran out about fifty fathoms (300 feet) of chain, five times the yacht’s length, a nice safe length. This weight of extra chain and angle of pull would keep the anchor from becoming dislodged, in case the wind got up at night.
• By the time we were set, it was dark. The bay was calm, a couple of lights had come on ashore and the wind had dropped right down to a very light North-Easter, which had us hanging stern-to Ned’s beach. It’s hard to describe the feeling that suddenly comes over the body when a boat comes to rest. Five days of sailing during which every muscle in the diaphragm, pelvic floor, spine, butt and abdominal work to balance the body. Not to mention hands, arms, legs and feet doing the hard yakka. It’s like performing ti-chi non-stop. When the boat stops, every muscle relaxes and the body screams for sleep. Anchor down, all six of us fell into our bunks with the intention of rowing ashore in the morning.
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• The thump, thump-thump of the keel against coral brought me abruptly awake and out of my cooked-breakfast dream. I’d called all-hands-on-deck. It was pitch black out and the tide had dropped to its low. We struggled into our wet-weather gear and huddled around Valhalla’s helm, staining our eyes through the rain, out into the night, trying to comprehend the change and to gauge our situation. There was a Northerly gale blowing directly into the bay causing a swell which was breaking just astern. Valhalla pitched over each short swell and bottomed in each trough, yanking on her chain and bumping and grinding against the coral-heads that now surrounded her deep keel. As skipper and navigator, I realized that I had made a serious miscalculation the night before. We had put out a little too much chain and had ended up too close to shore in shallower water. The wind and swells were picking up and the waves seemed to be breaking further and further out and it was inevitable that they would soon be breaking under Valhalla and then over her bow. She was heavy, 39-ton, very seaworthy and unlikely to be rolled, but in these conditions, caught side-on to the sea she could be beached and wrecked in minutes.
• We still couldn’t see a thing but knew that Valhalla’s anchor chain was stretched straight out in front of her, the strain on the chain must have been enormous. The chain was fastened directly to a very strong samson-post and we hadn’t set a snubber, a harness to take the shocks.  Each time she rose and fell on a swell she pulled hard on the chain like a rabid Rottweiler keen for a fight, causing the rigging to rattle and the whole yacht to shudder from mast-tops to keel. Our options were few; get the hell put or hang in there until first light. Sunrise was forecast for 5.30, it would be impossible to bring the anchor up in the dark in this sea. We could expect some light within the next half hour but we didn’t have a winch, and would have to rely on manpower to hand-haul the anchor, to pull Valhalla ahead of the swell. This was going to be a very dangerous exercise on the fore-deck, if the boys dropped the chain, and it slackened, the sea might catch us sideways and we could be wrecked.
• I don’t remember the exact details of the next moments, maybe we had decided to cut the chain and abandon the anchor, we carried a giant pair of bolt-cutters onboard. If we hadn’t decided this, in retrospect, we should have. Maybe the crew forward were trying to haul her ahead, in the dark and rain, I couldn’t tell. All I remember is that I was standing at the helm and had started up the Bedford diesel and decided to wait it out until first light so we could see our way clearly out of the bay. We had the Admiralty islands to contend with as well. We would have to navigate safely through them, if we managed to get out of this pickle.
• The Bedford was an old ninety-five horse power clunker. It swung a fourteen-inch three bladed bronze prop, powerful enough to push her at seven knots in calm water. The prop-shaft was belted to an alternator and when cruising under sail, we free-wheeled the prop and the alternator pumped five to ten amps into the batteries. In these conditions the engine was untested, if caught sideways it would be useless because we had no sea room.
• I had positioned the boys on deck, two on the bow and at the mercy of old Neptune we readied ourselves and waited. Suddenly the sea rose up and my worst fear was realized, a larger breaking wave, maybe three or four meters on the face, lifter Valhalla up and broke all around us. Dawn light was also breaking now, enough to make out the surging foam of the wave. At the same time a shout went up from the bow.
•   “She’s free, she’s free.” The yacht’s chain had gone slack. As Valhalla slipped off the back of the wave the chain pulled taught and with a tremendous twang, snapped!