CYCLONE DAVID Chapter 2. Eye of the Storm

Chapter 2.        Eye of the Storm          

•  “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!
• My reflex was to ram the throttle forward hard. Miraculously the fourteen-inch prop pushed her bow ahead through the next wave which thankfully broke behind us. We were free from our anchorage, and I steered her to a north-east compass bearing into rough but deep water, leaving our anchor and fifty fathoms of chain behind. I’d sometimes though of putting a folding prop on her and now I thanked Neptune that I hadn’t. The sky was getting lighter, the seas were short and sharp and if I think back on it, the wind was probably blowing at least twenty knots as the crew began busying themselves around the deck to quickly set some sails, to steady her and get us away from the island. First up was the stay-sail then the mizzen, which steadied her roll and gave her the power she needed. Next, we hanked on the yankee, a high clew Genoa, flown off the fore-stay and above the stay-sail. The bow now bit hard and buried her into the oncoming sea, setting her decks awash and flooding the cockpit as we heeled over and pulled away to starboard. With the sea now on our port forward-quarter we headed east, well away from land, into heavy conditions that Valhalla was built for and reveled in. As she steadied, pulling at the bit and ploughing forward through the swells, I handed the helm over to Tony, who had been onboard as crew for the past two years, ever since we first sailed in the Sydney-Hobart race. I ducked below to check the chart; at some point we were going to have to put her about. In retrospect I image it may have been easier to hightail it around the southern end of the island and into the Tasman Sea, with a following sea, but we’d planned our course the night before and I stuck to the plan. We would head out and when clear, put her about and run with the weather through Sugarloaf Passage, around the northern tip of the main island.
  
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• With no weather forecast, little did we understand what was to come. Weather forecasting at sea in those days was done by reading the barometer and the mood of the sailors. In this weather mood wasn’t difficult to read, ‘tense’, would have been the operative word. My concern about navigating blind through the narrow passage was groundless, if you’ll excuse the pun, we romped through uneventfully. With daylight the tension eased momentarily and thoughts of a leisurely breakfast ashore were left in our wake. Dreams of the beautiful Pacific Island destination were abandoned and we planned to head for Sydney, east with a strong tail-wind, blue skies and with a following sea. During the course of the morning the seas picked up dramatically, we scrutinized and tapped the glass of the barometer constantly, in disbelief as it plummeted, having never seen it so low. All thoughts of raising the mainsail, forgotten we were moving at hull speed already.
• Multi-hulls and skiffs are designed to sail on top of the water, a traditional yacht’s design, limits the hull speed through the water. That is to say, there is a maximum speed a traditional keeled-hull can travel. I mentioned previously that our prop-shaft was belted to an alternator and when cruising under sail, we free-wheeled the prop and the alternator pumped amps into the batteries. Valhalla’s hull speed was about nine-knots and when you got the feel of her you could gauge her speed by the hum of the alternator under the cockpit floor and the vibration coming off her propeller-shaft. At six and a half knots the hum became audible, over seven a slight vibration would set in. At nine knots there was little doubt she was at a gallop.
• At least three of our original crew and myself were surfers. We sometimes wondered what it would be like to surf mountainous seas. We even considered sailing into the Southern Ocean and finding a sixty-foot wave to surf, but we didn’t have to go that far, we now found them off the East Coast of Australia. As the weather deteriorated the mizzen-sail and yankee were dropped. Valhalla, was now constantly at maximum speed with only a tiny rag of a stay-sail lashed onto a six-foot boom to keep her on track. Each time we slipped off the back of a wave, the hull shuddered to keep up. The mountainous seas grew by the hour and she became difficult to handle, the swells rolled under her from behind at twice her speed and eventually we had to remove the stay-sail and sail under bare poles. By midday the barometer read 980 and would eventually go below 970 hectopascals, considered “phenomenal” in cyclonic terms. 
• Five of us onboard, short-handed by two on this leg home to Sydney. Usually there were seven of us on a major crossing, two for each watch and myself as navigator and reserve. There was old-mate Tony, myself, two young Kiwis sailors, Glen and the Goose, who had signed on in Auckland, keen for adventure, and Clive. Even though Valhalla had now been cruising in the Pacific for just over two years, when it came to these conditions, we were all novices. We rode the storm for the whole of the first day and into the night, not worrying about our bearing, just trying to stay comfortable, keeping her moving and on an easterly course. She shuddered backwards down one wave and was sucked back up the next. I say shuddered because the swells would suck her along at such a speed that she constantly tried to exceed her hull speed through the water. All and all including the speed of the swell we would have been moving at thirteen to fourteen knots most of the time, hesitating in the troughs and then accelerating again. But still the seas rolled under us much faster. 

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   Occasionally, standing at the stern rail when the swells were greatest, we could see the tops of the previous waves over the top of the main-mast. We had found our sixty-foot waves, and then some.
•  Just before sunset the wind cracked in hard, and I mean cracked-in, with a noise so frightening it came as a shock. The wind -vane on the top of the mast snapped off and propelled away, within a minute the wind blew the giant rollers flat and the sea became just raging foam. The yacht lurched sideways, now there was no holding her. Her bow pulled up into the wind as she lay over at about 30 degrees, and was blown sideways and backwards across the surface of the rolling sea. With the helm hard over there was nothing we could do except go below, lock her down and get stuck into the rum. Which we did. It was a surreal experience down below. The sea was so flat and the wind was so constant that there appeared to be almost no movement and with everything locked down tight the storm’s noise was minimal. We sat or lay back on the leeward settee with our feet up on the table and except for the fact that we were on an angle of 30 degrees you might imagine that we were moored in a harbour somewhere.
• It was pitch black outside again. After some time, a loud rapid hammering noise was heard from the direction of the fore-deck. One of the boys peered through the forward hatch and reported that the heavy stainless-steel clew of the stay-sail, which had been lashed to its boom, had worried itself loose. It was bashing against the cabin and threatening to break through a porthole.

• Cyclone David was recorded to have wind-speeds of up to eight-five knots, one hundred and fifty-seven kilometers per hour. A man would be blown off the deck in that wind. The barometer had fallen to 960 hpa. So, when I decided that someone had to go forward along the deck, untie the sail and stuff it down the hatch, the responses were short of polite. Rolling foam, 30-degree angle, no one on the helm and a choice between rum and risking one’s life, who can blame them for being scared. We couldn’t just remove the hatch; it would have blown away and the waves washing over the deck would have filled the cabin with water. So, I stripped down to my undies and put on two lifelines and on hands and knees felt my way forward along the windward deck in the dark, resetting each lifeline to the rail as I went. Two of the boys handled the hatch from inside the cabin and we stuffed the offending sail away, without further incident, and got stuck back into the rum.
• Just after midnight the wind dropped and the seas stood up again, not as steep as before and we steered her through the night, eastward, instinctively feeling our way by the direction of the swells. Dawn brought another surreal experience. The wind died down to nothing, the sun came out and all around us on the horizon the storm clouds hung, in cobalt-blue banks. We were becalmed, in a sickening sea, with no course. Small waves kicked up from all directions around us, like watery hands grasping for some air or sky. As the sun rose it became hot and humid and the hatches were thrown open and everything below that was wet was dragged up on deck and set out to dry.
• Researching Cyclone David today, I see that it stretched from Papua New Guinea to Lord Howe Island. Its main track was from New Caledonia to central Queensland. I’ll never know exactly what part of this system we sailed through. These enormous systems are often made up of a number of smaller systems with the maximum wind speeds at the “eye walls." 
• We must have been caught in the eye of one of these associate systems on David’s outer circumference because we were in-irons, stalled and becalmed, all at the same time, weird and more than just a little nauseating. By lunchtime it kicked in again and we batten down again and were sucked into what we could only guess was the opposite side of the storm.
• Lord Howe is only three hundred odd nautical miles off the east coast of Australia. The storm and seas had carried us north, how far was uncertain, so that second night our main concern was that we didn’t run into the coast. The night was again pitch black so we slowed her down and were relieved to see the coast at dawn. The storm took us about 300 nautical miles north of our intended destination, Sydney and it took a few hours of coastal navigation to confirm our position. We had been logging our average compass bearings every hour and surprisingly weren’t far off from our plotted position, Coffs Harbour.
• It was a short run into the harbour where we made fast to a public wharf. Coffs, as it’s called by the locals, was according to our outdated Admiralty information a pratique port. When arriving from overseas, international law requires all ships to undergo pratique clearance which involves customs, health and agricultural surveillance. In New Zealand we even had the drug squad and sniffer dogs onboard.  Wandering all over town looking for a harbour master is definitely a no-no, but when could only find a closed Harbour office, it was of concern. We’d had trouble in Fiji with officious port authorities who attempted to capture the boat for that reason, going ashore without permission. But tired and hungry and elated to be back on home soil we threw caution to the wind again, this time we risked a storm of a different nature, a bureaucratic storm. We slipped quietly ashore and made our next port of call the pub; schooners of dark beer flowed with a couple of kilos of fresh cooked, Aussie King Prawns, something our young Kiwis had never experienced. It was hard to tell if the Goose was more than a little exuberant over the prawns and beer, or having his feet firmly planted on terra-firma. Probably both!