The boarding – last night – was by now familiar, as was the ship, the Hansa Rendsburg, a carbon copy of the Hansa Flensburg. There was once again a United Nations on board with a Kiribati rank-and-file working crew, Filipino electricians and a mix of Russian, Ukrainian and Islander officers and engineers. The captain, with the upright name of Michael Hardmeat, was from Yorkshire. The most colourful of the lot was the chief engineer, a grumbly, grizzled old man with a twinkle in his eye and great interest in what we were up to. He had lived in Newcastle for a while, at Dixon Park Beach for next to nothing.
The Perfect Storm
‘Have you seen the weather report?’ she asked. Her lip twitching over her upper teeth.
‘No, why?’ I replied.
‘It’s bad. A storm from northern Australia has blown down the eastern coast of the north island of New Zealand. There’s no way you’ll get out of port’.
That evening we boarded the ship, a freighter bound for Melbourne, urgent with the need to get going.
At breakfast the chief engineer said, ‘I wouldn’t be heading out today. We should be sheltering in the lee of an island until it blows over. But I’m not the master’.
Mike Hardmeat was the master. At 900, straight after breakfast, the pilot led us out of Tauranga Harbour and around the back of Mt Maunganui. The channel out to sea was short and the harbour pilot was soon on his way. Hardmeat had to turn the ship hard to starboard to shelter the pilot boat so the pilot could leap aboard safely from the ladder.
Within an hour we ran straight into the storm. The barograph had been diving all morning. By 1100 it was at 970 on the graph.
Everyone was banned from going on deck. We passengers (all three of us) gathered on the bridge. Everyone grasped what handhold they could for even seasoned sailors found the crunch and roll difficult to read.
I hardly needed to read the instrument panels to know there was a Force 11 gale out there. The ship would crunch into an impossibly huge wave, throw up a sheet of white water and the wind would turn it into spray and blow it across the stacked containers in a matter of seconds. Again and again I tried to photograph it, but the moment passed before I could fumble the camera in to place. One rogue wave crashed up and over so thickly that it hid the ship before me from view for a few very long seconds.
70 knots said the wind meter. ‘It gusted up to 85 knots a few minutes before you came up here’, said the captain. ‘I’ve never seen wind that strong’.
The ship was travelling at less than 5 knots into the teeth of the storm to lessen the punch of the waves.
I looked at the chart and noticed the track went well out to sea. The captain said. ‘We lost rudder control for a few moments back there and I didn’t want to risk being blown into shore. We’ll run due north when we get some room’.
The captain had decided to keep the mate on duty company and rather than use autopilot he had a man at the wheel at all times. At first I thought that he did this regularly. Later he found it was not so. The captain stayed there until 3.30 am the following morning. A salt of 30 years experience, he was still taking about the storm a week later.
I tried to eat. I threw up my lunch within an hour of eating it. Dinner joined the earlier meal in the toilet bowl in an even shorter time.
I tried to sleep. By now the ship had developed a complex roll and crunch. It would lurch to port, but then before it could complete a smooth roll to starboard, it would thump into another monster wave with a thunderclap, judder out from beneath the huge weight of water and then finally roll to starboard. On every wave, thumping, crunching sounds came from stern and bow. In a state of half-dreaming sleep I thought they sounded like shells hitting the ship in an attack. I tried the bed but was almost thrown off by a particularly violent lurch. I tried the floor, but rolled around far too much. Eventually I wedged myself onto the couch in the living room, feet locked in at one end, head at the other and back pushed against the backrest. By the time the captain had gone to bed I fell into comatose sleep.
27 July 2008: Sunday
I woke and thought we had hit a calm after the storm. But as I walked to the toilet for my rich morning piss my legs told me the ship was still rolling and bucking. It was still very rough and no one but crew with safety gear were allowed on deck. It just seems like a calm after yesterday, I thought. In fact, after that anything will seem smooth sailing.
Crews with ropes and security hitches checked for damage. A few containers on the starboard side had their sides stoved in. Cables and some pieces of equipment were strewn over the deck despite being lashed down. The radar needed repair and one radio antenna had been broken off. The anchor seats had been bashed in by the force of the waves. And at breakfast the captain reported that they had made it into the Auckland Times. It was ‘The Storm of 2008’ and we were the only ship that had dared sail into it.
The seasickness slowly passed today. Being hit with a storm like that on one’s first day out was bound to do something. As the storm eased and I found my sea-legs I was able to eat and read again. We were still banned from the decks as the wind stayed high enough and the seas rough. It is taking us almost double-time to get around the tip of the north island, since we are running very slowly into the gale.
Great to be at sea again!
28 July 2008: Monday
Winter on the Tasman! Finally the sea is calm enough to be on deck.
29 July 2008: Tuesday
Dane in Australia:
One of two specialist engineers is a Dane, the other Australian. They travel with the ship to work on one of the generators (some things never change). In response to my questions, Mikael said that he decided to stay in Australia for a while after being bored to tears working as a chief engineer with an oil tanker. At the end of a contract in Darwin, he met someone at about 5am in the morning and mentioned he was thirsty. Offered a can, Mikael opened it and realised it was beer. This is a damned good country if they give you beer at five o’clock in the morning, he thought. I think I’ll stay awhile.
Pirates again:
The first mate from Kiribati told me of pirates. It was 3am, about 100km off the shore of Nigeria – much further than pirates usually go. Disturbance on the port side; a short investigation; a general alarm. They had arrived in a speedboat armed with a machine gun, knew exactly what they were wanted and came for it: gear from a particular container. When they had it they left; no violence, no more trouble. In the Malaccan Strait, however, a fishing boat might send out a distress signal. As the freighter draws near, guns replace fishing gear and they storm the ship. So there we use a scarecrow, he said, a cut out sailor, as well as have the lights and hoses going so it looks like people are out and about. They are a violent lot and you don’t want them on board at all.
A story from Kiribati:
The first mate also told me of a fishing boat and a stalled engine. Four men disappeared on a fishing trip (I was at home and they came from my island, he said). The mothers-in-law gathered the wives of the men together and told them to say their farewells, for they would not be home from this trip. So they began drinking for their sorrows, one of the women began fucking around, as he put it, and general carousing ensued. Four months later the boat drifted ashore in Papua New Guinea and he can remember when it was announced on the radio to some consternation.
First mate:
At sea for twelve months and home for two, the first mate mentioned he has five children. The youngest is three, the eldest thirteen. He misses them terribly, but knows that his job gives them many more opportunities. He trained in New Zealand, where they monitor the people from the Pacific very closely indeed. In fact he would love to move to New Zealand but the government is so tight on Pacific immigrants it is impossible. Yet the people from Kiribati have long been seafarers. In the 16th century they would navigate through oral tradition and sail (literally) their canoes to Samoa, some 3000 km away. Constructed out of planks and binding, one sits in the New Zealand Maritime Museum. It was used in an effort to sail from Kiribati to New Zealand in the early 1990s but had to be rescued when it began taking on water during a storm. How many others perished in storms this way?
Chief Engineer:
The old man with the twinkle in his eye called me over at lunch and asked me if I had a minute. So while the engine coughed and spluttered he asked me what I did. Not much to say there, but he was far more interesting. He was born in England during World War II to a mother did not like air-raid shelters (they were too cramped and common) so she would shelter under a table in a doorway. But he grew up in Caloundra and Mount Tamborine and still speaks with a broad Queensland accent. A naval engineer who trained at Tighes Hill in Newcastle (best town in the world, he said), he made a million buying a house a month in Vietnam as head of the port of Saigon in the late 60s and then lost most of it, had worked the ships carrying copper from mines in Papua New Guinea, married a Vietnamese woman and moved to New Zealand because his mother thought her a second-class human being. ‘That bloody chink’, she would call her, and refused to walk down the street with her grandchildren. So they settled in New Zealand and raised the children there. He reads an awful lot: we talked of Einstein and Spinoza (pantheism, ethics, bible, glass grinding), Moorhouse and Benny Morris, Africa and Israel.
30 July 2008: Wednesday
The usually rough Bass Straight was as a calm as a pond. Seeing the spout of flames from the oil rigs, our American passenger cursed.
‘How close are those platforms to shore?’ he asked.
‘Not sure’, I said.
‘Are they closer than 200 miles?’
‘Um yeah, Bass Straight isn’t that much bigger’.
‘That sucks’, he said. ‘In California we can’t build them closer to shore than 200 miles, and we’re desperate for oil. It’s those dreadful green people who’ve done this’.
At first I thought he meant some green aliens who’d landed in the USA, but then I realised: the argument was that the skyrocketing oil prices were the fault of greenies who are restricting access. Ah yes, spot on …
Oil rig and sunset over Bass Straight
31 July 2008: Thursday
I am absolutely fascinated by the role of the harbour pilot. It is probably less exciting for those who encounter pilots every day – a bit like what goes in the daily life of a port, which is closed to most of us, mundane for those who work there. I have often walked by the pilot station at my home port of Newcastle, seen the pilot boat race out of the heads on many occasions, but I never realised that the pilot climbs on board the ship and guides it in or out of port.
It is an old profession, for each port is different, with channels, sandbanks, rocks, varying depths, odd tidal patterns and all sorts of traps for the unwary. The huge cargo ships may be great on the open sea, able to take all sorts of weather, but they need to be treated very tenderly when in port, nudged and smooched by tugs and carefully guided by pilots.
Out in the open sea, the pilot boat touches up alongside the ship. The captain of the pilot boat needs a sure hand and great skill to hold steady while both the large ship and his small pilot boat touch. The pilot jumps off the small orange pilot boat and clambers up a ladder on the side of the ship. Sometimes there is a door for him to climb through if the hull is high. It matters not whether the seas are rough or calm, he must board the ship to guide it into port. A crew member leads him up to the bridge, where he takes off his jacket to show shirt and tie, opens his brief-case with harbour plans, sometimes a lap-top, and then his two-way radio for contact with the port and tugs.
The channel into port may be short and tight, like Newcastle or Tauranga, or it may be long – up to 4 hours – like Melbourne. The pilot may be a chatterer, or completely silent; sometimes they smile and say helo and at others they are absorbed in their task. The pilot stays with the ship the whole time. The captain is present, decked out in white shirt and shoulder stripes and a crew member holds the wheel. Then they settle into the ritual:
‘Port ten’, says the pilot.
‘Port ten’, says the crew member at the wheel.
‘Port ten’, he or she repeats a few moments later when the correction has been done.
‘Yes’, or ‘thanks’, says the pilot.
On it goes. Sometimes it is ‘mid-ships’ (straighten up), ‘starboard five’ (five degrees to starboard), ‘hard to port’ (full turn to port), ‘dead slow ahead’ (slowest speed forward), ‘half astern’ (half speed in reverse), ‘full ahead’ (full speed ahead) and so on.
If the port’s berths are full, the ship goes to anchor out of port – as we did in Melbourne at the end of the crossing. The pilot returns for the run into the berth. Here with barely metres to turn and manoeuvre, the pilot guides the ship and tugs into the tightest corner. For those of us on the bridge it looks impossible. Parallax error suggests to us that we will crunch into that building or this ship. Pilot and captain crane their necks out of the bridge wings (open viewing decks nine stories above the water), but each time the ship snuggles into its berth.
For a ship, the meeting of elements is very gentle. Compared to the thumping, stress-laden meetings of air and land (a plane landing is really a controlled crash), the meeting of water and land is very calm and peaceful. The ship slips ever so slowly into contact with the pier. In an ancient ritual, the ropes are passed from ship’s crew to harbour crew and at a signal they tighten them up until the ship is snug in port.
