CHAPTER SIX

A CHAOTIC BREW OF WATER AND A TERRIFYING NIGHT

Besides the four sailboats caught in the storm, a massive cargo ship, the 955-foot Paris Express, is plowing through the rampaging seas approximately twenty-five miles offshore from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Able to steam at twenty-eight knots, the ship has much greater stability and power to weather the storm. The ship’s size and muscle, however, are no match for the waves, and at ten p.m. the vessel lurches so suddenly that twenty containers go crashing overboard.

The Seeker is a sailboat a few miles west of the ship, and should it hit a wayward container, the boat will crack like a ripe melon and spill its passengers into the hungry ocean. Many boats likely have gone down from collisions with these massive steel objects, because an estimated two thousand containers, either twenty or forty feet long, are lost at sea each year, and some float for extended periods. A container can be buoyant when it goes overboard door-side first and its internal load lodges against the door, trapping the air inside. A passing boat’s radar may not detect the container because usually only a small portion of the steel box breaks the water’s surface. A container can float this way for years until corrosion allows the air inside the compartment to escape.

As if dodging a container isn’t enough to worry about, small boats also risk being run over by the cargo ship. Cargo ships are so big that a crew may not even know they’ve struck a yacht, and the mammoth vessels steam on. Or worse, the ship’s crew may hear the muffled sound of an impact, but doesn’t slow down to investigate because they’re on a tight time schedule and the captain might not want to know what he hit. More than once a large ship has been identified as the culprit due to a slash of paint on its bow that matches the color of the missing boat.

Maybe it’s a good thing the crew of the Seeker is unaware that there is a container ship nearby that has spilled some of its load. The crew has enough to worry about from the storm without the added knowledge that a giant vessel is being tossed around by the seas like a toy. On board the thirty-five-foot sailboat are three members of the Dixon family: husband, wife, and daughter, all from Bermuda. The vessel is approximately ten miles off Cape Hatteras. Earlier, Captain Dixon wanted to enter Oregon Inlet for safety, but the confused and chaotic waves made it too rough, so he was forced to drop anchor a few miles out. Because of the extreme conditions, the captain thought it prudent to alert the Coast Guard of his position even though he was not requesting assistance. Once contact had been made, it was determined that the Seeker’s captain should give the Coast Guard hourly updates regarding their situation.

The position of the Seeker is not very far from the deadly Diamond Shoals. These sifting sandbars extend southeastward from the tip of Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and countless boats have foundered and sunk here, earning it the name “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Charts that might have been accurate one month can be obsolete the next as some sandbars are swept away only to be replaced by new ones in an entirely different spot.

Besides the ever-changing shoals, this section of the Atlantic is particularly treacherous because it is where the western edge of the north-flowing Gulf Stream collides with the south-moving cold Labrador Current, causing a chaotic brew of roiling water. In days gone by, ships heading south would be aided by the Labrador Current on their journey, but upon reaching Cape Hatteras, these same ships would be forced into a narrow channel because of the proximity of the Gulf Stream, which moves in the opposite direction. One mistake in navigation or a sudden squall could push a ship off course and send it either too close to shore, or into the Diamond Shoals, which can extend up to fourteen miles offshore. Lighthouses, buoys, and even manned lightships were used to warn mariners of the dangers, but men and ships still went down. It’s as if the ocean proclaimed the turbulent waters off Cape Hatteras as off-limits to humankind, and enforced this decree with the loss of a ship and its entire crew.

More recently, with better weather forecasting and improved navigation technology, the accident rate has declined. But when a boat like the Seeker is surprised by a storm, its position is extremely vulnerable—particularly in the dark—as it gets penned in by the Gulf Stream on one side and the Diamond Shoals on the other. The best thing to do would be to maintain its position and ride out the storm. Unfortunately, the sailboat’s small motor is not strong enough to hold the vessel in place against the wind and waves pounding its hull. And so the decision to drop anchor is the only practical option left.

The Dixon family is in for a terrifying night, a night during which their very survival may depend on whether or not the anchor holds.

• • •

While the Seeker is near dangerous shoals, the Sean Seamour II, the Flying Colours, and the Illusion are all near the Gulf Stream and vulnerable to the huge waves being spit out into surrounding waters. To illustrate how exposed they are, consider the case of the Norwegian Dawn in April 2005. The cruise liner, at more than nine hundred feet long, was steaming through the Gulf Stream on its way to New York when it encountered stormy weather. Two waves, estimated to be at least seventy feet in height, slammed into the ship, breaking windows, flooding sixty-two passenger cabins, and panicking passengers. One of the waves put green water over the bridge at ten stories high, ripping two hot tubs loose from the steel deck they were bolted to. A passenger later described how he had been asleep when he heard a loud boom. He woke his family, and they raced to a reception area where they found other passengers, some with wet feet, huddled together in life jackets. A few of the passengers thought the ship was going down and were crying hysterically. The captain diverted the ship to Charleston, South Carolina, for repairs, and that was where many of the passengers disembarked, abruptly ending their vacation, too traumatized by the event to continue a voyage at sea. The shaken passengers instead boarded a train to take them to New York.

The captain of the cruise ship, who had over twenty years of experience, said that he’d never experienced anything like the waves that damaged the vessel, and he explained how no one could have predicted that such giant seas would materialize so fast. Passengers felt differently, and many of them filed lawsuits contending that such powerful waves are to be expected in the Gulf Stream during storms, and the captain should have positioned the boat far away. Other passengers contended that because the vessel was to be featured on the Donald Trump TV reality show The Apprentice, the captain was rushing to New York City to make it to the taping of the show. A class action suit was filed maintaining that the passengers were knowingly put in harm’s way to meet a schedule. In an article published by the Associated Press and Local10.com, an attorney for the passengers, Brett Rivkind, said, “The passengers feared for their lives. They were out on the open seas. People started putting on life jackets, expecting the worst. They started calling their loved ones to say goodbye.”

In June 2007 a jury returned a verdict in favor of the Norwegian Dawn. This followed a favorable finding from the National Transportation Safety Board, which called the incident “an unavoidable encounter with severe weather and heavy seas.”

Maritime meteorologists and Gulf Stream experts Jenifer and Dane Clark are all too familiar with the havoc that the Stream can cause. They believe that extreme waves in the Gulf Stream are more common than previously thought, and they are not at all surprised that the Norwegian Dawn incident occurred before hurricane season. “Some of the most intense storms we’ve ever seen happened in April and May. And waves that come up suddenly and have not traveled a far distance [the fetch] over the open ocean can be deadly. When you have big waves with little fetch, they are really dangerous because the wave period is shorter, meaning they are close together. One potential problem is that as your bow comes down off one wave, the trough is so small that the bow doesn’t have a chance to start riding up the next wave, but instead gets buried by green water. The Norwegian Dawn was fortunate that the captain had reduced speed prior to the accident, and really lucky that a third seventy-footer didn’t follow the first two.”

In the Norwegian Dawn lawsuit, the Clarks testified for the prosecution, explaining that informed mariners recognize that the environment in the Gulf Stream can be quite different from the surrounding ocean. “When the Norwegian Dawn entered the Stream, the waves increased from seventeen feet outside the Stream to forty feet in the Stream within a one-hour period.”

Even during a period of relatively low wind speeds of fifteen to twenty-five knots, the Stream can be a hazard for small boats if those winds are opposing the currents. Waves of seven to twelve feet can be generated, with the possibility of an extreme wave of up to twenty-four feet. So while the captain of the Norwegian Dawn said that no one could have predicted those giant waves, he should have known that when you are in or near the Gulf Stream during high winds, the potential for a rogue wave is much greater than in other parts of the sea.

The Clarks watch weather patterns over the Gulf Stream and try to warn mariners when the conditions are ripe for sudden seas. “Extreme waves produced near the Gulf Stream are not like tsunamis,” says Dane. “They often only have a short life span, with amplitude building before they dissipate. But in that short life, they can be deadly.”

• • •

During the evening hours of May 6 at the Coast Guard Air Station in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the men and women on duty are well aware that a storm is building at sea. The Coast Guard knows the Seeker is trying to ride out the storm beyond Diamond Shoals, and they are anxiously awaiting each hourly update. The search and rescue center has a hunch there are more sailboats farther out at sea, but at this time they have not received any messages from the Sean Seamour II, the Illusion, or the Flying Colours. Those boats are beyond radio contact and, so far, are performing as well as can be expected and are not in emergency situations that would cause them to activate their EPIRBs.

Earlier that evening a Coast Guard C-130 plane had been dispatched as a safety measure to broadcast radio warnings about the storm to any vessels that could hear their message. Upon the plane’s return flight to the air station, the pilots recognized that the cross winds were beyond the safe limit for landing on the station’s only strip long enough to handle the large plane. The aircraft commander decided to fly north to the airport in Norfolk, Virginia, and land there. The plane was immediately refueled, and a new crew drove up from Elizabeth City to relieve the crew who landed. The new crew checked in to a hotel for a night’s sleep, figuring there was an outside possibility that they would be instructed to launch the next day, should a vessel find itself in trouble.

The call will come much sooner than expected.

Images

Ben Tye at the wheel