June: A month of maritime victories and Misadventures.
By AMY CHAVEZ
http://www.amychavez.com

June 7 welcomed the return of two Japanese sailors who circumnavigated the globe nonstop: Kenichi Horie and Minoru Saito. I have a special admiration for these men because June also marks the first anniversary of my rescue from the sea while attempting to cross the Pacific in a yacht to Australia.

On June 3, three of us were 400 km off the coast of Japan, headed for Guam, our first port of call. We had already sailed through a couple of small storms that kept us busily pulling on ropes and reefing the main sail, but these storms were short and sweet. You can see them coming -- and what really struck me was how fast they come up. The wind starts getting strong and suddenly, just 10 minutes later, you're in the woes of rain, wind and heavy gusts. One minute you're sitting on the deck drinking wine and eating cheese and saying, "Wow, isn't this fantastic!" and the next minute you're reefing down the sails. It's that fast.

Paul, the other crew member, and I were doing the 11:00 to 14:00 shift at the helm while the skipper slept. The seas were relatively calm and the wind was blowing from the northeast. There were whitecaps, which meant the wind was over 15 knots, but that was nothing to worry about.

Then the wind picked up and started to get gusty. I don't like gusty, an unpredictable element of the wind. Strong consistent wind can be dealt with, but gusts are tricky.

I watched the wind meter nervously. The wind was blowing at 18 knots and occasionally jumping over 20 knots. "Shouldn't we pull in the head sail, Paul?"

Paul's face was etched with tension, with deep furrows in his forehead. "Not yet," he said, his eyes never leaving the wind meter. I looked at the barometer: 980 hectopascals -- strong typhoon conditions.

The meter kept rising: 23, 24, 25 knots. The boat heeled more and more, but Paul just glided confidently over the big swells, adjusting the wheel ever so slightly as we came off each swell.

Within half an hour, the wind meter zoomed up to 30 knots and held steady. "Call the skipper up here," Paul said.

The skipper was in the middle of a 10-minute groggy wakeup routine that involved a lot of yawning, grunting and face rubbing.

"We're going to pull in the heady," Paul said. "The wind is up over 30 knots."

"Let me just finish making some toast and I'll be right up," said the skipper.

Finish making toast?

The wind continued to creep up the meter: 31 knots . . . 32 . . . 34.

Toast? Damn.

Then 35 . . . 40 . . .

"Get your ass up here!" I yelled inside my head, as I knew the wind was too strong for me to be pulling on ropes. Now it was 45 knots, with gusts up to 55.

The skipper came out of the cabin, licking jam off his fingers. "Paul, you keep steering. Amy, you pull in the jib sail while I release the jib sheet."

Damn, I guess I wasn't going to get out of this after all. What the skipper says goes, so I winched the self-furler and pulled as hard as I could. The sheet didn't budge.

"The rope is caught on the jib mast," someone yelled as the jib sail flapped wildly in the wind, creating loud slapping sounds as it snapped back and forth against itself. The noise was unbearable, each slap reminding us that at any time the sail could rip. And it did just that.

I climbed on my hands and knees to the bow to remove the jib and nervously pulled the sail down and tied it to the boat.

In the meantime, the wind speed continued to increase. The main sail had already been reefed two times, leaving only the smallest area of the sail exposed. But even this was too much wind for the boat. The wind was so strong, it had already ripped the main sail too.

With both the sails down now, the skipper went into the cabin to get out the storm jib, which would allow us to keep the boat pointing into the wind, a key to survival in rough seas. But once in the cabin, the skipper reconsidered. "I'll do it later when the storm has calmed down a bit. I've got a ton of lead hanging down below on the keel. This boat is safe as a house." It was true that the keel of the boat was particularly heavy. The whole boat had been modified
to have a longer, heavier keel for racing.

I noted the barometer had dropped to 965 -- very strong typhoon conditions -- and that the wind was 55 to 60 knots. In another hour, the gusts would reach 70 to 75 knots.

As we waited out the storm in the cockpit, the boat was repeatedly slammed by waves that sent the boat rocking back and forth and shuddering. But the storm would be over soon. SLAM!

The skipper had told me earlier that storms never last more than 24 hours. SLAM!

Surely the waves would soon die down, the sun would break through the clouds and we'd be having dinner within a couple hours while watching the sun set.

BIG SLAM!

I looked up and everyone was sitting on the ceiling. The boat was upside down.

From bad to worse -- drifting out to sea with no sail or signal

"She's rolled," said the skipper. "In a few seconds, she'll right herself." With the cabin now under water, it was dark but I could still see the skipper and Paul sitting on the ceiling. Ten seconds passed, and the boat slowly rolled back upright, heaving provisions -- cans of food, heads of cabbage, sacks of rice, a frozen piece of beef and a toolbox -- across the room. Paul and the skipper were thrown onto their backs. I watched from the small space that was my bunk, where I kept myself braced with my hands and feet against the ceiling.

When I looked up again, the skipper was taking the tool box off his chest. There was no time to feel pain or to examine his broken collarbone. Paul had a gash above his eye and his head was bleeding. I was on my hands and knees looking out of my bunk when I saw something even more shocking out the cabin window: the mast hanging over the starboard side of the boat. "The mast is broken," I said.

"Get the bolt cutters," ordered the skipper, and Paul took out a giant pair of cutters secured inside one of the holds. Without a word, he put his harness on to go out on deck. "You're going out there in this storm?" I said, terrified. "What if another rogue wave hits?"

But it had to be done. If we didn't cut the rigging away from the mast to free it, the weight of it could drag the entire boat down. "Fill this bag with food for the lifeboat," said the skipper. "I'll put out the EPIRB."

An EPIRB (emergency position indicating radio beacon) is an international distress call that sends a radio signal out that is picked up by satellite at a central office in the country where the boat is registered, in this case Australia. There, they would follow up on the signal and start rescue operations. The EPIRB would guide the rescue team to our exact location in the ocean. The skipper set off the EPIRB, dropped it into the water and secured it to the boat with the cord.

Our situation was that we had no mast and no sails. The motor had already gone out earlier in the trip, and our radio antenna had been broken off along with the mast during the roll. All we had to rely on was the EPIRB.

I made my way to the V-berth at the front of the cabin, where the dry food was stored, getting ping-ponged from side to side by the rocking of the boat. I crawled past the broken sink, cleared some whiskey bottles out of my way on the floor and climbed over a torn 5-kg bag of rice and into the V-berth, full of upside-down food crates. We had plenty of food, but most of it inappropriate for a lifeboat. The canned food would need a can opener. Uncooked pasta would be too hard on the teeth. Rummage, rummage. Ten packs of ready-made spaghetti sauce in vacuum-packed bags. Rummage, rummage. Twenty-four nature bars. Soy milk? A bit luxurious for a lifeboat, but what the hell. I emerged with a bag full of nature bars, spaghetti sauce and soy milk. We definitely should have brought more chocolate. Later, I asked Paul what was happening outside.

"First, I cut the rigging around the mast, then went up to the bow to cut away the self-furling jib," which is on a pole 20 mm in diameter with walls about 3 mm thick. "I sat on the bow, with one leg on each side of the boat, when another rogue wave came. The bow came up over the wave and smashed down, and suddenly I was completely under water. The wave was so strong, it bent the railing and pinned my leg under it. It also snapped the jib pole right off all by itself."

The mast was now free to go whenever the sea took it.

Meanwhile, the wind and waves had pushed the EPIRB around to the stern of the boat, where it got caught in the solar panels. When the skipper tried to free it, the sharp edges of the panels cut the cord, sending the EPIRB floating away from us, out to sea by itself.
We watched in desperation as it drifted away, knowing that now there was no way for anyone to find us. The EPIRB would become a red herring, leading the rescuers away from us rather than to us.

Mayday in June -- rammed by rescuers

With a broken mast, no motor, no antenna for our long-range VHF radio to call for help, and a wayward EPIRB (emergency position indicating radio beacon) leading rescuers away from us, at 5 p.m. our boat was drifting into darkness.

Then suddenly, Paul said, "I see a ship!" It was miles away on the horizon.

"Get out the flares," said the skipper, and he set off half a dozen flares into the air.

But the cargo ship didn't see us.

The skipper set off half a dozen more, red ones and green ones. But the ship kept moving farther and farther away. We only had a few flares left.

The skipper brought out a hand-held UHF radio, with an internal antenna and a range of 12 to 15 km. Perhaps the ship was within range.

"Mayday! Mayday! This is Louise. Mayday!"

The skipper put out the call several times but no one answered. He put down the transceiver on the table and went outside to look at the ship again.

I picked up the transceiver. "Mayday! Mayday! This is Louise. I see a cargo ship on the port side, can you hear me?" Nothing. I repeated, but no voice came back. I tried the call in Japanese. "Mayday, Mayday! Hidari gawa ni kamotsu sen ga miemasu. Watashitachi no yatto ga miemasuka? Mayday, Mayday." Nothing. Just the lone crackle of the radio.

"Mayday, Mayday," I called over the radio in Spanish. After all, you never know where these cargo ships are going to and coming from. "Algien puede escucharme? Yo veo un barco a mi derecha. Puedes vernos? Mayday, Mayday!"

"Senora?" A voice came back. "This is the KM Trader. What is your position?"

"We don't know. The GPS has fallen into the bilge and is no longer working."

"Can you set off some flares?"

We set off our last few flares.

"We'll be there in about an hour."

But as the red cargo ship came closer and closer, we realized it would not be so easy for such a big ship to rescue us. Having just dropped off a load in the Philippines and now returning to Indonesia, the boat was carrying no weight, making it sit high above the water.

The KM Trader came alongside us on our windward side, with the idea that it would shelter us from the wind and crashing waves. It was dark now, and I stood in the cockpit looking up into the ship's bright light focused on us, the rain crossing sideways through the beam. The deck of the KM Trader soared 10 meters above our boat. I could see people standing on the deck, tiny dots looking down as if looking out of a third-story window. From there, they threw down a life ring on a rope.

But the sea was too rough, and the big swells made it difficult to get the life ring onto our bobbing boat. Meanwhile, Louise was coming dangerously close to the heaving KM Trader. If she hit the side of it, the blow could break her fiberglass hull in half.

Finally, the skipper caught the life ring. "Amy, you'll be first." Both ships were getting tossed by the waves, and our boat was completely out of our control. When it became obvious that Louise was going to slam into the side of the KM Trader, the skipper yelled, "Let go of the life ring!"

In a split-second decision, the skipper launched the life raft. He threw it into the water, and pulled the cord to automatically inflate it. But instead of inflating, the unit just sat there. The skipper pulled the cord again, and the cord came out altogether. The $7,000 life raft had malfunctioned.

"We have nothing left! We've lost our life raft and we have no EPIRB," yelled the skipper in his first visible sign of panic. "We have nothing!" he repeated, his voiced drowned out by the roaring waves and the noise of the KM Trader's engine.

Fiberglas scraped against metal as Louise crashed into the side of the KM Trader, her port side railing buckling against the steel hull of the ship. We braced ourselves and held on to the boat as each swell ground our boat into the wall of steel. Meanwhile, Louise was gradually drifting backward toward the stern of the great ship -- and its propeller.

GOING, GOING....

The captain of the KM Trader stopped the propellers and Louise slid up under the cargo ship's stern, the great ship bobbing up and down on top of us.

But the violent waves that had lodged Louise under the stern, also released her from it, and the crew on the KM Trader, unable to hold on to us any longer, let the lines go. As our boat rose up and down with the swells, the broken mast that had been lying over the starboard deck, lifted itself up out of the boat and slid off into the Pacific Ocean, 4 km down to the bottom of the sea.

We could die trying to live if we risked another rescue attempt. At least we had the hull of the boat, and although there was a crack in it and she was letting in water, we were able to pump the water out faster than it was coming in.

Now near 9 p.m. and exhausted from our first rescue attempt, we closed ourselves up in the cabin and waited. No one spoke as we took turns at the bilge, pumping water out. There was a large hole in the roof where the mast had been and the conditions inside the boat were worsening. We had been in rain for four days, the same amount of time it takes, I found out, for mold to start growing on the cabin walls. Condensation was in full force and drops of water dripped on me in my bunk. There were no more clean changes of clothes, nor even dirty clothes that were dry.

The meat that had bolted out of the refrigerator and across the cabin during the roll had started rotting -- somewhere. Odd food scraps were here and there and it was becoming more and more like living inside a compost. The inside of the boat was a mess, but with
the boat still rocking, it was impossible to clean it up.

We all had queasy stomachs from all the motion and didn't feel like eating. This was lucky, however, because the toilet was unusable anyway. We used the pee bottle inside the cabin and went out on deck only long enough to toss over the contents. If it was number two, you had to find a container, then toss the entire container over board when you were finished. It had been five days since I had had a shower and my hair was beginning to mat into one giant dreadlock. The wet, mildewy smell of the boat permeated us.

We waited in silence, lying in our bunks listening to the boat get continually slammed by large waves that caused the boat to shudder and vibrate. Exhausted, and tired of fighting, we had succumbed to the storm. I didn't think we were going to die, but I didn't think we were going to live either. Lying there, I thought about the scene in the Titanic where the great ship is sinking. Some passengers attempted to escape in the life boats, while others chose to crawl into bed with a loved one and go down with the ship. Exhausted from everything we had been through, I knew I would not struggle further to hang on to life. I would be ready to go when my turn came.

Sleep was impossible, but lying down was the only way to keep from being knocked around by the waves. My bunk was wide and my body still rolled from side to side with the waves. Paul crawled into my bunk, lay down next to me, and put his arms around me to hold me from rolling. Braced between the cabin wall on one side and Paul on the other, I managed to drift off to sleep for a few seconds.

Shortly, the KM Trader came over the radio, "We have contacted the Coast Guard. But unfortunately," the captain paused a long while, "they will not be able to rescue you. The sea is too rough."

Copyright 2005 Amy Chavez

This is the last excerpt from "Little Titanic: A journey through Japan's Inland Sea and beyond."

This book is my best book yet! The book features annotations, photos, and over 40 weblinks to information on sailing and the Inland Sea. Plus, I've included the entire diary my great grandfather wrote in 1900 on his trip through Japan's Inland Sea on a ship. His is a very detailed first-hand account of what Japan was like then. This diary includes all kinds of fascinating observations such as that the ponies then wore hemp sandals to protect their feet.

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Amy
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