Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Gavin would say. “Holy fuck!” he used to describe an even larger one. I began to get a bad
feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew that he had not read or seen the topics that I had
particularly searched out for sailing in heavy weather. One of them was a book written by
a man I had a lot of respect for and whose lectures had opened my thick head to celesti-
al navigation. The topic was entitled, Handling Small Boats in Heavy Weather, by Frank
Robb. I recalled the vivid black and white photographs of the seas that he and others had
captured from the decks of various boats. Surely, one of the worst came back to me in great
detail. It was taken from the deck of a naval frigate off the coast of South Africa outside
East London during the Second World War, a particularly notorious ocean for rough seas.
The photograph in question was that of the front of a truly mountainous wave, probably in
the region of around sixty feet high. What was so terrifying about this wave was that just
before it smashed into the frigate, its steep, upright face, made even more terrifying by the
hundreds of huge waterfalls cascading down the face of this malevolent giant, was more
like a giant tidal wave. This, I think, is where the term “greybeard” came from for describ-
ing a large sea, as it looked like the grey hairs in a beard. The reason why this area off East
London is so dangerous in a blow is due to a very long, shallow continental shelf running
up from the seabed to the shores of this coastline. The shallowness of the sea bed here has
tremendous drag on the ocean waves rushing along towards the land mass, and they there-
fore rear up and are very steep in front as the wave's energy is expanded and hampered in
its forward momentum.
We weren't to know this at the time, but we were in for a “greybeard storm,” perhaps not
of the wave height seen in that book, but they were nonetheless the same type of steep,
dangerous waves caused by a shallow ocean floor.
The daylight finally faded out, and we were left in the moist, cold dark in the gathering
storm. The noise level had also increased somewhat. The wind in the rigging wire was be-
ginning to scream, fraying our nerves even further. All night long we remained below in
our respective bunks, listening in fear to the raging storm about us. Every now and again
a large wave would smash into the little boat's side sending her skidding around and down
the face of some monster wave. “Fuckin' hell!” or some other choice expletives continually
wafted out from Gavin's side of the boat in the galley. I was supposed to be the calm, ex-
perienced skipper and dared not utter my true feelings, lest I terrify him even further. I was
very scared as well but nothing like we were going to be in the very near future. It was a
noisy, sleepless night.
We drew back the companionway hatch in the early hours of daybreak to an ugly scene. A
filthy, yellow-grey morning greeted our eyes. There was no discernible difference between
the sky and the horizon. Apart from the size of the waves that were bearing down on us,
the ugly, menacing grey color made my blood freeze. They were evil. This was the mean
Search WWH ::




Custom Search