I Worked On A Ship That Got Hit By a Tornado -This Is What It Was Like.
I Worked On A Ship That Got Hit By a Tornado -This Is What It Was Like.
It is easy to attach blame and create theories around the tragic loss of the Bayesian but never forget the power of the elements.
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Last week the British flagged super yacht Bayesian tragically sank 300 metres off the coast or Porticello in Sicily. Of the 22 people onboard, 15 people survived including the Captain and nearly all of the crew. However, tragically the owner, Mike Lynch, his teenage daughter, the boat’s chef and several of Lynch’s friends went down with the Bayesian. Predictably the galaxy of news anchors became experts on marine engineering, salvage operations and (in the UK) the primacy of British Marine Accident Investigators. First and foremost this event is a horrible human tragedy affecting families, friends, fellow passengers and those charged with saving survivors and recovering victims.
All of the swirling stories and theories have entered my consciousness at a point when I am writing a novel and organising a collection of short stories as well as taking part in a course on creating crime fiction. It feels like my brain is joining dots that are not there and like someone diagnosing their own medical condition after reading WebMD, I am afraid of slipping down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theory creation. The fact that Lynch had just been cleared of fraud charges in the US and his co-defendant was knocked down by a car last week in Cambridge is a very cruel coincidence. The fact that the Captain got off but the owner didn’t sticks out as odd as does the fact that the only crew member to die was the cook. But before I let myself invent theories, stories and propositions I pulled myself back because I also happen to have lived through a few emergencies at sea.
I spent 20 years working on ships and have experienced onboard fires, collisions, ships taking on water, engine failures, deaths, helicopter evacuations, mass illness, murder, suicide and extreme weather. I learnt how to launch and drive a lifeboat, how to use all sorts of firefighting equipment including breathing apparatus, how to jump into the sea while wearing a life jacket (VERY last resort). I had to swim in the sea in a lifejacket to a capsized life raft, get underneath it, place my feet on the air bottle and right the inflatable, swim out from underneath it, climb onboard then row several metres and rescue others. This is all part of the basic sea survival training which is both hard work and great fun. And you wonder why I became a writer!
I’ve also seen how tornadoes can affect ships. Back in the 2000s I was on a huge cruise ship that was over 1,000 feet long and carried more than 4,000 people. We were securely tied up alongside in Port Canaveral, Florida with the boarding bridge linking the ship to the terminal. I was running final front of house checks before we started to embark passengers when the whole ship suddenly started creaking and shaking as if the mighty engines were being forced into the wrong gear. There were several huge bangs cracking like gunshots outside followed by the sound of steel twisting and snapping.
A tornado had hit the ship and was pushing it off its moorings. Some of the ropes had snapped and others were pulling the solid iron bollards out of the pier. The boarding bridge had been pulled away from its anchor points embedded in the terminal building and had toppled over, scraping down the side of the ship and falling into the sea. Vicious wind was throwing horizontal rain and debris through the ship’s 4 metre wide open embarkation door bringing chaos to the main five deck high lobby.
The ship started moving sideways towards the main port basin. This 72,000 ton monster was being blown across the water, vibrating and out of control. Her engines were off, the stabilisers were in and there was no way to steer her. For several minutes we were at the mercy of the wind and in the palm of nature’s hand which had turned the back of the ship through 45 degrees and had us heading, powerless towards a ship loading at the cargo pier less than 800 metres away.
The thing about cruise ships is that you can’t just start the engines and drive off - the gear box in these monsters is about the size of a small house. It normally takes at least an hour to get the engines set up, checked and on standby before powering up. We had minutes.
The Chief Engineer somehow managed to get some power up for the thrusters which are used for manoeuvring and enabled the ship to be slowed down and then held in position seconds before a collision became imminent. This allowed tugs to come alongside and tow us back to a suitable pier.
TV reporters might have asked why the cruise line didn’t know the tornado was coming in, or why the Captain was in his cabin and not on the bridge. Answer: because he’s a human and sometimes he has to rest. The ship was a Disney Cruise Line ship and had the most advanced weather radars, industry standard watch and safety protocols AND was tied up alongside a huge building that would have been considered a windbreak. Afterwards, nobody was prosecuted, nobody was fired and we experienced only a minor delay to the start of the cruise.
The whole incident lasted about ten minutes which is a long time to be out of control and drifting. If you look on line there are countless videos of the world’s biggest ships being caught out by meteorological conditions.
The point is that extreme weather conditions happen and arguably more often now than ever. If the ship I was on had got hit five minutes later there might have been up to 50 people on the boarding bridge who would have been at risk when it was ripped down. If the ship’s power had not been made available in record time the ship might have collided with the freighter risking both vessels and the lives of those onboard.
In the case of the Bayesian tragedy the rush to attach blame has been predictable. The reporting of the sinking has been uninformed and frankly sounds like a novel written without research. This morning various outlets are screaming that the Captain of the yacht is being investigated for manslaughter. To which any seafarer will tell you “Of course he is”. Why? Because legally the Captain is totally responsible for anything that happens on his or her ship.
We all love to read a great thriller and the Bayesian provides us with a great starting off point featuring wealth, crime, an international cast and a beautiful part of the world. However, the truth is that the weather and the sea itself have more power over us than we can ever imagine. The oceans are immense, covering two thirds of the earth’s surface it is estimated that wave power could generate 20% more electricity than is currently produced globally.
The scale and power of the sea can only be appreciated from one place: onboard a ship in the middle of the ocean.
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