The Wave

by Susan Casey

  “When the boat’s breaking up and the oil’s headed for the beach and the authorities are going berserk, they really want you to come immediately,” Sloane said. “But then a year later they start saying, ‘Well, hold on, what’s this invoice for?’ Sometimes we don’t get paid at all.”

  We stepped off the elevator onto a busy floor filled with men in suits who were working the phones from a warren of glass-walled offices and cubicles. The place was hopping, Sloane told me, because a tanker had just run aground off Mozambique and Svitzer was trying to win the job of safely dislodging it. There were four major salvage companies in the region and they would all be vying for the work, racing to round up crews and send them to the scene to fix the situation before the waves pounded the vessel to pieces, spilling 3,500 tons of diesel fuel near the mouth of the Zambezi River.

  As we walked across the floor I heard bits of urgent conversation being murmured and barked into headsets:

  “They want sixty thousand Namibian dollars to get her out,” one man said, a frown etched on his brow and his shirtsleeves rolled up.

  “Are you available to go up to Mozambique for some good problems?” another broker asked, hunched over a map.

  “The tug’s in Durban,” a thin, frazzled-looking guy said, scrolling through files on his computer screen. “They’re leaving now.”

  Sloane’s office, in the corner, featured a poster-size photograph of a small figure in a survival suit rappelling down a two-hundred-foot wire that dangled from a helicopter. The figure’s destination, near the bottom of the frame, was a bulk carrier that was tilted forty degrees to port, engulfed in boiling whitewater from the enormous waves that were flooding its deck. “Twenty-four-meter seas that day,” Sloane said offhandedly, noticing me gaping at the picture.

  “Is that you?”

  “Yeah. We’ve had some fun.”

  Sloane had been in the business since 1984, working his way from the merchant marines to become a captain and then a salvage master and now a managing director in a global company, overseeing rapid-response crews in the hairiest situations. He’d been stationed on South Africa’s brawny salvage tugs the Wolraad Woltemade and the John Ross, and he’d gotten a big eyeful of what the Agulhas Current could dish out in a storm. As I looked around his office at more framed photos of tankers exploding spectacularly or wallowing helplessly in monstrous seas, it was clear that Sloane’s idea of “fun” involved a degree of mayhem that others would find less alluring. In this, he and the tow surfers were kindred spirits. The crazier the waves, the more eager they were to get out there. But a marine salvager’s job came with even more hazards. On top of facing the ocean’s wrath, he encountered all kinds of colorful man-made dangers.

  When waves or fire or an unplanned encounter with rocks disabled a ship, the first question anyone asked was: What is the cargo? In happy scenarios the ship carried something that could spill harmlessly into the ocean, like wheat or frozen seafood, something inflammable or at least nontoxic. The most precarious situations arose when a damaged ship contained lethal, explosive chemicals like ammonia, toluene, or phenol (a common ingredient in plastics that can cause paralysis when its fumes are inhaled), to cite just a few. In cases like these the salvagers weighed their own safety against the knowledge that if they couldn’t save the day, ten thousand tons of fungicide or acetone would soon be sluicing across the reef.

  Earlier that morning I had read in the Cape Times newspaper about a salvage team that was in the Philippines trying to prevent the Princess of the Stars—a ferry that had capsized in a typhoon, killing more than eight hundred passengers—from leaking its illicit cargo of pesticides onto the shores of Sibuyan Island, a place so environmentally pristine that it was referred to as “the Galapagos of Asia.” The chemicals, which shouldn’t have been within miles of a passenger ferry, had been destined for a pineapple plantation. Until the salvagers stumbled across the ten-ton cache of endosulfan, an acutely poisonous pesticide that has been banned in over fifty countries, they hadn’t known it was on board. The crew was dead; the ship’s owners denied knowledge of its presence. All salvage work had been temporarily halted as the team planned how to extract the chemicals safely, racing the clock before the ship broke apart in heavy seas.

  When I mentioned the Princess of the Stars to Sloane, he nodded soberly. Scenes like this were typical, he said. The most lethal substances were subject to such tight restrictions that some shippers simply didn’t declare them: “They try to hide away the really dangerous stuff.” The more threatening the substance and the slipperier the exporter, therefore, the more likely the salvagers wouldn’t realize what they were dealing with until they were staring at it. Even then, they couldn’t be sure. Sloane recalled one case in which a hold filled with cyanide powder had been labeled as flour.

  Other chemicals, while not life-threatening, had what Sloane referred to as a high “nuisance factor” in a spill, meaning they smelled terrible or fouled the water temporarily, causing beaches to be closed. Then there was oil. Crude, diesel, jet fuel, liquefied natural gas: oil in all its forms was a heartbreaking, infuriating, and all-too-common sight in the ocean. Supertankers, behemoths that couldn’t make it through the Suez Canal, swung down from the Middle East, took their chances hopping a ride in the Agulhas, and met their share of disasters. Salvagers used every tool at their disposal to prevent the damaged tankers from gushing out their contents, especially in fragile near-shore environments, but sometimes the battle was lost. Sloane wheeled around in his chair and gestured to another picture of a wrecked ship, its rusty bow jutting from the water at a sharp angle. “That was right off the coast here,” he said. “We had fourteen thousand penguins that we had to catch and wash.”

  Compared to those kinds of horrors, dealing with giant waves must have seemed downright pleasant, though no less threatening. Sloane recalled looking uneasily out of a helicopter that was hovering about one hundred feet above a disabled ship as eighty-foot sets broncoed through, worrying about a 110-foot rogue rearing up from behind, or seawater dousing the turbines and knocking out the engine. Meanwhile, down on the water, wrist-thick metal cables whipped through the air and heavy machinery jostled around in stormy seas. Hands, fingers, toes, eyes: they could be lost with ease. “Everyone’s been hurt at some stage,” Sloane said. “You always end up with a few broken bones. When we’re out there we’re pushing the limits because the people who are normally crew on the ship, they’ve lost control of the situation. And that’s where we come in: when it’s already got to a point where it’s really dangerous.”

  Ships have been meeting giant waves in the Agulhas Current as far back as you care to page in the history books. Often the boats perished, but those that escaped brought back strikingly similar stories: Gale winds had been blowing, occasionally switching direction. Conditions were seriously lumpy, but every so often a far larger wave (or a set of them) would lurch from the sea. Uncharted eddies dragged the vessels off course and deep troughs yawned in front of them and waves came from every direction. If a ship found itself along the three-hundred-mile stretch between East London and Port Elizabeth in heavy weather, all bets were off. If the Agulhas Current could be counted on for a steady supply of freak waves, this section was the most reliable of all.

  Consider this account of the São João, a Portuguese galleon that was heading home to Lisbon in 1552. Near Port Elizabeth, a storm hit: “The pilot, Andre Vas, was steering a course for Cape Agulhas, which they duly sighted, but then they encountered easterly gales which blew them to about 65 nautical miles southwest of the Cape of Good Hope … Next, beset by furious westerly gales, the captain, master, and pilot agreed that it would be best to run before the storm, back in an easterly direction … About 340 miles east of the Cape the wind shifted to the east again and they resumed their westward voyage in a heavy swell that threatened to sink the galleon at any moment … Unfortunately another westerly storm unleashed its fury upon them, the ship veered around and three huge waves struck her abea
m, breaking all the shrouds and backstays on the starboard side. It was now decided to cut away the mainmast, but while this was being done, it snapped … and everything disappeared over the side. Now the rudder broke in half and was carried away.” The São João didn’t make it (though some passengers struggled to shore); nor did the thousand other ships that fill the pages of Shipwrecks and Salvage in South Africa, the reference book from which the preceding passage was taken. These were merciless waters.

  One of the most unnerving incidents in the Agulhas involved a ship called the Waratah, which left port from Durban on the evening of July 26, 1909. Its intended journey would take it to Cape Town and then on to England. Now known as the Titanic of the South, the five-hundred-foot-long, 9,300-ton ship, designed to carry both passengers and cargo on the long-haul trip from Britain to Australia, had been launched in 1908 and rated 100 A1 by Lloyd’s of London, the most enthusiastic thumbs-up available. At Waratah’s helm was Captain Josiah Edward Ilbery, sixty-nine, a distinguished seaman who had attained the rank of commodore. Even gazing out from old photographs, Ilbery inspires confidence. He was silver haired and extravagantly bewhiskered, with piercingly clear eyes and a strong chin; precisely the type of heroic old salt you’d want steering your boat through the Agulhas Current. Ilbery, however, made at least one very big mistake.

  In the pre-satellite, pre-Surfline, pre-GPS, pre–emergency beacon, pre-radio days of old, captains used whatever scarce information was available to make their weather calls. Likely, Ilbery was unaware of the worsening conditions when he left Durban to steam down the Wild Coast. It wouldn’t have been long, though, before he realized the truth: other ships in the area had been bombarded by such high seas that they’d dumped their cargos. The Waratah, along with its 211 passengers and crew, was carrying 6,650 tons of supplies that included a fresh store of coal and, not very promisingly, 1,300 tons of lead.

  (Actually, on that night there were supposed to be 212 people aboard the ship. One man, an engineer named Claude Sawyer, had disembarked at Durban, refusing to go any farther. Sawyer, who unsuccessfully tried to convince other passengers to get off the Waratah along with him, was outspoken about “the strange way the ship dealt with the waves” on the passage back from Australia. To make matters worse, Sawyer had been plagued by a ghostly vision: an angry man with long matted hair, emerging from the sea waving a bloody sword and calling “Waratah, Waratah.” Sawyer was not shy about his misgivings and by all accounts spent much of the voyage spreading them. He complained at dinner, during the lifeboat drill, and in telegrams to his wife back in England. As the ship steamed away from Durban, the others must have felt glad to be rid of him.)

  The Waratah was last seen at six a.m. on July 27, when she overtook a smaller ship just north of East London. Both vessels were battling thirty- and forty-foot waves, and they acknowledged each other as they passed. Then the Waratah sailed into oblivion. Months of extensive searching by the Australian, South African, and British navies, along with salvage crews and other ships, turned up nothing, not even a scrap of wreckage. Several ships reported seeing bodies floating in the water, including such specific visions as a little blond girl in a red dress, but all were discredited. A Waratah life ring washed up in New Zealand, though it could have fallen overboard at any time. More unsettling, a week after the ship’s disappearance a bedraggled, confused man was found wandering on a South African beach; the only words he would say were “Waratah” and “big wave.” When no elaboration came forth, he was packed off to a mental hospital, his tale of survival (if in fact he had one) remaining locked in his mind. It wasn’t until December 15, 1909, almost five months after the Waratah vanished, that the searches were finally halted and the Lutine Bell at Lloyd’s of London sounded its mournful call.

  In recent years the Waratah, like the Titanic, has attracted its share of seekers. A number of attempts were made to locate its wreckage (one bankrolled by the American novelist and underwater explorer Clive Cussler). It looked as though these efforts would be rewarded in 1999, when side-scan sonar traced the outline of a sand-covered ship that matched the Waratah’s contours. The sunken vessel lay four miles offshore in 580 feet of water just north of East London, close to where it had last been seen.

  Champagne was cracked, a press release issued. A submarine dived to film the ship in its final resting place for an eventual feature film. Only problem was, when the wreck loomed into closer view it wasn’t the Waratah at all, but rather a transport ship of World War II vintage with a deck full of tanks and rubber tires. Similarly, another wreck lying nearby was not the Waratah either. This one was the cruise ship Oceanos, which went down in a storm on August 4, 1991.

  In a spectacular air and sea rescue by the South African Air Force and Navy, all 571 of the Oceanos’s passengers and crew had been evacuated after a giant wave breached the hull, flooding the engine room and knocking out power. Scandal erupted immediately after the incident due to the fact that the captain, Yiannis Avranas, fifty-one, had elbowed aside children, women, and the elderly (including an eighty-year-old woman with a broken hip) to ensure himself a seat on the first rescue helicopter. Similarly, the rest of Avranas’s senior crew distinguished themselves by commandeering the sturdiest lifeboat and bailing out, luggage and all, before most passengers were even aware that the ship was sinking. With the captain and crew gone, the Oceanos filling up with water, and hundreds of people still on board, a fast-thinking cruise director radioed an SOS. It fell to the ship’s comedian, magician, and lounge band musicians to supervise the rescue, a terrifying high-wire act conducted in mountainous swells and fifty-knot winds.

  It was miraculous that no one died. Later charged with negligence, Avranas protested that he had done nothing wrong. “When I order abandon ship, it doesn’t matter what time I leave,” he told ABC News angrily. “Abandon is for everybody. If some people like to stay, they can stay.”

  I’d heard about the Oceanos from Sloane, who’d been in the Agulhas himself that night, removing four hundred people from an oil platform that was in danger of being ripped from its moorings. These were the most out-of-control conditions anyone could remember seeing on the Wild Coast, with three major salvage operations under way at the same time. “Eighty-five knots of wind,” Sloane recalled, grimacing. “The average wave height that night was twenty-three, twenty-four meters [75–80 feet].” He recalled watching with alarm as the extending gangway they were using to get people off the rig, one hundred feet above the water, barely escaped being swept away by a wave. “They were really close to capsizing,” Sloane continued. “While we were out there the call came in from the Oceanos. And then the Mimosa—another ship, an oil tanker—got in trouble. That was the biggest storm I’ve ever been in.”

  “Have you ever seen a wave that really terrified you?” I asked. “Something totally off the charts?”

  Sloane nodded. “Oh, yeah. That night I did.” He pulled up a picture on his computer and turned the screen to face me. It showed a supertanker almost completely submerged in a haze of spray, being engulfed by waves that were washing over its deck—at least seventy feet above the waterline. “They said the one-hundred-foot wave would never happen,” Sloane said, smirking slightly. “Well, they were wrong.”

  At Sloane’s suggestion I had met with Captain Dai Davies, a renowned salvage master who had seen more of the Agulhas’s extreme waves than anyone. Davies, a trim man in his late seventies, still exuded the air of total competence that had distinguished his long career. He seemed to have a photographic memory for names, dates, ships, and storms, instantly recalling such arcane details as the nationality of a tanker’s crew, the type of cargo it was carrying, and what had been served for dinner during the rescue. The events of August 4, 1991, were crystal clear in his mind.

  “The Mimosa,” he said, “she was three-hundred-sixty-five-thousand tons. Norwegian crew. The ship was in trouble off the other side of Port Elizabeth from here, and she was coming down the coast. A big wave struck her. And I got the
call.” He shook his head. “I’ll never forget it. The weather was horrific, horrific, horrific!” Speaking to the captain by radio, Davies learned the wave had destroyed the tanker’s hydraulics, jamming its rudder and disabling its steering. “The captain said this wave was so big. He saw it from the bridge. The waves at the time were sixty feet, and this one was twice as big again. Just came out of nowhere. Extra-deep trough. They went down into that.”

  With great difficulty, the ship rolling wildly in the maelstrom of waves, swells, and current, Davies and his men successfully lassoed the Mimosa (with its thousands of tons of oil) and towed it into sheltered waters, then eventually all the way to Dubai, where it was repaired. “Not a drop of oil was spilled,” Davies said proudly. “Not a drop.”

  He went on to recite a list of ships that had met up with extreme waves in these waters, describing the damage to each in vivid terms: “It looked as if a cutting torch had split the ship in half entirely!” Then: “The ship’s side plating was punched in, completely smashed in, causing a hole to be formed you could fit three double-decker buses into.” Finally: “I looked down and I could see that the bow was gone! Four and a half tons of steel! It had dropped off.”

  “We’ve got a very queer current situation on this coast,” Davies said, and then paused for effect. After a moment, he continued, his brisk Welsh brogue dialed lower and raspier. “I call this part of the ocean the Final Surveyor. If ships can get past here, they’re okay, you understand? But a lot of them don’t. A lot of ships get beaten to a pulp.”

  On a slate gray day I left Cape Town and drove south on a winding highway, past the hamlets of Muizenberg and Kalk Bay and Fish Hoek, until I got to Simon’s Town, a pretty community perched at the edge of False Bay, only five miles from the Cape of Good Hope. There I took a hard right and switchbacked my way up into Table Mountain National Park. It was lonely at the top of the plateau, scrubby and windswept, the quaint houses and restaurants having been left far below. “Nuisance Grave,” a sign announced, unappealingly. As I drove, it became clear that the trees and vegetation weren’t merely scruffy; the landscape had been charred black from fire. This was a narrow peninsula, pinching off with dramatic finality at the cape, and I could see a glint of ocean both in front of me and behind.