Fatal Storm (19 page)

“Once they were out my plan was to fly away downwind from them and put the machine in the water, or do the best I could. It was important to be some distance from them because once the chopper hit the water there would be bits and pieces flying through the air all over the place. I had to get the spread of debris away from them.

“I was very confident that I wouldn’t survive the ditching – the odds were absolutely stacked against me.
The one good thing was that I was so busy at the time I didn’t have a lot of time to think about my fate.”

Jones said there was a very simple equation in his mind that led to him believing he would almost certainly die. Helicopters are top heavy, so once they hit the water and slow down the first thing they do is roll over and go upside down; then they sink quite quickly. In this model of Dauphin helicopter he was flying there was no door beside either the pilot or co-pilot seats at the front, so the only way to escape after ditching was for him to unclip his harness, squeeze between his seat and the side wall of the cockpit and then fight his way back to the doorway – all as the chopper was going through its death throes in the water. “That’s why I was sure the aircraft was going to take me with it. I would be struggling to get out before it sank.”

While contemplating this awful scenario Jones still had not given up hope that a miracle might occur; that everything might just go in their favour and they would make it to shore. “I had every possible scenario going around in my head. The fact that we were in a very light mode – I had only three people in the back, and very little fuel in the tank – was at least something going in our favour. We pressed on, and after a while I realised that we were making headway. I began thinking, ‘I doubt we can get to the airport at Mallacoota, but if I can get over land I’ll be a lot more comfortable. I won’t have to ditch the aircraft, and then, if we do run out of fuel, I can at least do an auto rotation to the ground’.

“I started to fly towards the nearest point of land, which was just to the east of Mallacoota, and incredibly we got there. From that point I just kept stretching it and stretching it, all the time looking for a landing location if I needed one. I was also thinking, ‘It’s still going so I’ll keep going’.

“I knew I really didn’t want to land on that eastern side of the inlet at Mallacoota because there were no access roads into the area, so that meant there would be a need to take one of the helicopters involved in the race rescue out of that operation so it could get fuel to us.

“There was no way I was going to try to get to the airport, which was about three miles ahead of us, so the moment I got over the inlet at Mallacoota and saw the football oval I knew that was where I was headed. I nosed down a bit and made a very shallow approach towards the oval, and the moment I got there I put the thing on the ground as quickly as I could – nothing fancy and certainly not a full and proper procedure. It had taken one hour and 22 minutes to get back to shore!

“Once you have landed a helicopter the procedure is to pull the engine throttle levers back to ground idle position, and let them run for a minute so the temperature and pressures in the engine settle down. I pulled the first one back; hit the stopwatch and 40 seconds later it stopped on its own. It had run dry! Then I pulled the second lever back, hit the stopwatch again and that lasted 20 seconds before it ran dry!”

Without hesitation Jones, Barclay and Key stepped out of the helicopter, walked a few metres away and stood in a huddle, all with a slight tremor and looking at each other in total disbelief. Nothing was said. They were in shock. They knew how close they had gone to being victims themselves. “We stood there for what seemed like a little while, but it was probably more like just 30 or 40 seconds,” Jones recalled, “and then an ambulance drove into the car park of the football oval and we just went
snap
, back into work mode!”

Campbell, unaware of the fact that he had experienced two incredible escapes in one day, was still lying in the helicopter. As he was helped from the cabin, the
thousand or so holiday makers who had rushed to the field from the nearby caravan park to see what was happening realised that he had been rescued from the race, and a spontaneous round of loud applause and cheering erupted among them.

With Campbell on his way to hospital Jones, Barclay and Key called it a day, but their involvement with the Sydney to Hobart race rescue did not end there. After a few hours’ sleep they were up and ready to go at 5am the following day. They contacted AMSA in Canberra and advised they were “on deck and ready to go”.

“The first job they gave us was to lift off the four crew remaining aboard
Midnight Special
,” Jones said. “One helicopter had already been out and taken eight blokes off, and they wanted us to get the other four. We flew directly to them, and after Keysie had been down and got three of them off, Barry said to me in a matter-of-fact way, ‘Go for a fly’. I said, ‘Mate, there’s still one to go, isn’t there?’ He said, ‘Yes, but go for a fly’. I couldn’t work out why he wanted me to ‘go for a fly’ until I turned and looked back into the cabin and saw Keysie lying chest down on the floor with his head hanging out the door, spewing up what was basically pure sea water.”

Jones took the chopper on a loop away from the yacht then came back overhead. Key descended on the wire to collect the fourth crewmember, and when the pair was just 15 metres above the water those in the chopper looked down and watched the yacht sink.

“It was gone in no time,” said Jones. “I guess we cut that one a little bit fine.”

Sergeant David Key, Senior Constable Darryl Jones and Senior Constable Barry Barclay received the Valour Award for actions of extraordinary bravery. The Valour
Award is the highest award for bravery from Victoria Police. They were also awarded the Royal Lifesaving Society of Australia Bravery Cross, which is the society’s highest award for a rescue involving life-threatening circumstances, such as a rescue at sea or in water.

Jones, along with all helicopter pilots associated with the 1998 rescue effort, received the American Helicopter Society’s William J. Kossler Award, which recognises the greatest achievement in practical application or operation of rotary wing aircraft.

Each member of the rescue helicopter crews was awarded the Commonwealth of Australia Group Citation for Bravery and each helicopter team received an Australian Group Citation for Bravery.

Footnote:
Jones said he has only one problem with his current job as a highway patrol officer: the worst memories of the rescue of John Campbell leap to mind whenever the red “low fuel” light comes on in his patrol car.

American John Campbell thinks it was probably because he was semi-conscious and in a state of shock after going overboard from the race yacht
Kingurra
that he has only vague memories of the incident and his subsequent rescue by the Victoria Police helicopter.

“I only have snapshot images,” he said from his home in Seattle. “I remember seeing the yacht a long way away at one stage, and the elation and surprise I felt when I saw the helicopter overhead. I was certainly not expecting that. Also, there’s the moment the guys dragged me into the helicopter and when I just flopped onto the floor, but my memories of the whole experience are not like a movie, or a continuous scene where you remember everything.”

However, those snapshots are enough for Campbell to still think about the incident on a regular basis: “There’s not a week that goes by where I don’t have some thoughts about the race, the experience, and how lucky I was – how miraculous it was that I was able to survive thanks to the help of lots of folk. It is, and always will be, a part of my life.

“For some reason though, despite what happened, I’ve never been consumed by terrible thoughts. Maybe, in the first year after the race, I had some sleepless nights and nightmares thinking about it, but I’ve never been stricken by any fear.”

Incredibly, he recalls little of the dramatic flight back to land where the chopper was on the verge of ditching into the stormy ocean: “I’ve heard the story numerous times since then, about how Darryl’s calculations on the amount of fuel we had to get to shore were positive when we turned for home, then rapidly went from good to extremely bad because of nasty headwinds. It got to a point, for those guys, where it was downright terrifying and they really were not sure we were going to make it. I’m told, although I don’t remember it, that we were so close to going in that they got the liferaft out, put harnesses on and actually clipped them to the raft, then walked through, as a crew, the procedure for evacuation if that were to come to pass. I was blissfully unaware of all this. All I can remember is thinking, ‘Man, we’re heading to shore. Get me out of here!’ and realising that they had laid a body bag over the top of me for warmth. At least it was better to be under the bag than in it!”

Back home in Seattle, it took some months for Campbell to recover from the surgery needed to rectify the injuries he suffered during the race incident. After that he went into the computer industry and today he is working for a technology company that services the mobile telephone market.

His focus now is very much away from ocean racing and on his wife and young family. Two years after his remarkable rescue he married his long-time girlfriend Lucienne, or Lucie, and they now have two daughters, Gabrielle, aged four, and Kate, who is two.

“I certainly haven’t done any ocean racing since the Hobart,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I won’t some time in the future. Right now though I’m in a different phase of life, one where I have different priorities. Maybe, when the girls are older, I’ll go back to that type of racing; who knows, I might even make a fourth attempt to successfully complete a Hobart race. Until then I guess I’ve got some great stories to tell my children about good luck and remarkable people.”

I
an Griffiths had one-and-a-half Sydney to Hobarts to his credit prior to 1998. The “half” effort occurred in the brutal 1993 event. Griffiths’ yacht
Devil Woman
was 50 miles east of Eden and punching its way into Bass Strait with 45 knots of wind on the nose when it came to an untimely demise. Yet again, the collision between the north-flowing current and a solid wind from the south had proven to be a treacherous combination.
Devil Woman
had been behaving itself despite the deteriorating conditions, and while providing an uncomfortable ride for the crew, it was ploughing on without any real dramas. That was until it went over a particularly short, sharp sea.

The yacht’s bow launched into mid-air, and when it pounded into the trough on the other side, the crew felt two “bumps” instead of one. They had a sneaking suspicion that the keel may have come loose. The helmsman pushed the helm hard over and the yacht’s bow responded immediately, heading up into the eye of the wind with the sails flapping. They were lowered in haste while the bow remained pointing into the oncoming seas so that there was little pressure on the yacht.

The ensuing quick assessment revealed that the keel had done a heck of a lot more than just come loose. It had
fallen off. All the high-tensile strength bolts attaching it to the hull had broken. To everyone’s amazement,
Devil Woman
did not capsize, but certainly would have had the helmsman not reacted as he did. The apprehensive crew donned life jackets and assembled in the cockpit for what was to become a long and slow passage back to Eden under motor.

Ian Griffiths lives in the pretty coastal port of Mooloolaba, north of Brisbane. An offshore racing enthusiast without a yacht, he was becoming restless, so he formed a syndicate with four mates from Mooloolaba Yacht Club to purchase another yacht. Their choice was
Midnight Special
, a light displacement 40-footer built using the fibreglass/foam core sandwich technique. It weighed just 5.2 tonnes. The syndicate represented an interesting cross-section of the local community; Griffiths, a lawyer, was joined by skin specialist David Leslie, earth-moving contractor Peter Carter, flower farmer Bill Butler, and bus company proprietor Peter Baynes. They got together with the principal aim of having fun.

After campaigning along the east coast – Sydney to Mooloolaba, Brisbane to Gladstone and Race Week at Hamilton Island – the big one, the Hobart race, loomed on the agenda. The nine assembled crewmembers were all locals. At 49 years of age, sailmaker Neil Dickson was the youngest in the team. He was very experienced in offshore racing and had recently returned from a magical four-year, 33,000-mile cruise with his wife, sailing their yacht to almost every beautiful island destination in the Pacific.

Through sheer bad luck but by no means lack of ability, he had only finished one Sydney to Hobart out of
six attempts. On two occasions he didn’t even clear Sydney Harbour. A mast breakage and equipment failure saw to that. This time though he was confident “a solid bunch of guys and a good yacht” would see him get to Hobart.

Midnight Special
was no specialist when it came to hard downwind sailing – its hull shape wasn’t ideal for running under spinnaker – so the crew were pleased as punch to be 20th in the fleet as they began the tough slog across Bass Strait. Their tactic had been to hug the coast before the leap off into Bass Strait. They were confident, considering the forecast for fresh westerly winds, that this move would bring dividends.

At around 2.30pm the wind-reading instrument at the masthead was blown off in a gust that registered 56 knots, and at about the same time the radio message from
Sword of Orion
warning of the extreme weather came through.
Sword of Orion
was only a few miles ahead of
Midnight Special.
About an hour later, race control aboard
Young Endeavour
read the race disclaimer, reminding all crews that it was the skipper’s responsibility whether to continue racing or not.
Midnight Special
had not at that stage hit the worst of the weather and was still sailing strongly under a storm jib, averaging between seven and nine knots.

With the waves growing in stature very quickly, the wind shrieking and the spume and rain pelting horizontally at the on-deck crew, things were becoming truly miserable. The crew noticed the waves were starting to break severely at times, but while it was daylight the helmsman had no trouble threading his way around the worst bits and finding a safe passage over the crests. There was no talk of retiring. It wasn’t until an hour or
so later that they were tempted to turn back. The yacht then leading the race on handicap, Bruce Taylor’s new
Chutzpah
, became a retiree and was soon after followed by Lou Abrahams and several other highly experienced sailors.
Midnight Special
was approximately 38 miles from Gabo Island and 120 miles from Flinders and the decision was made to head towards shore and seek temporary shelter behind Gabo Island or even Eden.

That decision was made even easier seconds later when the yacht took two exceptionally heavy hits from huge waves. The second knock-down, far worse than the first, hurled Griffiths from the chart table, where he had been innocuously plotting their position, across the boat and into the galley, fracturing his leg along the way. He was put in his bunk and sedated by Dave Leslie, the doctor in the crew. The yacht was then turned around and set on a course to the north. It appeared that the wind was coming from the same angle to the bow on the new course, but the waves were more difficult to read and almost impossible to attack when it came to getting over them.

At times the force of a wave would send
Midnight Special
surfing down the face “at ridiculous speeds” of up to 20 knots. The crew’s concerns regarding sailing into the night – it was going to be like going into a fight blindfolded – became justified as darkness closed in. As the yacht was negotiating yet another monstrous breaking wave it was knocked down again and came close to rolling. There were two crewmembers on deck and the others were resting below as best they could. Neil Dickson was lying on the cabin floor and remembers flying through the air and cracking his head on either a cabin window or a grab rail. The impact knocked him out for a couple of hours.

The roll-over was sufficiently violent to rip cabin doors from their hinges and send a number of the floorboards
flying like scythes through the cabin. The interior of the yacht was a shambles.
Midnight Special
was being hurled every which way and there was nothing the crew felt they could do to improve their lot. The storm jib was still set and was allowing a minimal amount of control over the yacht’s direction. Bill Butler recalls going down the face of a wave sideways. He was one of seven crew below deck when the seemingly inevitable “trouble” arrived and was aware of a massive crunch followed by a torrent of water in the cabin. “All I heard was the crunch of the wave smashing into the boat and a deluge of water coming through the cabin top as we rolled. The cabin top was actually breaking open. It sounded like, and felt like, we’d been hit by a ship. The wave just pushed in the perspex windows and split the cabin right along the port side where the cabin meets the deck. That side had been the windward side when we were upright,” recalls Butler.
Midnight Special
’s rig had been ripped out and there was a huge hole in the cabin top.

“The first thing we did was rush to get everyone a life jacket,” Butler said. “The water was knee-deep so I immediately got a bucket and started bailing out through the companionway into the cockpit. We didn’t know what the extent of the damage was but we knew we had a bloody lot of water in the boat and had to get rid of it. Some flares were sent to the crew in the cockpit and set off and the EPIRB was activated. The whole thing was an amazing sensation. I didn’t think we would get bombed like that, but we did.”

Peter Carter had been on deck with Trevor McDonagh, and was on the helm during the roll. As he sensed the yacht was about to go over he fought hard to regain control. It was no use. The wave was already the winner. Engulfed by white water, he clung resolutely to the aluminium tiller, his only form of security apart from
his safety harness. As the yacht inverted, the tiller broke off in his hands. When
Midnight Special
came upright Carter was back-slammed onto the deck. He was in agony. Unknown to him, or the crew at the time, he had broken two vertebrae. Crewmembers rushed to his aid and moved him below as gently as they could, laying him on the floor.

After bailing and pumping for some considerable time the crew seemed to have the water situation under control and could properly assess the damage. There were holes in the deck the size of a human head and one split on the port side that went up over the cabin to about the centre of the yacht and another long one that went along the side of the cabin at the deck. The shock of the roll-over was enough to jolt Dickson from his semi-conscious daze and he raced up on deck and started stuffing sleeping bags and sails and then spinnakers into the yawning holes.

“Baynesy and I then went and got rid of the rig,” Dickson recalls. “We undid the rigging and tossed it over the side. All the halyards were then cut and we ended up with the whole rig hanging off the bow by the forestay. That wasn’t fun, sitting on the bow cutting through it with a hacksaw. All the rails had gone so I was only attached by the harness. I had cut only about halfway through the forestay when the yacht lifted on a big wave and it snapped. It just went off like a bomb.”

The continuous roar of the waves – especially when they broke and sent two-metre-deep walls of foam cascading down their face like an avalanche – made for a harrowing experience. The crew could hear waves that were around 50-feet high breaking upwind of them and all they could do was hope they were not in their path. The injury toll was alarming. Carter was incapacitated with his injured back; Griffiths had added two damaged
ribs to his fractured leg; Roger Barnett was chronically seasick; Dickson was still suffering from concussion and Butler had a broken nose. Almost every other crewman had some form of rib damage or broken fingers after being hurled around the cabin. If that wasn’t enough, they were all soaked through and freezing, and thirsty and hungry. The catering had “fallen in a heap” when the weather turned sour and the lack of food and fluids was affecting everyone.

Initially reluctant to set off the EPIRB, a quick tally of equipment damage and crew injuries soon affirmed it as the correct thing to do. The radios were not working at that stage, they had no instruments, they had lost the hand-held GPS and all the charts had spewed out of the chart table and into the bilge. In addition, Peter Carter’s injuries were more serious than anyone had first thought and Neil Dickson was lapsing in and out of consciousness.

The yacht had gel batteries so there was sufficient power to start the motor. It also meant that the crew didn’t have to endure their night of fear in total darkness as some of the cabin lights still worked. They strapped the broken tiller to both of the main sheet winches so they could hold the rudder straight ahead. That way, with the motor running slowly and the yacht making some headway, they were able to hold the yacht up into the waves. One crewmember was up on deck for a fair bit of the time during the night, watching for aircraft and ready to set off flares if needed.

At about 3am an Air Force Orion flew by. The crewmembers aboard
Midnight Special
sent up a couple of flares to attract their attention and the aircraft circled to indicate the yacht had been spotted. Around daybreak another fixed-wing aircraft roared out of the skies acknowledging the yacht and then less than half an
hour after that, the first of the helicopters arrived. This should have signalled the end of their ordeal. In fact it was far from over.

Unable to communicate directly with the yacht, the crew of the SouthCare helicopter circled low overhead, using a form of sign language to indicate how they planned to carry out the rescue. David Leslie, Bill Butler and Trevor McDonagh were on deck at the time and the motor had been stopped.

“The helicopter came down and the guy at the door beckoned to one of us to get in the water,” Butler recalls. “David, being a doctor and knowing the injuries that we had on board, decided that it was best that he go and tell the crew of the situation. He jumped into the water – and you have to remember it was still blowing and really rough – and drifted about 150 metres away from the boat. They then dropped the flare beside him to gauge the wind direction and proceeded to get him up. The next thing I knew was that our whole world had exploded. A massive wave, which we didn’t see coming, just picked the boat up and rolled it upside down. We were just flung around like rag dolls.”

It happened so quickly that the first thing Butler knew he was under the boat without air, tethered in his harness. The harness was stretched to its limit because he’d been flung over the top of the boom, which had been on the deck. He was trapped but did not panic, just assessed his predicament as calmly as he could.
Midnight Special
had been upside down for around a minute when another mammoth wave thundered in, pounding the keel and inverting the yacht. Butler was pinned between the lifelines and the boom, and had blood running from a cut
to his head. He had smashed his thumb and broken some ribs but at the time was just thankful he could see daylight and breathe again. One of the crew that had been trapped below heard Butler’s shouts for help and rushed on deck and cut him free with a knife.

Sixty-year-old Trevor McDonagh had been sitting in the cockpit and operating the manual bilge pump when the yacht was rolled. Like Butler, he had his safety harness tethered to a strong point at half length – he’d looped it through the strong point and back to his harness – because it reduced the risk of being thrown around by the violent motion of the yacht. He was watching the helicopter when the big wave hit and was taken completely unawares. He too ended up underwater, under the boat, with no air. He was facing the stern and could see light coming in under the hull. Fresh air wasn’t very far away, but he couldn’t get to it. He tried to free himself from his harness but there was too much tension on the tether and before he could even try and do anything else the yacht had flipped back upright. Like Butler and so many other crewmembers, McDonagh’s ribs had taken a beating.