Fatal Storm (27 page)

“On the way out we heard a top cover plane flying around saying they’d just spotted a flare coming from one of the boats,” recalls Murray Traynor. “They didn’t know who it was but gave coordinates. We also heard that the Victorian Police Air had completed the
Midnight Special
job. We were then only seven to 10 minutes away from where the flare had gone off and so we diverted and came across
Business Post Naiad.
They were waving at us from the deck. Right from the start I didn’t like the look of what I saw. The yacht was just flipped up onto its side by a massive wave. I’d never seen a wave that big in my life.

“Graeme and I spent some time just looking out the door, looking at different ways we could extricate them out of the situation. The first thing we decided was that we were not going to be able to pull them off the boat because it was being thrown everywhere. We couldn’t tell which way the boat was going to go from one second to another. One of us suggested we see if we could get them to jump off the back of the boat and swim away from it, then I’d go down and we’d winch them straight out of the water. We went into a hover near the yacht and acted out what we wanted them to do; I’d come down the wire and I’d have this strop. I then put it over Graeme’s head and showed them what they were supposed to do. They seemed to acknowledge it.”

Murray Traynor then clipped onto the winch wire and began what was only his second, and certainly most dangerous, sea rescue. He knew that one mistake could result in the wire wrapping around a limb or even his neck. It required an exceptional team effort between pilot, winchman and paramedic.

“We decided it would be safer if we looped one of the spinnaker sheets through my safety harness so that it could be double ended back to the boat,” recalls Rob Matthews. “I figured that the guys would be able to winch me back to the yacht if the chopper guys didn’t get me. Anyway, I jumped off the back of the boat and this frogman came down and swam towards me. I unclipped my harness, put my arms up and the strop went over my head then
whammo!
Next thing I’m being launched out of the water at a hundred miles an hour and up into this helicopter.

“They whacked a headset on me and started firing questions, obviously wanting to see whether I was able to tell them what they needed to know. Making me do mental arithmetic about how many guys were on the boat
and how many were dead. They could see Phil in the cockpit. They were asking ‘Is the guy in the bottom of the cockpit deceased?’ I said, ‘Yes, and there’s another downstairs’. They wanted to make sure they got everyone accounted for. I also heard the pilot say, ‘I think I’m only going to have enough fuel to get four on. We’ll have to leave the rest until later’. The waves were still enormous and that boat still felt like it could roll at any time.

“The other guys started arriving in the chopper. I have to say that the one guy in the team who doesn’t get enough recognition is the winchman. You’ve got the pilot, who’s just unbelievable and the frogman who is outright mad, and then there’s the winchman who is the integral part of the whole situation. He’s the eyes and the ears of the chopper pilot. Things were obviously going well because after there were four of us on the chopper I heard the pilot say, ‘These guys are good. Everything’s going well. We’re going to get them all’. There was a big surge of relief for me. It was a fantastic feeling.”

Although the rescue mission was progressing satisfactorily, it was still a hellish experience for the chopper crew. Tyler had the unenviable task holding the machine in hover against 45 to 50 knots of headwind. Traynor was dicing with death each time he winched down, and was caught by two big waves. He had one crewmember in the strop ready to go when a mammoth wave appeared out of nowhere and broke directly over them. Two metres under, he paddled furiously back to the surface, blew the water out of his snorkel but before he could take a breath another wave pushed him under. He tried to relax and within a second he and the crewmember were hurtling skyward.

“During the first few winches I wasn’t aware that there were two people dead on board the boat so I didn’t have that thought pressuring me,” recalls Traynor. “The
realisation that someone might be dead didn’t come until probably the fourth winch because I could see one person lying flat on the boat. I said to Graeme a couple of times when I was back in the chopper, ‘What’s happening with that bloke on the deck?’ and he said, ‘It doesn’t matter, just keep going down’. He just thought I knew he was dead. I think it was the fourth winch when I just stopped halfway down and looked at this bloke on the deck, I looked up at Graeme, shut my eyes and crossed my arms across my chest. I signalled, asking if he wanted me to go and get him. He signalled ‘Don’t worry about it’. That’s when I realised he was gone. I still didn’t know there was a second person deceased on board.

“My biggest fear then was that I was going to have to go on board to get that person off. If I went aboard the boat I would have had to come off the hook, which means that my lifeline is gone. If the helicopter had to fly away I’d be stuck out there, and I’m no boating person whatsoever. That was my biggest fear during the entire exercise.”

Some 35 minutes after the rescue had begun there were seven depressed and badly beaten men aboard the Careflight helicopter. Dan Tyler turned it towards the coast and at 9am on December 28 all seven had their feet on dry land. A police launch left the next day, located
Business Post Naiad
and towed it back into port with the bodies of Bruce Guy and Phil Skeggs on board.

The story of what happened aboard Tasmanian yacht
Business Post Naiad
is one of the most emotional and graphic to emerge from what was the Fatal Storm, and in knowing what happened, and how two men lost their lives, it is not surprising to hear that a number of those who survived are still suffering 10 years on.

Rob Matthews, who so courageously narrated in great detail the experiences aboard the boat so others could learn from them, is very much in that category. He is still receiving counselling, which as he says continues to cost “a shit-load of money”, but it is keeping him on course through life.

“I don’t have nightmares,” he explained, “but I have what I call my video of what happened. I could be sitting here talking to you right now and I’ve got a storm going on inside my head on the right-hand side all the time. I’ve got this picture of Phil lying on the cockpit floor with the storm going on. Sometimes it lasts for months, sometimes just hours, and sometimes like right now it isn’t there at all. It’s not distracting when it’s there, but when it’s not I think to myself, ‘Where has Phil gone?’

“It doesn’t stop me from sleeping, but I have to say that since that race I’ve never slept well. I get plenty of rest, but not much sleep. I find it even more difficult to sleep anytime I’m on a boat. I don’t know why, but whenever I’m in my bunk I’ll get up every half an hour and go for a walk around the deck with a torch to check on everything, just to make sure things are OK. Then I’ll go back to bed and crash out for another 30 minutes.”

The first 12 months after the race were the toughest for Matthews: “I can’t remember 1999. I just lost that entire year. I can vaguely remember funerals and people around me, but that’s about it. I went to a wedding in Victoria not long after the race and I can’t remember a thing about being there. There are photos of me that show I was there, but I have no recollection of it.

“Life started falling back into place in 2000. I can remember helping deliver a catamaran from Tasmania to Mooloolaba that year, but that in itself was pretty traumatic because I took some of Bruce’s and Phil’s gear with me and so that when we sailed past Gabo Island I
could commit it to the deep in their memory. I did that when we got to the spot and then poured a can of beer over the side for them, then we kept on sailing north.”

“That experience, and the cruise, then convinced me that I needed to get away from work for a while to get things right in my head, so I took nine months off work on unpaid leave with my wife, Carmel, and we went cruising north from Tassie to the Whitsundays aboard our own little 34-footer.

“We made a pact before we left that we would only sail through the night if we absolutely had to, and if the weather wasn’t exactly what we wanted we wouldn’t leave port. It was a wonderful trip, very therapeutic, and most importantly we didn’t sail to windward one inch of the way. The entire passage made me realise that I didn’t want to be at work any more, but unfortunately, after nine months off work we had a lot of bills to pay, so I’m back again at the same job I had 10 years ago – a maintenance supervisor with the State Housing Department.”

For the next five years Matthews struggled with the thought of getting back into ocean racing, and while the pastime was deeply embedded in his veins he couldn’t bring himself to venturing offshore for any form of long-distance contest, especially a Hobart race. Instead he tried to distract himself from the thought by considering other activities, like flying, parachuting, hang-gliding and bushwalking, but none worked for him.

“I did the odd race in the harbour at home in Launceston and did a couple of delivery trips, but I couldn’t get my head around a long ocean race,” he said. “A few times over the years I decided the time might be right, so I made a couple of inquiries about doing the Hobart, but as soon as I did I changed my mind. I just thought, ‘No, I can’t handle it yet.’ Then in 2005 a guy from Launceston offered me a spot, and while I knew the
boat had no chance of winning on handicap it was the type of yacht that was going to make it. We did the race, we made it, and it got the monkey off my back.

“Since then I’ve been doing quite a bit of racing, mainly as a navigator. It means I can keep a better eye on the weather and the radio, two things I get a bit anal about these days.”

“As far as the Hobart race is concerned, I’m not saying ‘never again’, but it would now take a good boat that held a fair chance of winning to get me back. I have no need to do it just for the hell of it.”

Matthews said that Phil Skeggs’ wife had managed to rebuild her life over time and remarried; however, the children still very much miss their father. He sees Bruce Guy’s wife, Ros, occasionally. She is a proud mum as their son, Mark, has proven to be an elite endurance athlete and dominated the competition in Tasmania’s Three Peaks yachting and marathon running race for many years.

D
uring the night of December 26, Tony Mowbray, owner of
Solo Globe Challenger
, was phoned by a television reporter from his hometown of Newcastle. A story was being prepared on the progress of the region’s highest profile race entry. The reporter commented during the conversation that Mowbray appeared to be “pretty relaxed” about the forecast for 50-knot sou’westerly winds the next day. Mowbray, having covered thousands of sea miles offshore in small yachts, replied: “Oh well, you know, I’ve seen 50 knots plenty of times. I’ve been down to Bass Strait, probably crossed Bass Strait maybe 30 times.” Twenty hours later Mowbray was shaking his head in disbelief and was having difficulty comprehending what was confronting him and his Cole 43.

Solo Globe Challenger
is a comparatively slim yacht but Mowbray saw it as a strong and very seaworthy design that would hold him in good stead on his proposed solo around-the-world voyage in 1999. He had seven crew with him and they held a similar faith. Up until midday on the 27th they felt they were still competitive. They had been changing sails as required and were down to a storm jib. They were then about 30 miles into Bass Strait, not far from
Winston Churchill
, and encountering conditions Mowbray considered to be “fairly dangerous”.

“We had probably 60 knots of wind and it was starting to get vicious. The seas were fairly short and sharp and close together; probably in the 20 to 30 foot range. Already the noise from the wind and the seas was amazing, just shrieking and roaring. You had to shout at the top of your voice to be heard by someone who was just a bodywidth away. At that point we pulled the storm jib off her completely and then we just proceeded to sail under bare poles. Ours is one of those boats where you can actually maintain a course under bare poles. We were getting up and over the waves, it was certainly the safer option at that time. We had no desire to run away square with the waves.”

Mowbray had not slept since the start of the race some 24 hours earlier, so when the 14:05 sked came on he went below, climbed into the port quarter berth and tuned into the airwaves while veteran Bob Snape reported the yacht’s position and monitored developments. He listened keenly as
Sword of Orion
detailed the conditions they were experiencing but he still felt confident that he had a solid boat and an excellent crew. Glen “Cyril” Picasso, a competent helmsman, was left at the wheel. Three other crew were on deck with him.

The fresh on-deck watch was amazed at the speed with which the weather was going downhill. In just 90 minutes, conditions had gone from what some sailors might call “fresh”, to “frightening”, to something that was nothing short of horrific. The wind seemingly rose in increments of five knots every 15 minutes and the waves more than doubled in height. At around 4pm a 60-foot monster came roaring towards the yacht, picked it up and threw it down on its port side. When the wave broke it dumped, and forced the yacht over to about 145 to 150 degrees before sweeping it down the face for about 20 seconds.

Mowbray was in his bunk below deck and was taken
completely unawares. “It was a surreal sort of thing. I was saying to myself, what the fuck is happening here? It’s a situation where you are totally out of control, you’re in a washing machine and someone’s put it on bloody fast agitate and that’s it, it’s all over.” The mast broke almost immediately just above the boom and the force of water engulfed the yacht, imploding the PVC skylight that was protected by a cockpit coaming and located just above his bunk. Water poured into the nav station at the for’ard end of the quarter berth and swamped everything – GPS, radios, Satcom C, mobile telephone. Bob Snape was sitting there and ended up a sodden and bewildered tangle of arms and legs.

“I managed to struggle to the hatch and open it,” recalls Mowbray. “I had four guys up on deck. One guy had been knocked unconscious but was coming around. The mast had come down over the port quarter and was hanging out over the port aft side of the cockpit. His legs were pinned by the mast so as the boat was riding up and down over the waves the rig was sawing at his legs. Suddenly he was screaming like you wouldn’t believe.”

Mowbray’s attention then flashed to the water behind the yacht. Picasso, still attached by his safety harness, was being dragged along under the water. He said later that his life was flashing through his mind. He was saying to himself “for Christ’s sake this harness better not break”. His harness suddenly went limp and he stopped dead in the water. He put his hand up, touched the boat’s stern and grabbed the pushpit. In the pressure of the moment Mowbray uttered “one of the silliest things I’ve ever said: ‘Cyril, for Christ’s sake stop fucking around and get back on board’. I just turned around and went to help the other guys. As I did Cyril looked at me and said, ‘Right oh?’ So that’s what he did, climbed back on board, busted ribs and all.”

Meanwhile, Keir Enderby was trapped by the rig and Tony Purkiss was also lying there with a broken leg and a terrible gash on his head. The able crewmembers did what they could to make the injured comfortable in the cockpit but the yacht also needed attention. It had skewed off course and the smashed mast was now lying upwind. Each wave was slamming the broken and jagged aluminium spar into the side of the hull. The yacht was taking on a lot of water and was showing signs that it might be sinking by the stern. Cutting the rig away was paramount. Mowbray and three other crewmembers went up to the mast area and began working on the rig and within 15 minutes it had been removed. Fortunately none of it had snagged on the rudder.

Snape had triggered both on-board EPIRBs and had started bailing. Two others manned the manual pumps and after about 45 minutes the tide of water inside the hull was well down. Efforts were made to start the engine but its response was spasmodic. It would run and then die, apparently because water had found its way into the fuel system via the fuel tank breather and sediment from the fuel filters had been stirred up. With the situation reasonably stabilised, some of the injured were transferred to bunks below. It was found however that the crewman with the broken leg could not be moved without causing him excruciating pain. He chose to remain in the cockpit.

Mowbray was the only heavy-weather helmsman fit for action and went onto the helm to guide the yacht down the waves. It was then about 5pm and, with all communications lost, the crew were isolated in their little cocoon. Only their EPIRBs would be bouncing information back to AusSAR in Canberra. As yet the liferafts had not been prepared, a move which Mowbray felt should be a last alternative. During the night mammoth waves continued to pound the yacht, tossing the 43-foot, nine-tonne vessel like a cork.
They were caught on the northern side of the low and running downwind, and were moving with the worst of the storm but they were destined to remain in foul weather for the next 15 hours.

“We went into the night thinking the next wave could be the one that took us out,” Mowbray recalls. “It was a very, very fearful situation. As far as I was concerned, death was just there in the water alongside us. You could sense it was there. I was thinking if I get out of this I’m going to be a lucky bloke. We hadn’t done anything special about preparing the liferaft. It was still in place on deck near the mast. Actually I’ve never been a great believer about getting into rafts; it’s a bit like slashing your wrists before you go. It’s the absolute last alternative. As we charged off into the night we had a number of waves that really tossed us on our beam end. In fact the waves did all sorts of things to us that night. One monster just reared up behind and broke all over the four of us who were in the cockpit. We sensed it was coming and the others just dropped to the floor to protect themselves. I was steering and the white water just threw me forward into the wheel. It was just an unbelievable wave.

“The whole boat was completely engulfed in white water, completely submerged. I was standing and the water was at chest level. I was looking out across all this white water while the boat’s just careering down the face of this wave completely under the white water. All I could make out was the top of the pulpit at the bow. I was yelling at the top of my voice, ‘This is it! This is the one. We’re gone’. I was thinking, as we hit the bottom of this bloody trough, the nose is just going to keep going down and we’re going to pitch pole. Somehow, when we got to the bottom the yacht stopped and we bobbed back up onto the surface. There was one other wave that I will never forget. It was huge and the
moment it hit us it skewed us 90 degrees to our course. It picked us up and the boat took off across the face of the wave like it was a surfboard. We were absolutely charging across the face of this wave, like I’m talking about literally thumping across the water like you do in a high performance sailing dinghy.

“But we’re in a 43-foot, nine-tonne yacht. It’s going whack, whack, whack across the wave, doing 15 maybe 20 knots, and I’m hanging onto the wheel, crouched down, waiting for the wave to break all over us. I’m thinking in a split second, what do I do? Do I try and pull the boat away? Do I let it go straight ahead and try to steady it? Do I try and pull up through the back of it or what? Then I realised the yacht was just hanging in there. I decided I’d just steer her straight and let her go the way she wanted. This is all happening in a split second. I’m crouched down waiting for the water to literally engulf us – that’s how big this bastard was – and then suddenly I’m thinking, God I’ve got no water around. I’ve got my eyes and my mouth closed and there’s no water. What’s going on?

“I opened my eyes and I looked up and could see the water curling over us. We were literally in the tube of the wave. It was just a phenomenal, unbelievable situation. You could see it breaking over us, and we were just staying out of the break. Next thing, of course, it all caught up with us and
whumphh
, it broke all over us. Equally quickly it was all gone. I looked back upwind and could see white water for 400 metres. After that I made a few promises to myself. I decided that if I survived I was going to give away the plan to sail around the world. I’d imposed on my wife and children and my family and friends too much. You have to follow your passion but there also comes a point when you have to back off.”

At one stage they considered setting a sea anchor to slow the boat, but Mowbray’s experience in fighting a
50- to 60-knot Southern Ocean gale some years earlier assured him what they were doing was safer.

“Throughout the night I kept telling myself I wanted to see stars. We started seeing little patches of stars up there and I thought, OK, please stay open, open up. They’d close over again. We just had to be patient. I steered the boat from 5 o’clock that Sunday afternoon throughout the whole night. By the early hours of Monday morning I was absolutely ratshit. With my good helmsman injured I could do nothing else. I started hallucinating at one stage and saw a monkey sitting on the broken stump of the mast. When I knew that it wasn’t real, I told the guys I could see it. I said, ‘I can see a monkey on the mast.’ They just said, ‘Can you? Oh yeah, there he is.’”

The two EPIRBs were still operating but the crew did not know if their signal was being registered at AusSAR. They discussed how they might get off the yacht. The conclusion was that they probably couldn’t get off – it was dark, the seas were unforgiving and the yacht was being hurled around like a bucking bronco. Someone would almost certainly be killed. Mowbray had never contemplated abandoning his prized yacht, but that night admitted to himself that if his life could be assured by leaving the yacht he’d do it.

“By 1am I was shattered; unbelievably tired. I said to the guys, ‘have you got anything that can keep me awake’ and they came up with the idea of giving me a cup of coffee. So Bob Snape made me three cups of coffee between 1am until about 4.30am. They were so strong you could have stood the spoon up in them. They were like drinking bitumen. I hadn’t drunk coffee for six years but I did then. Each time I took a sip I’d just go ‘Whoa, whoa’, and my mouth would take on the shape of a cat’s bum. But I drank them – straight black. Anyhow it kept me going.”

When dawn broke, a glimmer of black slowly turning to grey in the east, Mowbray noticed signs of the wind abating. It was down to around 45 knots, and the 50- to 60-foot seas that had hounded them all night had quelled to around 40 foot.

As the light improved, tired eyes again scanned the skies for any form of assistance and around 7am the blissful sound of the Helimed helicopter filled their ears. Flares were fired and the big red and white Bell 412 turned their way. With no communications, the chopper crew indicated by hand they intended to take everyone from the yacht. But Mowbray thought otherwise. He was convinced
Solo Globe Challenger
could be nursed back to the coast and into port. He did, however, insist that the most seriously injured crew be lifted off.

Cam Robertson was the paramedic on the flight. They had been dispatched from Mallacoota at 6am and sent to investigate the
Solo Globe Challenger
EPIRB signal that AusSAR was registering. Despite the huge seas and high winds, Robertson saw all three rescues as “pretty straightforward”. He would be lowered into the water near the yacht, the crewmembers would jump from the yacht, he would swim to them, place the rescue strop around them, give the thumbs up and head for the heavens. Amid the confusion and noise and the uncertainty about how much fuel the helicopter was carrying, one crewmember jumped into the water in haste and without a life jacket.

“It was Tony Purkiss, the guy with the broken leg,” recalls Mowbray. “He believed that if you really seal up your wet weather gear tightly at the ankles and wrists and tie your hood down tight then there’s enough air trapped inside your wet weather gear to float you for five minutes. So he put it to the test and it worked. When he was about to jump I saw he still had his seaboots on so I
shouted, ‘Get your seaboots off!’. But he couldn’t because of his broken leg. We all thought he’d go straight to the bottom, but he didn’t. While they were getting lined up for one of the lifts I saw the chopper just rear up into the air like a rocket. The next minute this huge wave just came through. It would probably have wiped him out. That convinced me even more that those guys were absolute heroes. The guys in the choppers and the plane guys, and in particular the people who went into the drink from the choppers to rescue others; they’re all superheroes.”