The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  The wind from this squall line was like nothing I had ever felt before. It came upon us like a line of charging stallions. Instantly, we were blown right over at an obscene angle. We had both our jib and our reefed mainsail up, and with the wind vane still trying to hold our course, our mast was pressed right down, close to the seething, roiling surface of the ocean. Water roared up over our gunwales and to my horror continued rushing up until it was actually on top of our lower cabin roof. All the portholes on the starboard side of the boat were under half a metre of water. If any of them had been open, the ocean would now be flowing freely into the boat.

  My red-hot priority was the wide-open hatch through which I had just come. The tumult of water was boiling and licking right at its lip. One more degree of tilt, and hundreds upon hundreds of litres of water would rush unimpeded into that gaping mouth. In that instant, for the first time on this trip, a sudden vision of us being forced to take to our life raft leapt unbidden into my mind.

  Banishing the thought, I yelled at the top of my lungs to Herbert, not sure if he could hear me over the louder screaming of the wind. I didn’t know it, but the sudden lurch to starboard had slammed the heavy engine compartment hatch down on his back as he was standing under it. He certainly knew, even without my screaming, that something was very wrong.

  Tearing my eyes away from the gaping maw of the open hatch, I quickly disengaged the wind vane to take manual control of the steering. My first thought was to steer the boat so the wind was behind us. That would stop us from heeling over and also reduce the wind’s apparent speed, since we would be going with it instead of against it. But no matter how hard I pulled on the steering wheel, I was not strong enough to counteract the force of the wind. Twenty tons of steel boat wanted to point upwind. I tried for five or ten seconds until there was nothing to do but head into the blow instead.

  By now Herbert had clambered into the cockpit. Michael was peering wide-eyed out of the lower hatch. We yelled for him to close both hatches and make sure all the inside windows were shut. There was a look of pure terror on his face as he saw the water boiling up on the deck right under his nose. He slammed the hatch shut and ran to check each of the crazily-tilted starboard side portholes. Of the children, he alone appreciated the nature of the crisis upon us. This was the first time I knew for sure on this trip that he was afraid. As soon as he was done checking windows, he lay, quaking, in his bed. He said nothing to his brothers about the fact that all he had seen through all our starboard-side windows was water.

  At the same time as I began trying to steer us into the wind, Herbert released the jib sheet. These two actions had the effect of both turning and righting us immediately. The danger of flooding was over as quickly as it had come. Our jib began flogging violently, however, slamming around and bashing into the stays. Only a few minutes of this and it would be shredded to bits. Herbert manned the winch and struggled to furl in the jib, all the while praying it would hold together until he was done.

  That accomplished, he had somehow to drop the mainsail. This was a much more precarious manoeuvre, since it meant leaving the relative safety of the cockpit. Herbert snapped on a safety harness and, attaching himself to a steel line that went around the bow of the boat, began making his way to the sail. But the harness attachment on the starboard side somehow disengaged itself as he scrambled forward, and he was forced to return to the cockpit. Re-attaching himself to the port side jackline, he managed to lurch his way along. But from the port side he wasn’t as well positioned to take down the mainsail and found it impossible to wrestle it completely down.

  While he was at work, my job was to try to hold the boat on a steady course into the wind, but not so much that the boat would tack and send the main boom slamming over into Herbert. It took all my power to hold her on course.

  The squall was still blasting us at full intensity, the rain pelting down, shooting into our bodies like steel needles, sharp and cold. We were both dressed only in T-shirts and shorts, and in seconds we were drenched and freezing. Between the cold, the exertion, and the adrenalin coursing through my body, my arms and legs began to tremble until they were shaking so badly I could hardly hold the wheel. My right leg, which took most of the force of bracing my body against the downward side of the cockpit, was tapping so furiously I had trouble supporting myself on it.

  How much time passed in that cockpit that way? Five minutes? Fifteen? Somehow it was all just a blur. All I know is that at some point Herbert managed to get the sail down and we found ourselves braced there in the cold, penetrating rain, shaking and huddling together in the cockpit in a mixture of terror and relief. Somehow we realized that with this squall and the storm of the previous two days we were passing perhaps our first real test as sailors.

  Within minutes after returning inside, however, there was a new problem to cope with. Unbeknownst to us, the alternator was malfunctioning. We had no idea anything was wrong until Herbert opened the engine compartment for the routine turning off of a valve and happened to notice a very bright light inside. The light he was seeing was created by red-hot alternator wires. They could have burst into an engine fire at any moment.

  Once again Herbert was forced into the engine room, as sick and as exhausted as he was, to replace the alternator. It was our spare that had given out, so he re-installed the higher capacity alternator that he had just finished fixing. Throughout the rest of that troubled passage, we had problems with that large alternator, chewing through fan belts and making a screaming sound every time we used a lot of power. It seemed our troubles, our endless hours of fear and misery, just wouldn’t end.

  By the end of Day Five, the storm was still not willing to relinquish its grip. We were again heading north and once more nearing those same reefs. We turned the boat south a scant twenty miles west of where we had tacked back the day before. It was sickening to think of how difficult the past twenty-four hours had been, and yet all we had gained for our suffering was a pathetic twenty miles.

  Through the early hours of Day Six, we virtually retraced our path of the day before. But the cause of all our troubles was now moving well to the southeast of us. By the middle of the day, the winds finally dropped below gale force, and soon we were able to resume a southwest track. We had been at sea six days, three of them in a storm. We were closer to New Caledonia than we had been before the storm started.

  By Day Eight, about the time we had originally expected to be making a joyous landfall in Australia, we were instead carefully creeping through a set of banks and reefs only halfway to our destination. As we threaded our way through, nervous about the danger of running into the half-hidden mid-ocean Kelso Reef, we both felt full of unaccountable tension. We had hardly eaten or slept since the storm had begun five days before.

  Many a time we wished we could just let our little ship drift so we could get some rest. But that was impossible. We still had many days to go before we were safe, with the probability of encountering another storm increasing with each passing day. Herbert remarked, as we puddled our slow way through, that he felt just like the unfortunate bosun birds of Palmerston Island, sitting helplessly on the ground until they were picked up, thrown into bags, and carried off to their doom. All they could do was scream.

  Days passed. We were tired, dog-tired, unable to recover from the trauma of the storm, because we were stuck in the cockpit hand steering day and night. There wasn’t enough wind to sail, so our wind vane was useless. We were still two days away from Australia, on Day Ten of our final, stormy passage of the South Pacific, when we received our first inkling that more trouble lay ahead.

  Word that another storm awaited us first came in the form of an Australian small-craft warning passed on to us by my father. Dad e-mailed us that we could expect to get a “wet and rolly ride.” Then a few hours later, thinking he had better not let us be deceived by the flippant tone of that message, he sent a more strongly worded warning. It was perhaps just as well that we didn’t know exactly what was comi
ng.

  There was a depression just a hundred miles west of us, directly on our path. This time there was no escape; we would have to force our way right through the centre of the storm. We felt fragile and nervous, physically and mentally tired and desperately anxious for our ordeal to end. Still two hundred miles, and now another trial, separated us from safety.

  We calculated that we were likely to approach the Australian coast during darkness the following night. We had never approached a strange harbour at night, and doing so during a storm was totally out of the question. We therefore made the painful but necessary decision to heave to, or stop the boat, so that we could time our arrival for early morning two days later. Although we wanted nothing more than to arrive as soon as possible, instead we bobbed in place like a sitting duck, waiting, not knowing what sort of misery the next day might bring.

  It was a calm night, a beautiful night. Hard to believe bad weather was on its way. While the boys and I admired the beautiful orange sunset in the cockpit, we picked up Australian newscasts on our radio. They spoke of a huge storm, of the cancellation of professional sports events, of warnings for people to stay home, of chaos. Herbert and I grabbed snatches of sleep.

  Next morning those spectacular orange heavens had been replaced by a sky that was ugly, ominous, and grey. In order to cook some fried eggs for Christopher’s breakfast, I turned the wheel over to Michael. I could see that I didn’t have much time, for there was an all-too-familiar black line hanging low on the horizon. That line looked like grim, pursed black lips.

  It wasn’t ten minutes after I returned to the cockpit that the first squall hit. Our jib and small mizzen sail were both raised and hauled in tight. It was important that we not be knocked over by a blast of wind as we had been before. As soon as I could feel the wind jump in force, I turned Northern Magic north so that we were propelled along with the squall. Although conditions in the cockpit were miserable, with the pelting rain and whipping wind, the strategy was successful, and we were able to weather that first squall safely.

  The sky all around us had now turned into a witches’ cauldron. “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble” popped into my head. Shakespeare himself never imagined a more sinister sky, nor evoked a sense of foreboding greater than mine as I looked helplessly at the maelstrom surrounding our small floating home, all alone in a dark and violent sea.

  Even if our weather reports hadn’t said that the storm was spawning directly over us, we would have known it from the furious activity overhead. Low dark clouds with black borders swept from south to north; solid grey sheets of rain reached down to the water; huge thunderheads sprouted, blossomed, and towered ominously, like mushroom clouds from a nuclear bomb. Black cloud formations rose and reached out over us like giant hands ready to crush us. Even the sun hid, as if in fear of these evil storm lords clashing in their battleground. Standing exposed in the open cockpit of a tiny boat, this clash of titans was an awesome and fearful sight. We looked and felt very small.

  Squall after squall came racing across the water. The wind had picked up to thirty-five knots, and each time a squall rampaged by, it increased to forty-five knots, a shrieking hard blast. I continued steering around and through the squalls as best as I could, minimizing the strain on the boat and the sails. The squalls would come fiercely and last half an hour or so, during which time we would be pelted with slanting rain. The waves rose from three or four metres to five metres high or more. Once I really got in the rhythm of steering with them, I actually felt a sense of power and exhilaration, a keen awareness of being alive. Everything depended upon my concentration on my duties. Often, it took all my physical power to keep the boat on course, leaning my entire body onto the wheel. In this way we withstood perhaps ten squalls.

  Then, as we sailed through the dark curtain of the final squall, to my amazement the sky behind it was blue. The rain stopped. The wind calmed down. I was able to take my hands off the wheel for the first time in five hours. My right shoulder ached, and I had no sensation at all in my right thumb, which had been gripping the wheel for hours – for days, for weeks – with all its might. I stepped into the navigation station down below, where Herbert was resting on Michael’s bunk. Although exhausted, I felt proud and happy. I had brought us through the worst, and Australia was only sixty miles away.

  Herbert, who again, for only the second time in his life, had been laid flat by seasickness, sat up looking feverish. His head was hot, yet his limbs were shivering under a thick blanket. For half an hour I rested beside him.

  Then I felt a strange change in the rhythm of the waves. I stuck my head out of the hatch and couldn’t believe what I saw.

  Outside, that pleasant blue sky had been swallowed by a hideous black and grey tumult of clouds, a maelstrom of unbelievable proportions. Before my eyes, a solid white wall materialized and began galloping across the frothing surface of the water. It was heading directly towards us: a squall line of an intensity unequalled by any we had met before. As I turned the boat to run with it, the squall slammed into us. Rain smashed horizontally onto my body. Foam from the wave tops blew sideways as quickly as it formed and covered the water with a white froth. My wrap-around sunglasses were blown right off my face from under the snug hood of my foul weather suit.

  Those long-ago nightmares of storms at sea, encountered in the safety and warmth of my bed at home, did not do justice to the reality of the fury that now enveloped us. Everything we had gone through before had been just a trial run. Now the real storm started.

  Scudding along at eight knots with the wind, our wind indicator registered close to fifty knots, which meant we were experiencing about fifty-eight knots, or sustained wind of 105 kilometres per hour. During gusts, it went even higher. This was almost hurricane strength, a Force Ten storm, perhaps even Force Eleven. The kind of storm sailors talk about for a lifetime. The kind that is termed a “survival storm” in the definitive book on heavy weather sailing. Within minutes, the waves rose to seven metres, more than twenty feet high. Huge whitecaps roared on the tops of the waves, breaking and often crashing down all around us, onto our decks and into the cockpit.

  I steered with a steely gaze on the compass and forced myself not to look at the chaos around me. I asked God for strength. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I could see broad sheets of electrical flash, lightning hidden behind the clouds or beyond the horizon.

  At first I hoped this was simply another squall. But when it showed no signs of abating – if anything, it was becoming worse – I yelled for Herbert to come into the cockpit and take down our sails. I knew I really should have done this much sooner, but foolishly I had been trying to protect him from having to leave his sickbed.

  Herbert furled in most of the jib and put a deep reef in the mizzen. Later, he took down the mizzen sail altogether, and we ran under bare poles. Attached to the boat by our harnesses, Herbert and I sat there together in the cockpit, taking turns steering. Hour after hour it went on, the dark day slowly giving way to an even darker night. But still the storm continued, and the waves grew even steeper.

  Down below, the children had been left to their own devices. They had naturally put themselves into the safety of their bunks. As darkness enveloped us, I staggered inside to make sure their leecloths were all in place.

  Soon we were speeding along in total darkness, being tossed by nightmarish waves that had grown at least ten metres, more than thirty feet high. The waves towered over us, more than halfway up our mast, as high as our spreaders. Now that it was dark, everything looked even more ominous. We could see very little in the black night other than the painfully bright fluorescence of the breaking crests of the waves and periodic sheets of lightning.

  As we sailed through the deep trough between two waves, a frothing mass of foam loomed high up over the boat, advancing threateningly, looking as if it would surely crash down right on top of us. Just as it looked as if we were going to be engulfed, the wave would begin to lift us up until the foam was no longer
above us, but beside us, washing onto our decks or roaring into the cockpit. It was as if the wave was a muscular Titan, a Goliath of the sea, lifting us onto his huge shoulders, intent upon our destruction. For a moment, we would perch there, swept up in the giant’s tangled, shining hair while Northern Magic rose bravely up, decks awash with foam. Then the giant would rush on past us, letting us slide down his back, his wild white mane streaming out behind him as he continued on his malevolent path.

  A few seconds later, the next wave would arrive. Up we would be hoisted again. These monstrous Titans never tired of rushing at us, toying with us, and then throwing us down again with a deafening roar. I found I couldn’t even bear to look at them. I kept my eye fixed on the compass so I wouldn’t be distracted from my work. It kept me from thinking about my fear. Herbert stood beside me, watching the waves rush at us from behind, directing me how to steer so we would slide diagonally down their sides, warning me about particularly big ones. If we went directly sideways to the waves, there was a danger of us rolling over and capsizing under a breaking crest. If we went straight down, we might trip on our bow and pitch-pole, flipping end over end. A hundred times as we ran with the storm under bare poles at a speed of four and a half knots, I was grateful for our strong, slow, stable steel boat. Northern Magic seemed to know what to do.

  By now it was near midnight, and we were only thirty-five miles away from the coast. We’d been hand steering through the storm for fifteen hours. We decided to try lying ahull, which means to close up, lock the wheel, and simply let the boat take care of itself. Since we’d never done this before, we tried it cautiously, ready to take control again in case it made us less stable. We sat back, our hearts in our mouths, wondering what would happen next.