by Chris Dixon
Houtz next made a basic walk around the ship to ensure that Kirkwood had Jalisco outfitted properly, per instructions. The first discrepancy left him thunderstruck. Jalisco held only one anchor, on her starboard side, and it was far smaller than those he had seen in Oakland. He hadn’t noticed this from Rainbow’s End. Where was the port anchor? Why was this one so small? Kirkwood umm’d and ahhh’d before admitting that he’d sold them for salvage.
The blood rose in Houtz’s cheeks. Playing out the anchors precisely to maneuver Jalisco was now out of the question. Clifford Miller still controlled the ship from the deck of the Whitney Olsen, but Miller wanted Jalisco cast off as soon as possible. He had brought the ship this far and his work was done. Houtz thought a serviceable position might yet be obtained if he carefully positioned and played out the single anchor in the current. He keyed the starter of the eight-ton diesel that powered the chain spool compressor, but it wouldn’t even turn over. Hadn’t Kirkwood had it tested? “Nobody ever showed me that it worked,” Houtz said Kirkwood replied.
There was now only one way to lower the anchor—a massive, manually operated bow winch. But, once that was lowered, there was no way in hell to raise it. Houtz ordered Kirkwood and his crew to slowly release the brake, but the chain raised such a horrendous clatter that the startled men leapt back and let go. It zippered out at lightning speed before coming to an abrupt, thumping stop.
A moment of stunned silence ensued. Houtz first thought someone must have managed to activate the brake because nowhere near 750 feet of chain had played out. Yet the spool had emptied. “Where’s the rest of the chain?” Houtz asked Kirkwood.
Kirkwood shrugged. “He told the people at the shipyard, ‘We’re going to be in less than fifty feet of water,’” said Houtz. “He had the chain cut off and sold it for salvage to get more money—and he never said anything about it.”
Houtz was furious at Kirkwood and himself, but argument or debate was pointless. They were in about 50 feet of water with 100, maybe 150 feet of anchor chain. Houtz assessed the situation, mentally calculating different decision trees. None bore much fruit. The only way the mission might be salvaged was if the Jalisco somehow ended up in a functional spot on the reef as the current pushed her backward into shallower water. Houtz ordered Kirkwood to open the ballast valves below deck so she would begin to sink.
Jalisco was now attached to an anchor that, while not yet latched into a hard, fast position, nonetheless lay on the seafloor, and this would make it impossible for the Whitney Olsen to drag her out to deeper water. The chain was so short that Houtz reckoned the anchor would probably grab bottom just as Jalisco drifted into a position astride the precarious ridgeline where he had seen waves break during the previous months. To make things even worse, Jalisco was still bound to the tugboat by the tug’s heavy steel towing cable. Precious minutes passed as the men labored unsuccessfully to lift it off Jalisco’s bow stanchion. With the swells continuing to build, a fearful Captain Miller could bear no more.
Kirkwood hollered to Captain Miller to give the cable more slack. He was instead puzzled and alarmed when a man stepped out of Whitney Olsen’s cabin and fired a blowtorch. Kirkwood wrote, “The captain must be really worried by the increasing swells to cut away a cable worth several thousand dollars and let it sink in the ocean.”
Whitney Olsen crewman Louis Ribeiro held onto fellow crewman Ray Turnbull while Turnbull torched the cable. Conditions were going to shit. “We were going underwater while he was cutting the thing,” Ribeiro said.
From Whitney Olsen came a sharp crack and the Abalonians ducked. The melting cable had separated, whistling through the air with the speed of a striking cobra and ricocheting off Jalisco’s bow. She still floated freely in the shallow water, but not for long.
A building marine layer cast a funereal pall on the proceedings. With a sense of dread, Jim Houtz suddenly realized what was happening. The Jalisco was being enveloped by long, low-frequency forerunners that formed the leading edge of a big North Pacific swell. The waves had radiated out from the same low he had noticed days ago on the map, and they were now barreling down the California coast. The great old ship would soon be battling for her life at the mercy of the waves.
As the outer edge of the swell swept past Jalisco, wavelengths shortened into the twenty-second range, and the swells rapidly grew in surface height. Less than a mile offJalisco’sbow, the swells encountered something they hadn’t felt since Hawaii—an immovable obstacle. Their energy focused and compressed, but Bishop Rock wouldn’t budge. The swells could go nowhere but up.
Jalisco climbed and then dropped sharply down the backsides of the waves, her hull ringing like a struck gong. Free of the tug, she was nudged backward. Her anchor scraped and bounced for a couple of hundred yards before finally grabbing hard in twenty, maybe thirty feet of water. The chain drew taut as a banjo string, and Jalisco shuddered violently, throwing the men off their feet.
Moments later, a 20-foot swell liftedJalisco’sbow and a deep, rattling groan bellowed from astern. She had kissed Bishop Rock for the first time. Firmly tethered to the anchor, she was soon grinding and lurching against the ancient mountaintop—a stomach-clenching series of thunderclaps rolling through her hull. Houtz has still never experienced anything like it. “It was just, just the most god-awful thing,” he said.
Off the bow, a new line of swells. The ship slammed the rock in the troughs and was suddenly shaken by a terrific concussion. The floor dropped from beneath everyone. “Whoosh,” Houtz said. “It was like an elevator falling.”
Jalisco had been fatally impaled, and the punctured portion of her stern instantly fell onto a pinnacle of Bishop Rock like a trailer on a ball hitch. The waves forced a tortured, deafening turn to port. With every inch, the pressure on the anchor chain grew.
“It’s kind of like a movie camera that’s gone into slow motion and now into still frame,” said Houtz. “I told everybody to get away from the anchor chain because, when it goes, it’s going to be something you do not want to be around. I came over to the port side and stayed there because that was the lee of the anchor.”
Houtz was wearing a life jacket. At this point, he might have simply jumped overboard to save himself. But he was, officially, the captain of this sinking ship. It was his duty to help everyone get out alive.
When Jalisco reached a forty-five degree angle to the waves, the chain’s weakest link split near the hull with another massive crack. It bullwhipped out across the water with enough force to cleave a boat in half. Jalisco gave a massive jolt and swung around with dizzying speed until she was stern first into the waves, roaring and gnashing against the stake that had been driven through her heart. As she sunk lower, the waves grew higher, not yet breaking but just beginning to wash over her backside.
The men stood just forward of amidship in a daze. Things had gone wrong so fast. Houtz said to everyone, “This thing is done, guys. We have to get the hell off this boat.”
As the swells swept farther and farther over Jalisco, it became clear that the men were soon going to be cast involuntarily into a riot of white water if they didn’t leap overboard first during a lull. Houtz ordered everyone into life jackets, but Kirkwood, Lesslie, and O’Malley refused. Houtz was flummoxed.
“I’m somebody who can swim a hundred miles, and I put on my life jacket,” he said, shaking his head. “And they wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t do anything.”
I asked Houtz if this was an example of the “incredulity response.” In the 2008 book The Survivor’s Club—an examination of the traits found in those who survive utterly harrowing experiences—author Ben Sherwood writes that those who die in critical situations often don’t believe what they’re seeing and freeze like marble statues. Sherwood also describes a condition he calls “brainlock,” when unhinged panic inhibits the ability to think your way out of a situation. A person might even do something completely irrational—walk in the direction of a fire or not put on a life jacket in the face of gigan
tic waves.
Houtz lit up. “That’s exactly what was happening,” he said. “I’ve had my life on the line quite a number of times. In each of those instances, it’s not a panic. It’s mostly a mode of ‘Okay, what do I do now to get out of this?’ But some people just don’t listen. There’s nothing you can do.”
The first breaking wave roused the men from their deer-in-the-headlights stupor. When Houtz yelled “Run!” there was no argument.
The wave stood perhaps 35 feet high and was a hypnotic sapphire blue. It gathered up concrete, cast-iron hatch covers, wood, rope, steel cable, and fifty-five-gallon drums of diesel. The debris-field overtook everyone at the bow except for the speedy Kirkwood, who leapt a few feet up onto the base of a small mast planted on the very nose of the ship. The others were bashed against the bow gunwale and hammered by the debris. Houtz felt a stabbing, crunchy pain in his side as the breath was squeezed from his lungs. He had broken at least one rib.
A terrified John O’Malley had been battered, too, but “Many Horses” Lesslie was in real trouble. He had somehow been stuffed ass-first into the jagged hole in the bow and was bent over double, his body blocking the rushing water like a cork, completely unable to free himself. Another giant frigid wave swept the bow, and another. Lesslie was going to drown.
Then the set passed and there was a lull. Houtz and Dan staggered over and yanked out Lesslie, who was spitting out oily water and moaning in pain. Lesslie was indeed hurt, and O’Malley had probably suffered internal injuries. The pair then helped O’Malley into a life jacket and walked him to a spot just off the port bow. In a brave and foolish act, Captain Miller then rammed the Whitney Olsen into the Jalisco, revving the tug’s engines hard to maintain contact with the hull. Houtz and Dan tried to hand O’Malley down to Louis Ribeiro and another crewman. The pair had him for a second, but O’Malley was covered with a slippery sheen of diesel. A wave pulled the tug down, and the young man “stepped out into the air,” Ribeiro said. Miller withdrew his boat to fish him out.
“Get off the boat, Dan,” Houtz said. “There’s no reason for you to stay here.” Dan leapt off the side and struggled over to the Rainbow’s End.
Houtz moved to shelter himself behind the ship’s three-story-tall superstructure, and from there he tried to talk Kirkwood and Lesslie down off the bow and convince them to jump into the water. Kirkwood shivered, clutching the mast in a death grip, while a weary, damaged Will Lesslie held on just below him in the sheltered lee of the anchor winch. The ocean had been ominously calm for a few minutes.
“I was yelling ‘Joe, get back here!’” said Houtz. “He said, ‘No. This thing’s not going anywhere! I’ll hold on and the water will just rush by me. It’s gonna go by me.’”
The compressor had been lashed down, but one end of it had been broken loose by a wave, and it was just swinging around. If it had been broken free by a wave, it would slam Kirkwood and Lesslie like a runaway bulldozer. I said, ‘Guys, come on. The compressor’s coming loose. That thing weighs eight tons.’”
“I gave myself up to hanging onto that mast for all I was worth,” wrote Kirkwood. “Absurdly, I was determined that no wave would wash me over, if for no other reason than that people are always being washed overboard in movies.”
Houtz watched the water below the bow draw down. It was being gathered up by a wave. He peered around the corner at a thing of beautiful horror. The wave, the most massive he had ever seen from land or sea, stood high above the superstructure. Kirkwood gaped in wonder like Jonah before the whale. Looming above him, he wrote, was “an enormous wall of bluegreen water rising 45 feet or more, the fish in it plainly visible.”
The wave roared down the deck. Green water exploded around Houtz as he stepped into the protected lee of the superstructure. Houtz managed one last, long look at a wide-eyed Kirkwood before the King of Abalonia was blown off the deck of his castle by the titanic fist of water.
“I remember seeing him just flying through the air,” added Ribeiro.
The final moments of the Jalisco and the nation of Abalonia. One hundred and eleven years and 361 days after the death of Archibald MacRae. The photo shows Joe Kirkwood Jr. perched out on the bow, the instant before he was blown off his great ship of state. Standing in the lee of the three-story-tall superstructure, Jim Houtz recalled Kirkwood’s last words: “The wave’s gonna go by me. It’s gonna wash around me.”
Houtz had between fifteen and twenty seconds before the next wave. He peeked around the corner and gazed up at a sight he had previously thought impossible. This wave was 50 feet high—easy. When it slammed the superstructure, a dark ceiling erased the sky, a condition mariners call “green water.” “You’re looking way up and all you see is green water coming up and over that bridge,” Houtz said. “It was solid water. Not spray, not a little bit of curl, just green.”
A cubic yard of water weighs around 1,700 pounds—almost as much as a 1966 VW Beetle [at 1,672 pounds]. Thus, a mere fifty-cubic-foot segment of this wave weighed 7.75 million pounds, and smashed the superstructure at between 35 and 45 miles per hour. The roar was deafening, but the superstructure miraculously held. Ten seconds later, the maelstrom abated. Houtz ran to the railing to see a vast cauldron of seething water. Bucking and churning in the middle of it all was the Whitney Olsen. There was no sign of Kirkwood or Lesslie.
Of his experience, Kirkwood wrote: “Suddenly I was flying through the air with the mast still locked in my arms.” Aboard the Charger (a boat that had arrived carrying several reporters), two Catholic newsmen went down on their knees and started praying. Something struck my head, a shattering blow, and I went down, sinking and drifting into blackness.
“I regained consciousness in the murkiness of deep water, already instinctively swimming and fighting my way up through the darkness, until at last I could see daylight above, and struggled to break the surface. I gasped and coughed up water, my voice rasping in my throat as I sucked in air, when I was suddenly hurled down through the water with the force of a building falling on me, deeper and deeper into the dark depths, the pressure on my ears almost unbearable. My lungs bursting for air, I again fought upwards until I reached the foam and emerged, treading water, fighting for a few seconds of air.
“There was a film of oil on the water and debris everywhere in sight. If I could only find something to hang onto! Something knocked against my arm, and I grabbed blindly for it, grasping onto a six-inch-long piece of two by four lumber. For a fraction of a second, I appreciated the irony. With half a ship floating on the ocean, I find a matchstick…I tried to get my after-ski boots off. I had worn them for warmth, but now, waterlogged, they felt like lead on my feet. I tried to work the zippers down the front of them, but couldn’t get at them without putting my head underwater. It flashed through my mind that I needed to lose a few pounds. I had just given it up when another wall of water fell on me, and I was hurled headlong down into deep water.”
Anticipating a rescue, Cliff Miller had already staged the Whitney Olsen just off Jalisco’s bow. As near as Houtz can reckon, Kirkwood disappeared into the raging foam and was carried beneath the tug, the entire 120 feet from bow to stern. Mere feet separated the bottom of the tug from the top of Bishop Rock, yet Kirkwood passed safely not only between hull and reef but around two propellers. He boiled to the surface off the tug’s stern and miraculously managed to weakly lift his head. Ribeiro stripped off his shirt and prepared to leap in for a rescue. “Are you crazy?” a crewman asked.
Ribeiro had spent his entire fisherman’s life throwing lines. He instead heaved one out to Kirkwood with a skill Captain Miller compared to a big- league pitcher.
“No matter what you do, don’t let go,” Ribeiro yelled to Kirkwood, just before he was buried by another nightmarish wave. That guy is one tough son of a bitch, Ribeiro remembered thinking.
“I was flagging and knew I couldn’t hang on any longer,” Kirkwood wrote. “As one of the crewmen grabbed my hair and another my armpit, I blurted out, ‘Pleas
e help me fellows. I can’t help you.’ And the rope started slipping from my grip. In seconds more they poured me like a sack of potatoes onto the deck, where I lay in a soaken, oily heap, too spent to move and beyond caring about anything.”
Houtz looked around. Lesslie was gone, and he was all alone aboard the dying ship. He made sure his life jacket was secured tightly, clutched his gun, and stepped off the port rail before the next set of waves bore down on the ship. The current carried him toward the Whitney Olsen. He was plucked out of the water. Miraculously, so was Lesslie.
After several more sets of waves, the Jalisco’s entire superstructure tore completely free of the deck in a colossal mingling of water and steel. Anyone forward of it would have been crushed to powder.
Taken shortly after Joe Kirkwod’s last moments aboard his ship, this photo shows a massive wave breaking over the Jalisco in the take-off spot today preferred by surfers like Mike Parsons and Greg Long. The ship’s jagged, battered hull still rests below the surf break. The photo also shows that the ship’s three-story-tall superstructure has been obliterated. Both photos: Associated Press.
In the backyard of his Laguna Beach home, Houtz flashed back to Kirkwood’s last moment aboard Jalisco and shook his head. The pictures taken that day were shot by a former U.S. Marine combat photographer named Daniel Bresler, who worked in a photography studio across from Kirkwood’s bowling alley. Bresler’s son told me that not only had his dad witnessed the sinking of the Jalisco but had actually been one of a number of photographers sharing duty with Joe Rosenthal on the day Rosenthal snapped the iconic image of Ira Hayes and his fellow marines as they raised an American flag on Iwo Jima during World War II.