Fatal Storm (26 page)

Later that night, somewhere between 10 and 11pm, a light plane roared out of the night sky and circled low overhead. The plane, apparently homing in on the EPIRB, is said to have reported back to AusSAR that “Breakfast Toast Naiad” had been located.

Rob Matthews steered for some time that evening in perpetual awe of the ferocity of the storm. He had been sailing for 37 years and had never seen anything like it. He took over the helm and instantly tried to familiarise himself with the conditions and the motion of the yacht and found the only way to judge the course was to read the angle of the wind on his face. The boom with the mainsail wrapped around it was lashed on the windward side of the cockpit behind him, providing a modicum of protection. He was also trying to keep an eye on the dimly-lit compass that was just four feet away, squinting all the time in a bid to keep the stinging salt spray out of his eyes. Phil Skeggs went on deck, intending to relieve
Matthews of the compass watch. The noise of the storm was so great that he had to scream out the heading.

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had motored some 20 miles, but was no nearer the coast. The course was due north. For a brief moment the clouds parted and the moon shed an eerie light on the mayhem. The moon disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, leaving the crew wishing it had taken with it the constant roar of the storm. Matthews was repeatedly calling out to Skeggs to hold on as each wave approached, but no amount of holding could prepare them for the monster wave which suddenly appeared. It all happened so quickly that Matthews’ first recollection was being trapped underwater at the aft end of the cockpit, unable to move. The colossal wave had lumbered out of the night and had rolled the 40-foot yacht forward and upside down like a pebble on the road.

“It was very surreal, deathly quiet, because you could feel the yacht still surfing sideways,” said Matthews. “All the time I was being slammed up under the side of the boat and my head was banging on the cockpit floor. My life jacket and float coat were holding me up there. I knew exactly where I was because I could reach aft and feel the stern of the yacht. I was underwater and outside the aft lifelines which are about a metre forward of the transom. Initially I didn’t make any attempt to unhook my harness or try to swim out. I immediately struck trouble when I eventually did go to release my harness clip. The boat was still being surfed sideways and all the time my head was being slammed on the cockpit floor – above me. My harness strop was almost fully extended. There was just enough play in it to unclip. But each time I tried to unclip, the notch in the clip slotted over the stainless steel plate on the front of my harness. It just jammed and I couldn’t free it.”

Matthews was almost out of oxygen and would most probably have drowned but for another freak wave
which swept through and lifted the stern just enough to let a puff of air dart under the cockpit floor. He pressed his nose against the floor and filled his lungs with the biggest gulp of air he could muster. Exhausted but breathing, he managed to free himself finally from the harness strop and pull himself to the back of the boat and up to the surface. His main concern was that Skeggs might be similarly trapped in his harness and he desperately wanted to dive back under the boat and search. But it was dark, he was fatigued from his own ordeal, and, apart from the time it would take to remove his buoyancy aids, there was the distinct chance he’d lose them altogether. Also, he didn’t know where to start looking, and he could well have become trapped himself.

He remembered hearing of a single-handed round-the-world race competitor who had survived by climbing onto his upturned yacht and attaching himself to the rudder. Matthews devised a plan. He would swim around to the side, hopefully stand on one of the wire lifelines – or side rails – and somehow launch himself towards his target. The odds were against him being successful, but he had to try. As he swam to the side of the yacht he stayed as close to it as possible so he wouldn’t be washed away. He felt something brush against his leg – something underwater. It was a section of the broken mast that had been lashed to the deck. Matthews sat on it initially to rest then tried to stand on it and prepare for the leap but he was too exhausted and all he could do was sit, hang on the best he could and pray.

The sea was unrelenting, and an agonising four to five minutes after the yacht overturned yet another behemoth of a wave came crashing towards
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Matthews first heard it rumbling out of the gloom, then saw its churning white collar descending from above.
It engulfed the boat, but in doing so exerted sufficient force on the upturned keel for the yacht to be first tipped onto its side and, when the full pendulum effect of the keel took over, whipped back upright.

“I don’t know what I was hanging onto, possibly a stanchion, but suddenly I ended up on my feet in a squatting position from where I’d taken off; on the piece of cockpit floor that had been above my head when I was trapped. I can only assume that I was flicked through the air, did a backflip of sorts and ended up back on the deck. My lifeline harness that I’d unclipped was there in front of me, draped over the lifeline. I clipped myself on and stepped back inside the rail.”

As Matthews regathered his senses he was confronted with the sight of Phil Skeggs, face down in the cockpit. His legs hung limply over the broken boom and protruded over the lifelines. As well as being held by his harness, Skeggs’ body was wrapped in ropes. Matthews yelled for assistance from below. Crewmembers scrambled on deck and frantically cut away the harness and the stray ropes and performed CPR and mouth to mouth resuscitation.

It was to no avail. Phil Skeggs was dead.

The massive wave had also wreaked havoc below deck. Half asleep, Steve Walker heard a loud swoosh then an enormous roar, audible even above the noise of the diesel motor. With the aid of the faint light from their miners’ headlamps, he and Bruce Guy had kicked out the stormboards in the companionway. This allowed more water in but only to the point where the air pressure equalised. Thankfully a quick inspection of the keel revealed minimal damage. In the ghostly dim light a black figure seemed to appear out of nowhere. It was Jim
Rogers, saturated in oil. He had been dozing alongside the motor for warmth and when the yacht rolled it deposited its contents all over him.

The water was nearly knee-height in the cabin and was strewn with floating detritus – food, clothing, bottles, diesel, oil and sails. The seven crewmembers trapped inside could hear Matthews’ frantic calls for Skeggs above the roar of the storm. Bruce Guy suggested kicking a liferaft out through the companionway so that it was at least there if the yacht sank, but that idea was soon vetoed for it was likely the raft would become stuck either in the companionway or the cockpit.

“The thought entered my mind that the yacht would not come back upright,” recalls Keats. “She was floating so comfortably upside down due to the wide flat deck. I was concerned because I couldn’t see how we were going to get out. If the boat went down we were going to go to the grave with it.”

When
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eventually came upright, a metre of water remained in the cabin.

“As the yacht righted, Bruce just seemed to slip in the water and almost went under,” recalls Walker. “He struggled to get up and I went to help him. As I grabbed him I could see he was in terrible pain, mainly from the left side of his chest. His eyes just rolled back and he died immediately, there and then in my arms, a massive heart attack. There was nowhere I could lay him because he would be underwater. All I could do was sit on a bunk edge and hold him in my lap – hold his head above the water and try to keep his air passage clear. I felt for his pulse and his breath but there was nothing. I sort of knew instinctively that he was dead but I didn’t want to give up on him. Jim and I held him and did what we could. At the same time we didn’t realise that the other guys were trying to revive Phil up on deck.”

The water in the hull surged towards the bow with every wave and threatened to submerge it.
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was within centimetres of sinking and water was still flooding into the hull, sloshing into the cabin out of the cockpit. A stormboard was finally located and put in place – a makeshift and temporary measure in a dire situation.

Amid the confusion a liferaft was passed up from the cabin to the cockpit. As it went it was accidentally inflated and crewmembers wrestled with it until it was eventually pushed over the side and tethered to the yacht. Flares also arrived on deck but no one immediately available was experienced in firing them. Peter Keats was frantically trying to read the instructions through his salt-encrusted glasses, but his hands were covered in oil and even when he did manage to get one out of the pack he was unable to get the cap off.

“Eventually one of the guys got the first one going – an orange smoke flare – and gave it to me to hold,” Keats recalls. “I then got hold of three parachute flares and let them go. I may as well have saved my energy. They went up fine and ignited, then disappeared to the east at an unbelievable speed because of the wind. They seemed to come back over us at a hundred miles an hour.”

The batteries had been underwater and had short circuited so the radios no longer worked. Hansen put some sails over the bow on a rope to act as a crude sea anchor. The second liferaft, which was then on deck in its pack, was pushed back down below so it would be better protected, but on the way it too was accidentally triggered. Four crewmembers struggled with the rapidly-expanding rubber monster and ultimately got it on deck and deployed over the side with the other one.

Rob Matthews remembered the bow ventilation port between the anchor locker and the forward cabin was open and he waded forward, smashed open the toilet door and put the vent cover in place. That done, he rushed back to the raft. “We had thrown everything we thought we might need into one of the rafts – extra water, thermal rugs, some food, flares and things like that,” he recalls. “When I went back on deck the raft was upside down and everything was lost.”

With both bilge pumps clogged or broken, the bucket brigade started what was to be a three-hour battle against the incessantly rising water. Two crewmembers handled the buckets below while two others on deck tipped the contents over the side. Peter Keats was on deck furiously bailing, soaking wet and freezing. He called for a jacket, but the only one they could find had belonged to Bruce Guy. Once it was apparent that the buckets were stemming the tide some of the crew moved Guy’s body into an aft quarter berth. Neither Rob Matthews nor Peter Keats knew at that stage that Guy was dead.

The water level inside the cabin was brought down to a manageable level of around one metre thus stabilising the yacht. There was still the distinct possibility of another roll but the weighted boat seemed to be handling the slamming waves a little better. The wind had lulled to 50 or 55 knots which felt like a pleasant afternoon breeze after what they had just been through. The sails over the bow were tending to hold
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up into the seas most of the time. There was no need for anyone to be on deck so crew that weren’t bailing tried to rest. At around 3am another big wave swept across the yacht and submerged it, but this time it stayed upright. At one stage, well before daylight, one of the crew poked his head out of the companionway to check on the weather and saw something far more
frightening. Both liferafts had gone. Their tether lines had either chafed through or parted.

“Some of the guys, particularly Keatsy, became pretty emotional about the loss of the rafts,” recalls Rob Matthews, “but there was nothing we could do about it. We all knew that the only time you get into a liferaft is when you step up to it. Our yacht had become our raft and it was floating quite well. At dawn Steve and I got up and went on deck to rig a red sail cover over the cabin top to make us more conspicuous because we had a white boat, with a grey deck, on a grey sea and white waves so we couldn’t be seen too easily. We wanted to use the V-sheet, the orange distress sheet, but it had been washed out of its locker and lost. It was still blowing. There was still spume coming off the water so I figure it was probably about 45 knots. I went back in time and rigged an oil can over the side then punched a hole in it, it actually helped the situation. The oil drifting upwind on the surface of the sea did, to some extent, help smooth the seas as they came at us. It worked but it wasn’t enough.

“Steve went back down below and I sat up there looking around for aircraft or something. At about 6am Matt came up on deck and I said to him, ‘I haven’t seen Bruce up and about’. I’d asked Steve during the night ‘Where’s Bruce?’ and he said, ‘Oh, we’ve put him in a bunk’. I said ‘Oh right’ and thought no more about it. Matt looked at me a little surprised and said, ‘Oh shit, mate, didn’t you know? Bruce died last night.’ That brought me totally unstuck because I’d assumed he was down there in his bunk whacked and tired. It was seven hours after he died that I found out. I got really angry then, swearing and cursing and shouting about God knows what.”

Around 7.30am on December 28 a light aircraft was spotted to the north west of
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A red parachute flare was sent arcing through the sky while an orange smoke flare was ignited on deck to give a specific target for the course of the parachute flare. The plane turned and began circling the battered yacht and stayed there for an hour, acting as a beacon for a rescue helicopter the crew prayed was on the way.

The NRMA Careflight helicopter out of Sydney arrived shortly after. At the controls was veteran pilot Dan Tyler, Graeme Fromberg was crewman and Murray Traynor was the SCAT (Special Casualty Access Team) paramedic. They had been in Canberra on a medical mission late the previous day when they were “commandeered” by AusSAR and requested to join the Sydney to Hobart rescue effort as early as possible the next day. The only accommodation they could find at such a late hour was in the SouthCare headquarters at Canberra airport. The four grabbed two fitful hours of sleep; two of them on the floor and two in beds before a 4.30am launch for Merimbula. In Merimbula the Careflight team was initially asked to attend the Jarkan 40
Midnight Special
and assist with a rescue there.