“Talking Sailing” From My Archives. The Queen’s Birthday Storm – part 1

This liferaft is the proverbial ‘needle in the haystack’ as the massive seas dwarf it completely.
pic. courtesy of Royal New Zealand Navy

By Richard Crockett

Storms at sea are one of those things that everyone going to sea in a small boat has to prepare for, and be prepared when getting clubbed by a particularly bad one.

The Fastnet race, the Sydney Hobart race and the Vasco da Gama race are just a few of the races that have seen their fleets hit hard and with tragic consequences. Cruisers are not exempt from these storms either, as is recounted in the feature shared today.

In June 1994, the ‘Queen’s Birthday’ storm swept the Pacific north of New Zealand – it was a four day ‘bomb’ of huge seas and hurricane strength winds, and a fleet of 60 yachts lay in its path. The Eustache family, on their Morgan 43 sloop ‘Hippo’s Camp’, were there.

“It is one of these freak waves that four or five times every hour picks up the boat and throws it on its beam-end, leaving ‘Hippo’s Camp’ shuddering from mast to keel. In these moments, I picture myself in the very heart of the fibreglass and feel the shudder deep in my bones. How long can these tiny particles of glass withstand this hammering before they give up?”

“Since the ‘second’ part of the storm takes place during daylight, I can now see the freak waves that we could only hear during the previous night. Hard to convey the image of a 15-ton boat thrown around by these mountains of water like a mere plastic toy. Breaking crests engulf ‘Hippo’s Camp’ and crush her on her beam-end in the troughs with a formidable thump. It’d be fantastic to be able to film this phenomenal display of sheer violence. The air is so filled with water that sometimes I can’t even see the bow from the cockpit.”

The above are just two extracts from the first part of this report, the second part will feature tomorrow.

This is an editorial from which one can learn lots.

READ IT ALL HERE:  Pages from 2004 06 – SAILING Magazine – OCR

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