Mariners say the ocean can be unforgiving. During a voyage as a junior officer, Robert Buck found just out how much. Although he didn’t know it, he was a little more than four minutes from disaster.
“We knew the cyclone was out there,” Robert recalls.
The crew were carrying steel on the Newcastle-Auckland route in a general cargo ship. The voyage takes about five days, but bad weather adds an extra couple of days. One day out from Newcastle and the weather deteriorated.
Technically, they were sailing through a south-moving extra-tropical depression.
“It was a cyclone in all but name,” Robert says.
The weather was awful. Visibility was poor because it was overcast and because of the driving rain. Windspeeds were more than 50 knots (93 kilometres per hour). The sea state was rough and high, about the size of a three storey-building. Although the vessel was pitching heavily, it wasn’t rolling so much because the ship was headed bow-first into a series of big waves.
“The ship was riding over it quite reasonably. I was on the bridge at the time, about 10-ish. It wasn’t anything that the ship couldn’t normally handle,” Robert recalls.
Then the engines failed.
“The lights went out. The ship’s engines went silent. Their vibrations stopped. It was eerily quiet,” he says.
Find out more about the life and career of Captain Robert Buck.
