When the sea turns stormy, it loses all forgiveness

One of my secret pleasures comes from watching the television series “Deadliest Catch.”

It’s a reminder for every mariner that, if you go to sea, you’ll eventually catch her in one of her bad moods.

I know this to be true because, once, we got caught. With marine forecasts and high seas weather reports available. With shipboard instruments at our fingertips. With years of experience available, we still got caught.

We were several days out of Pearl Harbor and enroute to Jacksonville, Fla., via the Panama Canal. It was early February and the weather had been been good.

On this particular day, I’d spent most of the afternoon watching the deck department painting the main deck just below the bridge. Toward the end of my watch, however, I noticed that the wind had freshened and that the seas were making up.

My next watch began at midnight and, when I got to the bridge, I found that the wind was still increasing and the seas were now fully formed and running 10-15 feet high. When I looked at the barometer trace, I saw that it was dropping rapidly.

All during that night, the weather continued to worsen and my next watch later that day was, simply put, awful. The barometer had plunged and the wind was now a steady 70 knots with gusts to over 90. Twenty-foot waves came one after another and the whole surface of the sea was torn with white streaks of foam. To make things worse, every now and then, a larger wave would rear up and come at us. We saw one that we estimated to be over 50-feet high.

The ship was getting beat up and, so, we slowed to bare steerageway. Even so, we were pitching and corkscrewing as we climbed each wave and literally fell into the trough on the backside. Too, the waves were now boarding over the bow, leaving tons of water on deck and making the entire ship shudder.

Inside, things were a mess. File cabinets and bookracks had spilled their contents and the galley was a shambles. Men were trying to make things secure, but even gear that had been doubly lashed had broken free and was crashing about. Too, the water that had made its way into the ship was sloshing around and adding to the chaos.

Sleep was impossible. Even with bunk rails in place and mattresses wedged to form a “V” shape with the bulkheads, the motion was too violent. At best, you got mattress burns on your elbows and knees while trying to hold yourself in place. Most of us were too scared to be seasick.

Sometime later that night, the ship’s head swung a little too far to one side and, while laying in my bunk, I felt the ship stagger as a large wave hit us on the starboard bow. This pushed the bow further to port, exposing more of the ship’s side to the wind.

You could feel what was coming next. We were now almost broadside to the wind and seas and the next wave laid us over — well past 40 degrees (some said that the inclinometer reached 50 degrees).

In my room, I watched a typewriter leave its desk and smash into a bulkhead without ever touching the deck. Two people were tossed from their bunks. One suffered a concussion, the other a broken arm.

On the bridge, everyone ended up in a pile of bodies on the port side. An officer who fell against a window said that all he saw under him was the ocean — tinted bright red by the port running light — and it looked close enough to touch.

Thankfully, the storm peaked during that hour. We’d lost a life raft and sustained other fairly serious damage but, from about that point onward, the barometer began rising and the wind and seas began to subside.

It took several days to clean up the mess and even our captain said it had been one of the worst storms he’d ever seen. I, for one, was perfectly willing to believe that.

As regards the secret pleasure I get while watching “Deadliest Catch,” it comes from the very human (but not very charitable) feeling of now being able to say “better you than me.”

I really need to work on that.

Larry Simoneaux lives in Edmonds. Send comments to larrysim@comcast.net.