Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [32]
When Ilima Kalama speaks of greed and respect, and the fatal dangers that can follow an unwise decision, he captures an essential element of life atop the Cortes Bank. Bishop Rock’s litter of wrecked boats, Larry Doyle’s among them, are testament to this. Yet two far larger ships have also met the Rock. Both misadventures, one a near disaster and one an outright fiasco, would only add to the Bank’s ominous legend.
Next to the USS Constitution, the ship that first discovered the Cortes Bank, the USS Enterprise is the second-oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy. The aircraft carrier first sailed in 1961, and at 1,123 feet (about 300 feet shorter than the Empire State Building), she remains the longest U.S. Navy ship ever put to sea. She is also incredibly fast, her reactors still capable of pushing her along at forty miles per hour.
The Enterprise has, of course, seen duty all over the world. She blockaded ports during the Cuban Missile Crisis, served as a base for countless sorties over Vietnam, and in 2001, she was one of the first ships to launch airstrikes against Al Qaeda. Yet in 1985, she was very nearly undone by Bishop Rock.
At that time, her captain was Robert J. Leuschner Jr., a local boy who grew up along the paradisiacal shores of San Diego. He vividly recalls boyhood hunts for yellowtail skipjack around the offshore Coronado Islands. “It was always a race to see if we could get it in the boat before hungry hammerhead showed up,” he told me. “The sportfishing fleet also ran occasional overnight trips to what they called ‘sixty-mile banks.’ I always wanted to go, but couldn’t come up with the fare. Ironically, I got there thirty-three years later.”
On November 2, 1985, a mere month before Larry “Flame” Moore first painted a bull’s-eye on Bishop Rock, fifty-year-old Captain Leuschner stood on the bridge of the Enterprise, in charge of a five-thousand-man crew and a busy, swaying one-runway airport that resembled a floating city. The Enterprise was conducting an Operational Readiness Exercise (ORE) west of San Clemente Island that would bring her to a simulated “choke point”—an imagined tight passageway just beyond the Cortes Bank at 6 P.M. OREs are intense, fast-paced combat simulations, and Leuschner had expressed concern to his commanders that his flight crew was not yet ready for this “graduation day” level operation, but it was ordered anyway. Planes were to be launched in rapid succession while a myriad of other ship-wide drills were conducted—a man-overboard recovery being among the first. Drills and discussions pulled Leuschner off the bridge for extended periods while bad winds and course corrections eventually left the Enterprise two hours late for her choke point rendezvous. She accelerated to thirty knots and was bound for the Bank by 5 P.M.
At around 5:25 p.m., Leuschner returned to the bridge to note that an officer on duty had put the ship on a near 180-degree southerly course, heeding the navigator who intended to avoid the Bishop Rock. “That’s dumb,” Leuschner told the cowed officer, and he ordered a northerly turn to 322 degrees. Leuschner was annoyed. The southerly course would not have allowed for proper winds to recover three aircraft still in flight, and he was currently the only man on the bridge qualified to solve the wind, and swell-direction issues to reel his planes back in. Today he admits that he also became distracted by other tactical discussions, and thus missed a simple mention by the navigator that the Enterprise