Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [41]
Joe Kirkwood and the captain of the Whitney Olsen would indeed claim that Jalisco struck the Bishop Rock sometime Monday night and began taking on water. Yet both Jim Houtz and Whitney Olsen crewman Louis Ribeiro, whom I interviewed recently in San Diego, insist that as dawn broke on Tuesday morning, a perfectly sound old ship stood ready to become an island.
From Rainbow’s End, Houtz asked Clifford Miller to tow the Jalisco into position. She steamed in from some distance off Bishop Rock and lined up with the buoy runway. By 9:15 A.M. , all was well.
The men marveled as the spooky old ship slid silently past Rainbow’s End. Houtz pondered the origin of a round hole that had been punched in her forward gunwale—a nasty, toothy little wound about two feet around and lined with crumbling cement and twisted, rusty rebar. A lengthier section along her forward starboard bow had also shattered. She really was rotting to her bones.
Houtz planned to live aboard the ghost ship for the next few weeks. He grabbed a bag of supplies, a .270-caliber bolt action rifle (should he need to defend their island), and a life jacket, and he had his mate bring the Rainbow’s End alongside the Jalisco . As best as Houtz can remember, Dan, Kirkwood, William Lesslie, and John O’Malley joined him in clambering aboard, ferrying life jackets and other supplies. Spirits were high.
It was at this point that Houtz first noted an odd sensation. The horizon was making a ponderously slow seesaw. Jalisco was undulating atop a very long, low, and pillow-soft swell that was approaching from her bow. I asked Houtz exactly how long, and he gave a whistle. “Long,” he said. “The distance from trough to crest was tremendous.”
Houtz had not seen swells like this out here, but he had also never stood right above Bishop Rock on a big ship. The swells weren’t very big—two, maybe four feet. He and Dan discussed them briefly but shrugged and attributed the anomaly to conditions right atop the rock. “It’s been dead calm,” he told me. “So what if we get a little wind and the normal seas. I mean, this is a freighter. Big deal.”
Houtz next made a basic walk around the ship to ensure that Kirkwood had Jalisco outfitted properly, per instructions. The first discrepancy left him thunderstruck. Jalisco held only one anchor, on her starboard side, and it was far smaller than those he had seen in Oakland. He hadn’t noticed this from Rainbow’s End. Where was the port anchor? Why was this one so small? Kirkwood umm’d and ahhh’d before admitting that he’d sold them for salvage.
The blood rose in Houtz’s cheeks. Playing out the anchors precisely to maneuver Jalisco was now out of the question. Clifford Miller still controlled the ship from the deck of the Whitney Olsen, but Miller wanted Jalisco cast off as soon as possible. He had brought the ship this far and his work was done. Houtz thought a serviceable position might yet be obtained if he carefully positioned and played out the single anchor in the current. He keyed the starter of the eight-ton diesel that powered the chain spool compressor, but it wouldn’t even turn over. Hadn’t Kirkwood had it tested? “Nobody ever showed me that it worked,” Houtz said Kirkwood replied.
There was now only one way to lower the anchor—a massive, manually operated bow winch. But, once that was lowered, there was no way in hell to raise it. Houtz ordered Kirkwood and his crew to slowly release the brake, but the chain raised such a horrendous clatter that the startled men leapt back and let go. It zippered out at lightning speed before coming to an abrupt, thumping stop.
A moment of stunned silence ensued. Houtz first thought someone must have managed to activate the brake because nowhere near 750 feet of chain had played out. Yet the spool had emptied. “Where’s the rest of the chain?” Houtz asked Kirkwood.
Kirkwood shrugged. “He told the people at the shipyard, ‘We’re going to be in less than fifty feet