Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [42]
Houtz was furious at Kirkwood and himself, but argument or debate was pointless. They were in about 50 feet of water with 100, maybe 150 feet of anchor chain. Houtz assessed the situation, mentally calculating different decision trees. None bore much fruit. The only way the mission might be salvaged was if the Jalisco somehow ended up in a functional spot on the reef as the current pushed her backward into shallower water. Houtz ordered Kirkwood to open the ballast valves below deck so she would begin to sink.
Jalisco was now attached to an anchor that, while not yet latched into a hard, fast position, nonetheless lay on the seafloor, and this would make it impossible for the Whitney Olsen to drag her out to deeper water. The chain was so short that Houtz reckoned the anchor would probably grab bottom just as Jalisco drifted into a position astride the precarious ridgeline where he had seen waves break during the previous months. To make things even worse, Jalisco was still bound to the tugboat by the tug’s heavy steel towing cable. Precious minutes passed as the men labored unsuccessfully to lift it off Jalisco’s bow stanchion. With the swells continuing to build, a fearful Captain Miller could bear no more.
Kirkwood hollered to Captain Miller to give the cable more slack. He was instead puzzled and alarmed when a man stepped out of Whitney Olsen’s cabin and fired a blowtorch. Kirkwood wrote, “The captain must be really worried by the increasing swells to cut away a cable worth several thousand dollars and let it sink in the ocean.”
Whitney Olsen crewman Louis Ribeiro held onto fellow crewman Ray Turnbull while Turnbull torched the cable. Conditions were going to shit. “We were going underwater while he was cutting the thing,” Ribeiro said.
From Whitney Olsen came a sharp crack and the Abalonians ducked. The melting cable had separated, whistling through the air with the speed of a striking cobra and ricocheting off Jalisco’s bow. She still floated freely in the shallow water, but not for long.
A building marine layer cast a funereal pall on the proceedings. With a sense of dread, Jim Houtz suddenly realized what was happening. The Jalisco was being enveloped by long, low-frequency forerunners that formed the leading edge of a big North Pacific swell. The waves had radiated out from the same low he had noticed days ago on the map, and they were now barreling down the California coast. The great old ship would soon be battling for her life at the mercy of the waves.
As the outer edge of the swell swept past Jalisco, wavelengths shortened into the twenty-second range, and the swells rapidly grew in surface height. Less than a mile offJalisco’sbow, the swells encountered something they hadn’t felt since Hawaii—an immovable obstacle. Their energy focused and compressed, but Bishop Rock wouldn’t budge. The swells could go nowhere but up.
Jalisco climbed and then dropped sharply down the backsides of the waves, her hull ringing like a struck gong. Free of the tug, she was nudged backward. Her anchor scraped and bounced for a couple of hundred yards before finally grabbing hard in twenty, maybe thirty feet of water. The chain drew taut as a banjo string, and Jalisco shuddered violently, throwing the men off their feet.
Moments later, a 20-foot swell liftedJalisco’sbow and a deep, rattling groan bellowed from astern. She had kissed Bishop Rock for the first time. Firmly tethered to the anchor, she was soon grinding and lurching against the ancient mountaintop—a stomach-clenching series of thunderclaps rolling through her hull. Houtz has still never experienced anything like it. “It was just, just the most god-awful thing,” he said.
Off the bow, a new line of swells. The ship slammed the rock in the troughs and was suddenly shaken by a terrific concussion. The floor dropped from beneath everyone. “Whoosh,” Houtz said. “It was like an elevator falling.”
Jalisco had been fatally impaled, and