Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [44]
“Get off the boat, Dan,” Houtz said. “There’s no reason for you to stay here.” Dan leapt off the side and struggled over to the Rainbow’s End.
Houtz moved to shelter himself behind the ship’s three-story-tall superstructure, and from there he tried to talk Kirkwood and Lesslie down off the bow and convince them to jump into the water. Kirkwood shivered, clutching the mast in a death grip, while a weary, damaged Will Lesslie held on just below him in the sheltered lee of the anchor winch. The ocean had been ominously calm for a few minutes.
“I was yelling ‘Joe, get back here!’” said Houtz. “He said, ‘No. This thing’s not going anywhere! I’ll hold on and the water will just rush by me. It’s gonna go by me.’”
The compressor had been lashed down, but one end of it had been broken loose by a wave, and it was just swinging around. If it had been broken free by a wave, it would slam Kirkwood and Lesslie like a runaway bulldozer. I said, ‘Guys, come on. The compressor’s coming loose. That thing weighs eight tons.’”
“I gave myself up to hanging onto that mast for all I was worth,” wrote Kirkwood. “Absurdly, I was determined that no wave would wash me over, if for no other reason than that people are always being washed overboard in movies.”
Houtz watched the water below the bow draw down. It was being gathered up by a wave. He peered around the corner at a thing of beautiful horror. The wave, the most massive he had ever seen from land or sea, stood high above the superstructure. Kirkwood gaped in wonder like Jonah before the whale. Looming above him, he wrote, was “an enormous wall of bluegreen water rising 45 feet or more, the fish in it plainly visible.”
The wave roared down the deck. Green water exploded around Houtz as he stepped into the protected lee of the superstructure. Houtz managed one last, long look at a wide-eyed Kirkwood before the King of Abalonia was blown off the deck of his castle by the titanic fist of water.
“I remember seeing him just flying through the air,” added Ribeiro.
The final moments of the Jalisco and the nation of Abalonia. One hundred and eleven years and 361 days after the death of Archibald MacRae. The photo shows Joe Kirkwood Jr. perched out on the bow, the instant before he was blown off his great ship of state. Standing in the lee of the three-story-tall superstructure, Jim Houtz recalled Kirkwood’s last words: “The wave’s gonna go by me. It’s gonna wash around me.”
Houtz had between fifteen and twenty seconds before the next wave. He peeked around the corner and gazed up at a sight he had previously thought impossible. This wave was 50 feet high—easy. When it slammed the superstructure, a dark ceiling erased the sky, a condition mariners call “green water.” “You’re looking way up and all you see is green water coming up and over that bridge,” Houtz said. “It was solid water. Not spray, not a little bit of curl, just green.”
A cubic yard of water weighs around 1,700 pounds—almost as much as a 1966 VW Beetle [at 1,672 pounds]. Thus, a mere fifty-cubic-foot segment of this wave weighed 7.75 million pounds, and smashed the superstructure at between 35 and 45 miles per hour. The roar was deafening, but the superstructure miraculously held. Ten seconds later, the maelstrom abated. Houtz ran to the railing to see a vast cauldron of seething water. Bucking and churning in the middle of it all was the Whitney Olsen. There was no sign of Kirkwood or Lesslie.
Of his experience, Kirkwood wrote: “Suddenly I was flying through the air with the mast still locked in my arms.