Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [51]
In the space of a few hours, the waves rapidly grew from simply large to mountainous juggernauts fifty feet high, a quarter mile wide, reaching twelve hundred feet deep under the surface. Their forward speed was, somehow, actually slightly faster than that of the sixty-mile-an-hour wind.
When the lows consolidated into a single monster system, Ramapo’s barometer plummeted to 28.40—a record for a North Pacific winter storm— and sustained winds reached 70 miles per hour. Since hurricanes can have sustained winds of 150 miles per hour, this might not sound very dire. However, a hurricane’s core wind field is usually no more than a hundred miles across, while winds over 110 miles per hour actually blow the tops off waves and thus, in effect, reduce their height and power. This cyclone was at least as wide as North America, and the hurricane-force winds spanned half of the North Pacific. In the deep troughs of swells, the air was eerily calm, but when Ramapo was born to the crests every minute or so, she was assaulted by the gale. Apocalyptic squalls occasionally gave way to moonlit skies and awestruck viewing.
To survive, the Ramapo had to maintain the same direction as the swells, keeping the waves at her stern and running like hell. Yet compared to waves moving at six times her top speed, she was almost standing still. “The vessel was dwarfed in comparison to the seas,” Whitemarsh wrote. “It would have been disastrous to have steamed on any other course.”
As the seas grew, the Ramapo’s single screw propeller would lift clear of the water each time it crested a swell, causing the engines to rev dangerously, and Captain Mayo was forced to reduce power. This was perilous. Were the ship not being driven forward with sufficient force, she might wallow sideways across the westerly winds and waves. Had this happened, she would have been driven nose-first into the seething Pacific and disappeared within moments. Instead, she was quite literally surfing for her life on the downslope of each passing swell.
James Whitemarsh recalled, “He told me they were simply running from the waves. In all his years at sea, he never saw anything like them again.”
Serendipitously, the Ramapo turned out to be the perfect size and dimension to survive. She was 478 feet long—two Boeing 747s placed nose to nose—and this length fit snugly between the waves. Were she, say, 880 feet, the length of the Titanic or a modern-day container ship, the situation might have been terminal. Atop the crest of a 1,200-foot-long wave, her bow and stern would have lost buoyancy and drooped down—a condition called hogging. Fifteen seconds later, the situation would have reversed, with bow and stern supported, but her amidships bearing tremendous weight—a condition called sagging. These forces can easily result in a catastrophic set of side to side rolls; if they don’t, they can essentially snap a ship in two.
Instead, as Whitemarsh later noted, the conditions actually made for ideal observation. Swell and wind approached from exactly the same angle. Ramapo was thus not faced with the specter of wind-driven waves approaching from sideways angles—a nightmarish condition that can cause waves to ramp up into treacherous peaks. She was steaming across a vast, undulating ribbon of seemingly impossible energy.
For the most part, Whitemarsh leaves us to wonder what he and his ninety crewmen thought and did while they endured conditions straight from a Jules Verne novel. Surely, he and Captain Mayo would have filled the Ramapo’s ballast tanks, so she would ride low and stable in the water; general quarters would have been sounded, with a contingent of men ready to cut loose the lifeboats without a moment’s hesitation