Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [54]
eleven days later, Captain Ronald Warwick was captaining the Queen Elizabeth II through 40-foot seas off the coast of Newfoundland around the periphery of Hurricane Luis. At 4:10 A.M. , a Canadian NOMAD buoy nearby bobbed over a wave 98 feet high. Moments later, Warwick gasped. An eerie line of white phosphorescence loomed across the horizon directly ahead. It appeared, he famously wrote, “that the ship was heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover.”
The ship plowed into a wave that smashed seventy feet above her waterline. She then careened downward into a breathtaking drop on the wave’s backside before facing an even more nightmarish peak. This wave exploded through thick windows of her main lounge, two levels above her eighty-foot-high main deck. Had the ship been sidelong to these waves, she would have surely rolled right over.
The biggest weather-driven wave ever measured seems to have been generated during a disastrous gale whose 70- to 80-foot waves sank five sailboats competing in 1998’s Sydney to Hobart race. An Australian helicopter went in to rescue the crewman of the stricken vessel Kingurra. As the bird hovered in position near the boat, pilot Darryl Jones saw a massive wall of water bearing down and made an emergency ascent to 150 feet. When the wave passed beneath him, his precise radio altimeter measured a mere ten feet of elevation. The wave was 140 feet high.
Miraculously, Ramapo was drawn backward up the face of her mammoth wave and eventually over its crest and down its backside. The wave passed on, heading directly for the Cortes Bank, carrying an almost incomprehensible amount of energy in its belly, the equivalent of 29.6 billion watts. As a comparison, on a hot summer’s day, the entire city of New York consumes only about 11 billion watts.
Ross Palmer Whitemarsh survived another forty-four years. On December 7, 1941, he was in charge of a minesweeping division. From the deck, of the USS Gamble, he watched bombs drop around and narrowly miss Ramapo as she lay exposed in Pearl Harbor. For all his life, he swore that one of the boats under his command sunk a torpedo-laden miniature Japanese submarine in the hours before the attack. Such a damning revelation would cast a harsh glare on American commanders who claimed the attack was a complete surprise. “But the Pentagon and whoever wouldn’t believe him because he had no proof,” said his daughter, “Taffy” Wells. “Then a few years ago, they found the sub.”
Whitemarsh went on to lead mine-clearing operations in Iwo Jima and Okinawa, while facing intense artillery barrages and a kamikaze attack that nearly sunk his ship. His service earned two Legions of Merit and a slew of other citations.
Not long before Whitemarsh died in 1977, his grandnephew James visited him one last time. Ross Palmer was still mowing his own yard. James said, “He was a cool customer. He never once conveyed to me that he feared for his life.”
I asked Ms. Wells if her dad ever said he was frightened during his time aboard Ramapo, or later during the war. “Dad went over huge waves,” Ms. Wells said, “had ships blown out from beneath him. But no, he wasn’t scared. My dad was never scared of anything.”
The descriptions of Whitemarsh by his relatives parallels something I would come to recognize in people from Flippy Hoffman, Jim Houtz, and Harrison Ealey to the big wave surfers facing ten-story rogues atop the Cortes Bank today. In short, even if they do feel fear, they are somehow able to overcome it—to become almost analytical in the face of life-threatening conditions that would leave most of us paralyzed.
At the end of “Great Sea Waves,” Whitemarsh wrote: “Since time immemorial, seafaring men have been telling the world in their inarticulate way that storm waves attain heights which seem incredible to the rest of mankind. The privilege of viewing great storm waves of extreme height is a rare one indeed. Furthermore, we have no assurance that the highest waves of the ocean have been observed or measured. If such a wave should ever