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Published: December 30th 2009
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Lookout
Jay on wave lookout. So while I was in Vanuatu this year there were a few major earthquakes in the area that caused enough of a ruckus to make international headlines. It wasn’t necessarily the earthquakes that caused the ruckus, but the accompanying tsunamis that followed them.
One such earthquake happened to the East of Vanuatu. It was in the Fiji, Samoa, and American Samoa area, but respectively that’s not all that far away. The wave which struck land in these other countries managed to kill quite a few people and do a lot of damage. Luckily, it did so early enough in the day to make the morning weather news in Vanuatu.
Alvei, the ship where I was living at the time, listens in to a morning report called ‘Rag-of-the-Air.’ This report comes from Fiji and is transmitted via high frequency radio to all yachts in the South Pacific. Primarily it is used to disseminate weather reports for the whole region, but many other topics are discussed during the open forum which follows the news.
On this particular morning, Alvei was anchored between the islands of Malekula and Sakao in the Maskelyne Islands Group. The captain got up early that morning
Additional Lashing
Mich was throwing extra lashings on the shore boats. There was no time to get them onboard. James, Jay and Marge stand a little dumbfounded. to catch the weather report and was at that time alerted to the Tsunami warning which had been given to all boats and coastal cities in Vanuatu. The news report gave the epicenter of the earthquake and speed of the wave, with estimated times of arrival for the tsunami.
The news also gave some of the preliminary reports of damage done to areas that had already received the wave. In American Samoa the coastal town of Apia had been decimated. Alvei had just been there a few months before the incident and our crew knew several of the people that were supposedly still there. Boats had been lifted out of the water and thrown onto the land to be found on the opposite side of the coast road. A school bus had been overturned and smaller cars destroyed. The death toll was as yet unknown.
The captain marked the epicenter of the earthquake on the charts and discovered that there was an uninterrupted line of ocean between our location and ground zero. None of Vanuatu’s Eastern islands stood in the way to act as a breaker to where we were anchored. The path was clear.
Due to
The waiting
Mich and Marge wait it out. our location in a deep and narrow channel between islands, we were effectively at the bottom of a large funnel. Should the wave of destruction decide to grace us with its presence, we would be in the worst location possible.
I forget the exact time that the captain woke me up to help him start the engine, but I did know that it was earlier than the standard wake-up call. The thunderous pounding of our motor woke up the rest of the crew and there was a crew meeting which quickly followed. The captain briefed us to the situation and we didn’t really know what to think. The estimated time of arrival was in 15 minutes, and we had 45 fathoms of cable out to our anchor.
There was no way of weighing anchor in time to motor away from the island. With 45 fathoms of chain out the locker it would take us more than an hour to pull it all in. What were we to do? Break out the grinders and cut the chain? Hell! That job alone would take longer than 15 minutes (our anchor chain is pretty beefy).
The captain said that it
Just look at the man
Yes, He's brushing his teeth... wouldn’t matter either way. If the wave came at us…it would first drain the channel by several meters of water, then two walls of water would rush at us from both directions. The walls would be several meters high and wouldn’t care if our anchor were down or not. Whichever wave hit us first would knock us down and pick us up, anchor and all. “It’s not the wave that kills you,” he said, “it’s where it puts you when it’s done with you.”
We were surrounded by reef…
Next up began the waiting game. It was a beautifully perfect day, weather wise. I remember thinking that if this wave had our number, it couldn’t have picked a better day to do its work.
Several crew were up the masts trying for phone reception. I was trying to call anyone I could get a hold of in the states so that I could get a better report of the situation from Honolulu’s Naval Weather Service. I called San Diego first to get a hold of my friends Chris Borreson and Chris Kennedy. Both of these guys work in an office with computers so I figured they were
Making the calls
James and I were up the fore mast making calls. Jay was up the main. my best shot. Neither answered.
The next call went to the amazing Dave Wiener. He’s the shop foreman at La Jolla Playhouse and he always carries his I-Phone with him. I got a hold of him about 7 minutes before the wave’s estimated time of arrival and screamed our situation over the howling wind.
Funny enough, Dave was not in San Diego, he wasn’t in the shop, and he wasn’t near a computer. In fact, there’s no reason that he should have picked up his phone. He was boarding a plane in Atlanta and should have had his phone off. But true to form, as an amazing friend, Dave said he’d get what info he could with from his phone.
Then next call I placed was to Kevin Sikma in Port Vila. (Long time readers might remember Kevin’s role in other Seamus and MARC adventures.) But Kev’s line was busy which was of little surprise as his location in Port Vila was also a potential disaster site.
With a minute to go-time, I sent out a text message to as many people as the phone would allow. I don’t remember the exact words, but I think
More waiting..
Here sits Jay. Contemplatively waiting for whatever might come. it was something along the lines of “Tsunami coming. If the worst should happen, know that I liked most of you a lot…Evan is brushing his teeth.”
The final minute facilitated some minor epiphanies about the choices I’d made in life…which was nice. But the unknowing was really horrible. The unknowing of what (if anything) would come down that pipe, how big it would be, and what it would do.
As the estimated time arrived there was no breath holding. No frantic looking about. Our minds had calmed down. It was just too nice a day in tropical island paradise to really get worked up about potentially imminent death approaching. And the captain was so damn calm, how could we get worked up? As mentioned before, the man was brushing his teeth.
One minute past the ETA we started wondering how much of an ‘estimation’ the estimated time of arrival really was. How long should be wait before standing down our alert status?
Then the phone rang. It was Kevin. “Sorry to be so late returning the call, mate! I had a few others to make when you called. No worries about the Tsunami! Vanautu’s been
Ironie's Monkey
Cpt. Steve kept Ironie far off shore till the warning had passed. downgraded from ‘tsunami warning’ to ‘tsunami watch.’ The whole town’s still going pretty crazy!”
A minute after I hung up with Kev, I got the call from Dave. He said the same thing.
The earthquake apparently uprooted an East-West fault line and sent the wave running North and South. We found out later there were 31 dead in American Samoa, 140 dead in Samoa and 9 dead in Tonga. There were reports that some of the Northern Banks Islands in Vanuatu had seen some wave action, but otherwise the country was unaffected.
In the weeks that followed, there were three large earthquakes in the area with accompanying tsunami warnings that sent people heading for the hills. No waves hit shore, but when you get the warning you’re never sure if that will be the case. It’s the unknowing that’s the worst.
On this mentally tumultuous day we also had some new additions to our crew, and began a new segment of Project MARC’s expedition season. The SV Ironie came to meet us in that little channel where we were anchored and brought Dr. SueLin Hilbert and the Optimizer Frank Zolnai. Captain Steve who owned the delivery
New Additions
Frank "The Optimizer" Zolnai and Dr. SueLin "The Captain" Hilbert vessel would not get to stick around with us for the whole month but would help out for the next few days with our clinic work in the area.
All-in-all, the day made for an interesting way to start our October expedition.
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