Brother Fish (102 page)

By this stage the wind was registering sixty knots, with gusts up to seventy-five knots. Technically speaking we were right in the middle of a hurricane on a stretch of water known worldwide for its ferocity. For those who may know little about Bass Strait, it used to be a land bridge to the Australian mainland before the rising seas flooded it. This means it's pretty shallow, so when massive waves roll in from the Indian Ocean on one side and from the Tasman on the other, and warm tropical air from the Pacific Ocean off the New South Wales coast moves down, you have the beginnings of a disaster. The low pressure formed over the Strait sucks cold air from the Southern Ocean and suddenly you've got a hurricane that affects the winds and the tides in a totally unpredictable manner that can be catastrophic. We were now in the dead centre of such a performance.

Jimmy wasn't back yet, and I was beginning to worry. The wheelhouse is the most stable position on a boat such as the
Janthe
. He was down in the fo'c'sle, and if he wasn't strapped in he was in serious trouble. A man of his size – in fact, even someone my size – could be thrown up against the deck beams and easily sustain a cracked skull. If he'd secured Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan she'd be safe, and hopefully he'd done the same to himself in the other bunk. But it wasn't like Jimmy to take the safe option, and I'd instructed him to return to the wheelhouse. The problem was that I couldn't leave the helm.

We travelled just ten nautical miles in the past seven hours and daylight didn't bring any change to the weather. It was approaching seven o'clock on the morning following our departure from Livingston and the conditions, if anything, were getting worse. The speed of the waves was often so fast that the
Janthe
would be suspended in mid-air with only a small length of the rear portion of the boat in contact with the water. We would fall fifteen feet before meeting the water again, and Jimmy was below in all this. I felt a weird sort of panic growing within me – not because of the sea that threatened to kill us but at the prospect of losing my mate because I'd acted like a bloody skipper, telling him to secure the Countess and then report back to the wheelhouse. I could have easily told him to strap himself in for several hours until the storm died down. I could hang on alone another four or five hours before I'd have to take a break from the wheel. I turned the radio on for the seven o'clock weather report.

‘Here is the forecast at 0.700 hours.

Situation: A slow-moving high is situated in the Bight and a very deep depression has developed in mid Bass Strait and is moving slowly to the north-east.

Here is the forecast: There is a storm warning for all Tasmanian coastal waters.

East Coast: Gale-force south-east to south-westerly winds with an increasing high southerly swell.

Tasman Island to Cape Sorrell: Gale force winds from the south-west with high to very high sou'westerly swells increasing during the day.

Cape Sorrell to Rocky Cape including all of Bass Strait: West to south-west wind changes of sixty to seventy knots extending from the west this morning and increasing to ninety knots in Bass Strait this afternoon. Signed Weather Hobart . . . all ships, this is Hobart Radio. I have traffic on hand for the
Denalis
,
Western Star
and
Janthe
.'

Well, they knew we were out here somewhere, but a fat lot of good that would do. It was pointless trying to get them back – there wasn't anything they could do. So I turned the radio off. I now knew that things couldn't get a lot worse, and we'd survived so far. But life is never like that – I guess it never rains but it pours. I'd hardly completed the thought when the bilge alarm started to ring in the wheelhouse. We were taking water, so I switched on the electric bilge pumps and hoped for the best. I needed to check the engine room urgently. Christ help us if the water was coming in there. The other likely place was the fo'c'sle where Jimmy and Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan were. I couldn't leave the wheel, and was trying to think how I might tie it so that I could go and take a look when I saw Jimmy crawling towards me. He disappeared from my view almost immediately but not before I'd seen that his head and face appeared to be covered in blood. Then there was a banging on the wheelhouse door and I opened it to let him in and nearly passed out with shock – Jimmy's skull was cracked wide open.

‘Fuck!' I yelled.

‘It leakin' in the fo'c'sle, Brother Fish.'

‘Can you man the wheel, Jimmy?' I cried.

‘Sure. Can yoh wipe mah eyes, man?'

I grabbed a piece of cotton waste and wiped the blood from his eyes. ‘You gunna be all right?'

‘Go! It comin' in real fast, man!'

I wasn't sure if he meant the leak in the boat or the blood running into his eyes. I left him to inspect the fo'c'sle. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was moaning, but still tied securely to her bunk. ‘You okay, Countess?' I called out.

‘I've shit my bloomers!' she cried, terribly distressed. The vomit bucket had turned over and I could see she hadn't had much of a time. She must have been really scared to use words like that and despite myself I was forced to laugh. ‘You're in good company,' I shouted. ‘If all you get is a good shit out of this we'll be extremely lucky.' Not in a million years had I thought I'd ever say anything like that to her. There wasn't any time for further social discourse. The force generated by the continual pounding to the hull as the
Janthe
fell off the tops of the big seas had pushed the caulking cotton between the planks so far inwards that some of it had come out. Now spurts of water were being forced through the holes that had been created.

It wasn't the first time I'd blessed Mike Munday during the storm, but he was about to get another major benediction. Of course, naturally and axiomatically, he had a caulking iron aboard. Working furiously in order to get back to Jimmy, it took me less than ten minutes to plug all the leaks. The bilge pump would do the rest. I left a moaning Countess to contemplate her ruined britches and, grabbing the first-aid kit, made my way back to the wheelhouse.

I had to attend to Jimmy's head. I swabbed what blood remained, which was surprisingly little, and saw that Jimmy's skull had a six-inch crack the width of my small finger. I could see the membrane covering his brain. The first-aid kit contained two crepe bandages that I wrapped around his head, although with the boat pitching and falling this was a task that took some time. There wasn't much else I could do. He was still completely conscious and his big hand gripped me on the shoulder to thank me. The roar of the wind made it almost impossible to talk. ‘You okay?' I shouted. He nodded.

I was about to close the first-aid box when I saw the Bex powders.
Fat lot of use they'll be
, I thought, then, what the hell, they just might help Jimmy's headache. I opened a powder to see that it contained white crystals instead. I couldn't believe my luck, or rather Mike Munday's foresight. I suddenly remembered his words:
‘Oh, by the way, Jacko. If ever you find yourself in a tight spot, big storm or something, and you've got to stay alert, look in the first-aid box – the Bex packets.'
I'd seen these crystals before – a skipper named Bad Brown I'd once worked with would give us some when we had to work a twenty-hour shift after finding a big cray haul.

The crystals were referred to as ‘White Lightning', but in reality they were methedrine crystals – stuff that could keep you going well beyond the capacity of normal flesh and blood. I opened a second packet, same thing again. So I handed a packet to Jimmy and indicated he should swallow the contents, then did the same myself and took the wheel from him. He backed into the corner and sat down on the deck, pushing his back against the planking of the wheelhouse. The poor bastard was in a bad way. I resumed trying to fight an opponent that was getting stronger all the time with a vessel that was getting weaker with every hour that passed. It was midday and in the past five hours we'd gone five miles.

Nothing good ever happens in a storm, and a hurricane is ten times worse. A huge wave caught me unawares and I wasn't able to turn into it sufficiently to take it head on. The bulk of it hit the stern, tearing the dinghy from one of the davits where it hung like a watch on a fob chain. We were suddenly in the deepest possible shit. Without the dinghy we would lose all means of escape. If we had to abandon ship it was our only means of surviving the storm. ‘Jimmy, mate, you have to take the wheel!'

I shouted. Somehow I was going to have to secure the dinghy by means of a rope, winch it down from the remaining davit and get it into the water. I'd use the Morris line and tie it to the dinghy and then somehow wind the rope around the stern post and then the wheelhouse and secure it with a bowline knot. Jimmy got to his feet slowly and took the wheel.

I was high as a kite and what was clearly an impossible task seemed possible. We were in the middle of a hurricane with a boat pitching like a cork every which way, a seventy-knot hurricane blowing and an inexperienced helmsman at the wheel. I moved out of the wheelhouse, the wind and rain tearing at my oilskins and threatening to blow me overboard. I found the Morris line, secured it to the stern post and pulled it towards the hanging dinghy. Somehow I managed to winch the dinghy down so that I could tie the rope to it and then let it fall into the waves behind the boat.

Sounds simple enough, but the task took me half an hour and I fell frequently so that I was bruised and bleeding from the side of my head where I smashed it against the stern post. I pulled the remaining rope towards the wheelhouse and had almost reached it when I was lifted high into the air and pitched over the side. A freak wave had hit and taken me overboard. By some miracle I still hung onto the rope but I was going nowhere. The
Janthe
was pointed into the waves and there was no possible way I could get back on board.

It was all over for yours truly. I knew, even with the effects of the methedrine, there was no way I could hold on for long. I was going to die – drown, like so many fishermen before me. This didn't seem to bother me – so many of the men on the island died this way it seemed almost predestined. It was the fact that I would kill Jimmy and Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan as well that distressed me most, as they had almost no chance of surviving without me at the helm or on board to get the dinghy prepared if we had to abandon ship.
We should have remained in the lagoon. I should have caught the one p.m. ‘sched'. I've fucked up big time!
Gloria was right, we were nothing but a pinch of shit. I'd let everyone down again. Jack McKenzie hadn't made the grade, as usual.

Suddenly I felt my wrist being grasped. Perhaps I was imagining it. It was Jimmy, his grasp strong as an ox. We were both underwater. Instead of feeling grateful, my first thought was
Now we're both gone!
He'd left the wheel and come after me.
Bloody stupid bastard! Fuckwit!
A boat sometimes survives even against the most incredible odds – the storm blows out and it's still miraculously afloat, sometimes even after the crew has abandoned it. Now we were both in the water, good as dead and with Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan strapped to her bunk.

The boat, given its own way, started to turn in order to run with the sea. As a boat turns from having the sea on the nose to having it behind her she must at some point of time be facing side on to incoming waves. If she’s hit with a big one she'll roll over, and there were nothing but big ones coming towards us. But, as Gloria so often said,
‘Miracles will never cease'
– the vessel turned without being hit and started to run with the sea. With both of us clinging to the rope the next wave hit and lifted us upright to the level of the deck. Quite how Jimmy did it, I'll never know – it would have taken the strength of ten men – but he grasped onto the aft rail with one hand, holding onto the rope with the other. The wave washed over and somehow he managed to get aboard and pull me up on deck. Jimmy was making a regular habit of saving my life.

Somehow I managed to crawl over to where he lay face down on the deck, the wind and rain ripping at his inert form. He'd taken off his oilskins to dive overboard and his shirt clung like a shining skin to his huge body. I dragged him to the stern post, tied a section of the rope we'd clung to into a loop and attached it to the stern post, then wound it over his head and under his arms. I had to hope that the rope tied to the stern post would hold the dinghy and the loop would keep Jimmy on deck. It was the best I could do under the circumstances. He seemed to be unconscious and I hadn't the strength to drag him into the wheelhouse or the fo'c'sle. I'd have another go when I regained a bit of strength. The main thing was to get back into the wheelhouse to maintain some sort of control of the boat and get her punching back into the oncoming seas.

By now the sea was such that every wave was over seventy feet and the wind was gusting at ninety knots, blowing the tops of the mountainous crests. We'd just about reached the end of our tether and I switched on the transmitter to send a mayday.

‘Mayday, mayday, mayday all stations . . . this is the
Janthe
.
Janthe
, over . . .'

Within a few seconds a reassuring voice boomed back, ‘
Janthe
, this is Melbourne Radio. What is your position? Over.'

‘Melbourne Radio, this is
Janthe
. Our position is thirty-nine degrees, thirty-five minutes south by 144 degrees, five minutes east. Over.'