Thomas: *Off Topic* And long post * About storm, It was as most trawlers of that time single screw. The steering was manual, the sprocket chain type were a long rod runs the length of the boat to the stern, and another sprocket and chain takes over to handle the rudder.
As for a sea anchor, in the first few seconds after we lost
steerage I tossed over the main anchor we had plenty of line
for the depth, but were being blown so fast that there was no
way it could hardly sink let alone grab.
When I first read your question about the sea anchor it caused me
to sit back and laugh , not at the question mind you ,
but it brought back some more memories and with hind sight being what
it is, just to recall how I did think of doing just that and then
re living the conditions in my mind just what ever gave me the
idea I might could have got one rigged and over board, caused me
to laugh at my own self.
We had very large trawl doors and nets, two sets. I did think of using them, that maybe they would hold the bow up, but it didn't
take long to see nothing would have worked, and we could never
have got them over board and the cables tied up forward anyway.
Even the anchor turned out to be like a joke.
The house on that type of trawler is big and up forward and holding the bow up in a heavy storm with a sea anchor like the books say just don't work.
In fact I can now see how it will work against you on that type of boat. Had we been able to dumped all the gear over and made it
fast up forward , with that big house the boat would have gone directly
sideways as it was, her bow stayed a little down wind
and we caught a lot of the seas at an angle on our port
stern quarter. Since those days I've spent many years on Tugs and
supply boats and I'm a good judge of how in a sea tieing off
as one might think would work doesn't always pan out.
On top of that by the time the rudder chain broke
just kicking the anchor lose was a serious undertaking.
Rigging a sea anchor and getting it or the nets over board was out of the equation. It was more than that you couldn't just stand up, you had to hang onto something, even a well timed dart across the back
deck at one time had me floating and being swept overboard that
by shear luck took me to the try net davit that was on the
starboard stern and I managed to grab it and wrap both my
arms and legs around just as I was like gone.
I'm talking about a situation were to go on deck at all,
is the very next thing to suicide, there is as much of the deck
under water at any given time than above water, half of
the seas are not just breaking on deck but washing clean over
you. I sent my mate to the stern after the chain fist broke, By the time he got into the rudder room to find the broke chain he decided he was not coming back out, and not going to try to get back to the wheel house.
When I finished trying to call Rossie on the Radio,
to let him know we had a problem I then went back there.
Lewis was white as a sheet and telling me how he almost didn't
make it and I had to calm him down and told him just to
stay there as that's were I would need him.
By the time I sized up what we would need to repair the chain
and got back to the house to get tools and parts we had
lost our first window to the storm, and the wheel house was
beginning to get drenched. Later on the whole house, when one time
I went back to get something, looked like a big huge washing machine
in slow motion..it's to awesome to describe fully; seas washing in
through the forward windows rushing aft to be met by seas
that had come in via the aft door and windows that were
on their way forward, colliding and shooting up gushers,
mattresses washing abound the deck, the places they had been
were now little bath tubs, cabinet doors all tore off , and the
ones that had not found a way to freedom I wanted to toss over
board to get them out of the all the junk I had to dig
trough to find a turnbuckle that was no longer were it had been
stored, every thing was like a jumbled up mess of garbage and
all of it in motion.
Before then and before the Radio got completely washed out I managed to get out a mayday to the Sabine Coast Guard, I can laugh now at how
every time I pushed the button to try to talk already a short of
some sort had developed in the radio and holding the mike button
down caused me to get an electrical shock much the same as if
you were holding onto a live spark plug wire on your car.
Still the situation was such that I pushed and held that button,
and can remember how several times when I held the mike close to
my mouth it was worse than holding a spark plug wire, the mike
turned into something like an eclectic cattle prod and was
cooking my lips any time I let them get to close to it.
They got my Mayday and position, ( but there was no way any thing
could move in this storm, hell I knew that before I called but
the hope that they would look for us after it passed was on my
mind, as I didn't have an idea what kind of shape we would be
in , or that we would even be missed for several days.)
Two days latter when I got in and called by land phone
( they were out and looking for us ) they also laughed with
me about the absurdity of trying to launch any kind of
rescue into the storm at the time I had made the call,
they were already clocking winds at 110 mi per hr. and that
was all on their logs.
That storm was back in the late 60s , and we had nothing near
the type of warning systems you have today. It was a freak
storm of very high intensity but not in size, and it came
out of the SE moving to the NW at 30kts and caught them , the
weather department and me by complete surprise.
Small craft warnings had been up for weeks and we had been
experiencing a long period of one Nrth Estrn right behind another,
The entire fishing fleet of the gulf coast was tied off in
one port or another with 99% of them staying drunk as a skunk
and the prolonged bad weather was getting to me.
I had gone east to fish and had not been home for over a month, when what looked like a break in the weather my self and one other Captain decided to make a break for it, ( Captain Rossie ) he got underway some time ahead of me as I had to retrieve my hung over mate ,
from a bar he had been camping in.
We were the only two boats out at the time
from Morgan City to Aransas Pass. We talked and switched radio
channels and talked some more , there was like silence on all
the channels except for us. In spite of the on going small craft
warnings the weather was not bad at all, we had become hardened
to small craft warnings any way. It was not so much the
rough weather that had the fleet tied up, but prolonged bad
weather had caused the shrimp to bury up and there had been no
production in several weeks among any who had ventured out
to try it. The entire fleet was resolved to the fact that
weather would have to improve before the shrimp would come
back out of hiding.
In short you couldn't catch enough at the time to
pay the fuel bills. Capt. Rossie & I were more interested in
getting back home than catching shrimp. The break we caught
in the weather was much nicer than we had hoped for, and like
any fisherman we had to make some samples pulls with our try
nets.
He was running inside the Sabine banks well ahead of me, so
I decided if we spilt up our chance on finding something worth
working was better so I headed out for the deeper water outside
the banks, we passed our sample information back and forth in
a pre arranged code. ( knowing that likely one or two who had seen
us leave might be listen in ) if we found something we at least
wanted a head start on them before the fleet found us.
He picked up few fair samples and decided to put his big nets
out to see how they "paid off" in the big rigs. I got a few fair
samples and also "Set out" we would make a short 1hr drag and
then compare notes as to how they paid off. The weather was
enjoyable some sun had came out seas had laid down, and
there was no big swell running in front of the storm that was
charging in from the SE I had not dragged my hour when a
upper level haze caused the sun to fade, I looked at the barometer
and it was as we say suddenly falling off the wall
A fresh wind came up but from the SE not the NE , and in the
distance to the SE I could see what looked like the bar of a
storm, as very dark and black clouds appeared on the horizon.
We had 120 miles to go to get home, and I lost interest in hoping
to find shrimp as it looked like getting home was not
going to be as smooth a ride as we had figured. I called
Rossie and told him what I saw and that I was "hauling back".
He said no wind had hit him yet and he would finish his hr
drag. By the time we got our nets up and was breaking them
down and wiping them aboard the wind had picked up with
very alarming speed, ( this thing was coming fast and was not
kidding, the wind had gone from a fresh 20kts to over 50kts
in less than 20 minutes and the first of the rain was moving
in on us, not just coming down but being blown in sheets,
the seas had not built yet but the gulf had turned into a
white froth and in short order. To save time we wiped the
nets doors and all aboard never dumping the bags to look
at the catch, and with one eye on the storm bar I told
Lewis " lets don't try to tie em down, lets go straight in the
ice hold with the entire mess "
When I got back into the wheel house I called Rossie, and he
said he was about to haul back the fresh wind had just hit him,
( we were over 30 mi apart ( 3hr for our boat ) and Him about NW of me,) I guessed at the "amount of time" from when it had hit me and roughly figured when it hit him & knew then this storm had to be moving very fast maybe 30 to 40kts.
I was hooked up from the moment I had entered the wheel house
having push the pedal to the metal, setting the known course for
Freeport, and then shoving the auto pilot in like it was all in
one move, before I had even reached for the mike to call Rossie.
I was now trying to guess at how bad this blow was going to be,
and to make up my mind if I should duck back inside the Sabine
banks or head a straight course. We were a salty bunch some pride
went with that and I had the reputation of being one of the most
salty out of Freeport. ( shared only with Ned Barron ) Small
craft warnings and even Gales did not stop us if there were
shrimp to be caught. We didn't take them lightly but they didn't
stop us, only the lack of production could do that, or if it
got so bad the rigging couldn't stand the surge of the seas.
We did from time to time use small craft warnings as an excuse to
tie on a drunk, if we had spare money and could get away with it.
I didn't have to think long about if making a bee line for home or ducking back inside the banks would be wise,
Less than 15 minutes had gone by and Capt. Rossie was calling me,
he had got a net tangled in his prop when he was hauling in.
( one of the fears we live with all the time in bad weather )
I got his position and headed his way , told him I'd see him in
3 hrs..in about 30 minuets he called back they had cleared the
net and he was making for Sabine, Rossie was an old salt as good
as they come ( much older than me ) and if he was making for Sabine
It might not be an bad idea. I told him I would be headed in that
way but if it eased up I would go on to Freeport.
Seas had built fast but were still only 8 to 10 feet, they were
very close running but with us going with them the ride was OK.
The worst thing is that an almost blackness had set in rain
was in torrents visibility was next to less than zero.
I knew exactly were I was , and my fathom meter was a good one,
the rain didn't blank it out like it does a lot of em.
( shrimpers learn the bottoms like you wouldn't believe so a
working fathom meter back in those days was some confidence. )
On top of that I had a loran, the old A type, you tuned in and
matched the spikes on the oscilloscope, it was also working
and I was good with it.
Things were going OK, once inside the banks they would break up
the seas & if they did get big I'd have some protection, and maybe I could angle on west to Freeport, I would make that decision later
I thought; not knowing how bad this storm was going to become,
( as it is that's what we did anyway but not at the time or the
way I thought it would happen ) <G>
Rossie called me back he had found the Sabine channel and was
headed in , I told him I was undecided as of yet as to coming
into Sabine but was headed that way , and would be clearing
the banks in about 30 minutes -it was an over and out type
message- 15 minutes after that call, a big sharp sea caught our
stern the bow dived and the wheel was wrenched out of my hand,
it spun real hard I grabbed at it and got it back, but now it
wasn't working. I had popped chains before on other boats,
also I had a rod going to the stern break, this crap always
seem to happen just at the wrong time.
------------------------
The storm was an anomaly, it never got a name, It was the second
storm I was in with winds over 100 that had not got a name.
It was a small rare freak of a thing that formed in the Gulf
to the south of some prolonged NE weather we had been having.
Some how this thing built up and then charged towards land
so fast the weather bureau never mapped it.
They never acknowledge one they miss , but write it off as a squall, but it even had a small eye, I know because the eye passed right over me.
IT looked like it had come at me from the SE but I later
figured out may have been more from the SSW. What I had first saw
while I could still see was the east side of the storm which
had more clouds and was much more intense. And the SE winds had convinced me it was coming in from that quadrant. This was likely
the most Imperfect Storm of the Century, nothing more than a blip
on the news media, never called a storm at all. <G>
Had my steering chain not broke at just the wrong time, It
likely would not have caused me a serious problem.
Had I been in deep water were the seas would have spread
out some I may have rode it good. I was in a bad spot
to weather storm , even inside the banks would have help
but being I was like on the shelf were the coast shallows
up ( like an outer sand bar on a beach ) I didn't just
get normal seas, half Of them were trying to break, and
some of them had stacked up with pure rollers on top.
Hind sight is 20/20 there is no doubt when it first hit had
I got the anchor down when I could have had a chance to make
it dig in and away from the shoal , we would have rode her out
without too much damage.
That's almost always the safest thing if you can get it to hold.
Also the wisest thing if your caught up in a storm and don't
have other information, and we didn't. So yes we should have
anchored as soon as I wiped the nets aboard.
ah BUT but would I have stayed on anchor when Rossie called me about the net in his wheel.
NO is the answer to that, I would have headed for him even
if I couldn't have pulled the anchor back up.
If need be I would have put a buoy on the end of the line,
took a loran fix and left it. So in this case even had I anchored ,
I was still due to run by that bank, and that chain was due to break
maybe pass due.
One trouble with fishing boats is the work is never
done, there is no way you can maintain them in what can be really
and truly called ship shape, and safety checks are often placed on the back burner, production takes front seat, if you did
everything you should do you would have less than zero time
to do anything else, it wouldn't even make sense to try to make
money as you could never have a minute to spend any of it.
That chain should have been replaced, but I had not seen the wear, just like the Weather Department didn't see that storm.
We wound up getting washed completely over the banks, man the
amount sand that wound up in that boat we found as we cleaned
it up was unbelievable.
In our fight to fix the chain we got
it on backwards, ( but it worked ) just had to turn the wheel
to opposite way you wanted to go. And I drove That SOB back
to Freeport like that too.
----------------
Being I've gone to this much writing I may as well explain
not all the details of fixing the chain , but the ordeal of
trying to secure the quadrant ( a big tiller like thing that's
secured to the top of the rudder post that the chains hook
up to via turnbuckles ) This thing is made of heavy duty
channel iron and shaped like a big 6ft slice
if pie not only does it weigh a half a ton, it's slamming
back and forth from one rudder stop to the other, and has all
the force behind it of the seas that are slamming the rudder
first one way then the next.
To secure it to one of the stops is a must if we are to get the
chain back on, talk about a nightmare that alone is all the
nightmare a person needs in a life time.
It can cut you in half like butter if you get between it and the stop when it's making one of it's wild and completely unpredictable swings.
With the boat tossing you around at times like a rag doll how do you get close enough to this thing to get something around it and the
stop at just the right time to get a turn or two on it and
not get tossed in it's path, or at the least not get a hand chopped
off. You have to use both hands to do it , and hell you can't
stay any where with out holding on, so timing is a real
problem and it has no rhythm.
After many tries I got her looped with some 1 in nylon line, took up the slack around the big stop brace, pinning her there then wrapped her down with 6 turns more. She looked secure enough to work on.
In less than 5 min Lewis tells me she is cutting the Nylon, we have
some poly 1 in. line handy so I bind her down with that on top of the
nylon ( like about 20 turns ) all we had handy, and this is a big
bunch of wraps.
I'm thinking will it hold long enough for me to take off the
old turnbuckles. They are rusty threads and all and wont budge,
going to have to cut them with a hacksaw. I got some new ones
some where. Another trip across the deck.
I get back new turnbuckles hacksaw spare blades and all and we
start in. We got so many wraps of line around this thing we can't see her cutting the inner turns, which she does, and then with one sea
and a little play they all seem to go at once and this monster thing is on the war path once again but with even more vengeance.
We back off and watch her for a bit; a huge feeling of
discouragement over takes me I look at Lewis and see
it panited on his face too.
She is slamming from one end to the
other and hitting the stops with huge bangs and such force as to
say I'm going to kill myself if you don't stop me, and I'll
kill you if you try.
Well by now we know we cant use any kind of
line to secure her, and that means another trip across the
deck ...to get some chain this time..and all the time I know we
are running out of time, this thing is going to destroy itself
in short order. I force myself to go get the chain, and we finally
get her tied back down, I start to relax and suddenly realize
"I'm so exhausted I can hardly move."
My hands are bloody but no broken bones, putting the chain around
her it had whipped back off so many times before I got a good turn
on it and had whacked me up on my head and arms so many time I
had lost count. ON my last trip up on deck I could tell we were
going to wash over the banks Ok and she was not going to sink,
at worst now we would wash ashore some where around Sabine,
or get tangled up in an oil rig on the way. The sense of urgency
was passing.
I asked lewis if he wanted to take a break maybe
go into the engine room and dry off some it wouldn't be so
bad down in the belly of her and we could rest a bit ( getting
close the center of gravity on any boat is the most comfortable
place to be ) He stuck his head up through the hatch and looked
and looked back at me and shook it no. Lewis was a good man but
over weight and not near as agile as I was. I decided I could make
it and had to check the pump any way.
I was in the engine room and
put the extra pump on line. ( I had left the main one running
earlier to keep up with the water coming in from the ice hold.)
The hatches had washed off and fallen inside the hold the lip
was a raised kind like most are but this one was higher like
most 2-1/2 foot, still tons of water was flooding in and
my main pump had not kept up. We had a very deep bilge you could
have a picnic under the engine room deck and not bump your head on
the oil pan of the main. That was nice about her but we had a lot
of water and much longer and the wooden deck boards we used down
there would be floating too.
The spare pump started gaining on
the water and I started feeling better and better about our
chances. It was about then I noticed the howling and screaming
of the wind had stop..I went up and while the sea was crazy
the wind had stopped this was the first time I actually saw the
inside of the eye of a storm. It didn't take it 3 minutes to
pass over, the wind shifted but was not as bad. The south side
of the storm was smaller and didn't have the wind augmented
by the storms forward motion, heck compared to what we had earlier
it was a piece of cake.
----------------------------
My guess is that to the North and East of the eye, hurricane winds
extended out about 100 mi , maybe less and to the south and
west only about 50 miles. She was moving North to NE so fast
that the east side of her was by far the worst and that's what
had caught us, and most of the damage was done to the boat
in about 3 hrs.
With the wind shift the anchor had a chance
and it dug in I got Lewis out of the rudder room and into the
engine room , I had never shut the engine off. Night came
and we bobbed around like a crook but for the most part it was
over. I deferred finishing the rudder job till daylight.
We had lights in the engine room but that was it. We dried out
cloths and got the diesel stove fired up and even managed to
eat and have some coffee, and then fell asleep like babies,
even the hard deck of the engine room felt good to lay down
on.
By the next evening I pulled her into Freeport ( steering
backwards ) It was the next morning when the owner came down,
he had not heard a thing about the storm, or even knew we had
left Cameron two days ago, I guess that's why he couldn't
understand what the hell had happened to his boat.
Guess I should name it "The Storm That Never Was" It hit land
between Sabine and Cameron and didn't have a tide surge in front
of it.
While USCG at Sabine clocked and logged some winds at 110, she was wrote up a server squall, and to most that is all she was.
I'm sure as she hit land she merged into the other ( cooler )
weather system and fast lost what punch she had.
I've seen worse and road out worst just never got myself
jammed up as bad. Except maybe once but that was way back in
the 50s and I wasn't the Captain.
NO I didn't get fired over it, after all I was the Top Producer
out of Freeport TX for four years running. I don't think I was
the best fisherman. Ned Barron could beat me in a fair race
but he had a smaller boat and less horse power. Roy Pepper could
out fish me hour for hour, but he didn't want to work as hard,
so I retained the top title, for longer than most. My reputation
and name still comes up around the fishing crowd , because those
were the days of some huge hauls, and old timers like to talk
about them . But if you were to ask about me by the name I use on SI
you may come up empty. Fisherman most always have a Nick, and
often that's all anyone calls you. I can't post it as I use it
as my password here on SI.
---------
republic.net
Jim
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