Typhoon (2005)

What's left of Eroica's broken rig is lashed to the pushpit after a dismasting in the South China Sea 100 nautical miles east of the Vietnam. Photo by Scott Neuman

These events took place late Oct-early Nov. 2005 between Hong Kong and Da Nang, Vietnam and the account, with minor edits over the years, was written down in the days following:

The only photograph of that moment is the one that will forever be fixed in my brain: Looking forward, I saw the cresting water curl over, burying the cabin and foredeck in a blur of foam. Eroica rolled a good 90 degrees, nearly pitching John over the side, his safety harness straining to keep him from being washed away to certain death. He managed to clamor back aboard. We both glanced up at the cabin, and then at each other and said in unison: "There goes the mast."

Days of battling 30+ -foot seas and near-hurricane force winds had sapped any reserve of strength and my fatigued movements were dream-like and automatic.

Grabbing bolt cutters from the cockpit, I went forward, removing the boom. It dropped overboard and tugged like a massive fish at the stainless steel that still held it. I hesitated for a few moments before cutting the rigging, studying the devastation one last time in the vain hope that a miraculous solution would show itself. Nothing, save mental fog and physical exhaustion. That’s it, I thought, our voyage from Hong Kong to Thailand had ended ignominiously off the coast of Vietnam. Looking at the broken rig one more time, I remember John saying simply "gotta do it."

With a sense of defeat, I sliced with surprising ease at eight lengths of stainless steel wire that pinned the stump of the mast to the cabin top -- three on either side and twin forestays. That left only the backstay attached. Then, I untied the halyards as John and I watched the tangled web of wood, wire, rope and dreams slowly drift away in our rolling wake.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

For the past year and a half I had been preparing for this ill-fated voyage, but it really began much earlier than that. As a boy growing up in Indiana, every summer weekend, my Dad would bundle my sister and I into the car and make the three-hour drive to the south shore of Lake Erie. There we kept Talisman, a 24-foot cabin cruiser of my father’s design and construction.

Years later, I found myself living and working in Hong Kong, where the frequently ideal sailing conditions re-awakened a latent desire to be on the water. After a brief flirtation with a small catamaran, I found Great Transition, an aging 28-foot fiberglass sloop, which I purchased and promptly renamed Eroica after the Beethoven Symphony. She was everything I had been looking for in a boat, a “fixer-upper” to be sure, but a solid, seaworthy design with slender, graceful lines.

Much of the next few years was spent getting Eroica ship-shape. By the time I changed jobs and moved to Bangkok, I had committed enough time and money to the still unfinished project that I had become what you might call "emotionally invested."

That’s when I started talking about sailing over to the Gulf of Thailand. More than a few of my friends and relatives speculated that some mid-life crisis had taken hold of my (generally) good sense.

So, here I was essentially adrift off the coast of Vietnam proving all the naysayers right.

Maybe it was just bad luck after all. Besides trying to second-guess the weather, we had done nearly everything we could to tempt Poseidon into calling our bluff: First there was the boat’s name change (bad luck), then departing on a Friday (more bad luck), and finally the albatross we killed. OK, I’m only kidding about the albatross.

Four days before, Typhoon Kai Tak was merely a low pressure area when sailing buddy John Magel, a Thailand-based charter captain, and I departed Hong Kong on October 28. Finding a good “weather window” for the trip had always been a bit of a crap shoot. I had poured over passage charts and the British Admiralty’s sailing instructions trying to find the right time to go. Late October seemed the best bet, and a semi-annual race at the time along the first-leg of our intended route -- from Hong Kong to Nha Trang, Vietnam -- reinforced that view.

On the night before our departure, the low pressure area hadn’t concerned us too much. Even if it turned into a typhoon, we reasoned, it was likely to track west and be out of the way well before we reached that stretch of the ocean. At least that’s what other storms in that region in late October had generally done in past years. Obviously, our guesses were wrong; a few hours after we departed, the Japanese meteorological service gave this rather innocent looking low the number W22 and the designation tropical depression - the toddler stage of a typhoon. After meteorologists initially forecast a westerly track (just as John and I had), the pros soon changed their prediction to northwesterly, sending the storm skirting up along the coast to intercept us.

We might have been more aware of the deteriorating weather situation had it not been for a dodgy satellite phone. Even before we left, we had experienced a lot of problems with the phone and could only make a good connection to Thailand, where the sat phone company was based.

But on our first day out, the phone troubles seemed more a minor irritation than a serious problem. The weather was fine, the local breeze was light and we motored much of the way to our first "waypoint" on the southern extreme of Hong Kong’s chain of islands. As we neared the lighthouse, the wind picked up a bit and we raised the main and jib. We reported our position to my father by cell phone, the last time we would be able to do that before cell coverage disappeared offshore. John and I traded off four-hour watches at the helm that afternoon and night.

On my few open-water passages, one of the great joys has been the intensely dark night skies and the brilliant panoply of stars that challenge even my pretty good knowledge of the sky. That night with one hand on the tiller, seas were moderate and the weather was pleasantly warm. The GPS told us we were still averaging about 6 knots. Orion awoke from his repose on the eastern horizon, languidly raised his shield and sword for the hunt; the summer triangle passed overhead, Deneb, Vega and Altair. Venus was so bright that it cast her own moon-like shine on the water.

A (not so tall) ship and a star to steer her by. What more could a sailor ask for?

By day two, the 29th, the wind and seas had begun to pick up. We put a reef in the main (making it smaller) and later decided to take down the foresail altogether. The boat was handling fine.

For John, these conditions were nothing out of the ordinary. I had worried some about seasickness and wasn't sure if it would happen to me in "extreme conditions." But the dreaded mal de mer never came for either of us, which was no surprise in John's case. My helming was getting sharper, and the rising waves were just part of the challenge -- a bit exhilarating, but nothing we couldn't handle. The boat rose gently to each swell.

As the seas that day became more confused, however, it became harder to steer. I called in our position to the only number I could easily reach with the frustrating sat phone, my employer, the Associated Press Asia-Pacific Desk in Bangkok. The connection was crackly and I didn’t want to stay on too long for fear of running down the battery on the phone. But apparently, a colleague had noted a typhoon off Vietnam and passed the word to the person on the phone with me, the desk's office manager, Nida Kirati. I remember thinking: "Oh, so that low did turn into a typhoon after all." but despite the deteriorating weather, it just didn't seem possible that it was the same system affecting us so far to the north.

It was about a half hour later that I noticed a potentially serious problem with the rig. From the cockpit, I could see a large crack in the mast near the goose neck -- the place where the boom and mast join together. Already wearing a harness clipped on to a lifeline, I donned my life jacket and went forward to take a look.

What John soon confirmed on his own inspection was that we had extensive damage. It was unclear whether it would hold together without some fix. Although I had inspected the mast, stripping it down and changing the fastenings a few years ago, I failed to detect what John noticed: rot INSIDE the mast. That, along with the force of an accidental jibe triggered by the increasingly confused swells, was apparently enough to do the damage.

I came up with an idea to splint the mast by making and attaching some cross pieces from some lumber we had aboard to bridge the gap over the damaged area. It was too rough by then, however, to effect such a repair.

We moved wire cutters and a hacksaw into the cockpit to be on hand in case the worst should happen: if the mast came down, we might be forced to cut it away.

I think I called again to the AP office later that day in an effort to find out how soon the sea state might improve to give us a chance to fix the mast. Nida and another colleague, Dean Visser, seemed concerned and read me off the coordinates of the typhoon's center (still a tropical depression at the time). I remember glancing at our chart and tracing my finger to where the storm was supposed to be. Dismissively, I said "yeah, but that's just too far south to be affecting us." Later, as I sat down in front of a computer looking at the satellite imagery of Kai Tak, I could see exactly what was going on: the low that we saw on the weather charts on Thursday evening was quickly turning into a swirling hydra that engulfed most of the South China Sea. And, it was heading straight for us.

As the weather deteriorated, I began to understand where mariners get their superstitions: every time John or I would verbalize that the wind seemed to be dying down or the sea state improving a bit, almost as if on cue, conditions would rev up a few notches. By about this time, waves were averaging 20 feet, with lots of heavy cross swells that sideswiped us just in time to threaten a broach, or sideways presentation, of the hull to the next big one.

How much worse could it get?

Still, we were handling it. After awhile, as the rig continued to hold, we stopped worrying about it so much and concentrated on our sailing - trying, as best we could to point the stern at a 45-90 degree angle to the swells. We struggled to hold our southwesterly course, but the seas were so chaotic that it was difficult to steer more accurately than plus or minus 10 degrees of our intended direction. If we were pushed around too much or lost concentration for a moment, we found ourselves 30-40 degrees off course.

Having helmed for four hours in what I was beginning to realize must be the edge of that typhoon, I woke up John, who had an amazing ability to sleep even in the roughest conditions. "I think we've got to go bare poles," I called down into the cabin. We took down all the sails; from now on, the storm would be in the driver’s seat.

John Magel, friend and delivery skipper, at the helm. This picture, like the others, was taken before conditions made photography virtually impossible. Photo by Scott Neuman.

The light dimmed and it became increasingly difficult to judge which wave to meet. Most ocean swells are fairly predictable, but cyclonic storm-driven waves are erratic. I remember eyeing every rising mountain as it approached from behind. I would get in position to meet it, and its two or three siblings, only to then look forward at the compass and realize we were radically off course. Because of the wind, it was then very difficult to get back on course.

Over the next three or four days I could never decide what was worse -- the daytime, when I could see the behemoths stalking us from behind and hope to take some preventative action, or the night, when there was no choice but to hold course and take it on the chin.

The first night of the storm conditions, John and I traded off helming duties about every 20 minutes to an hour. The "off duty" guy would stay in the cockpit in foul weather gear and occasionally try to give a heads up of a "big one" coming from behind -- as seen by only the dim glow of the aft navigation light. At one point I remember saying: "Fuck it, John, they're ALL big!"

John decided to recount his favorite moments from the television show The Simpsons. Not exactly what I would be expecting to talk about in a situation like this, but it was something to keep our minds off the disaster we had gotten ourselves into.

By dawn on Sunday, the seas and wind were, unbelievably, even worse. Realizing that we'd soon be exhausted, we had reverted to longer shifts at the helm in the vain attempt (at least in my case) to get some sleep. I was on duty when the sun filtered through the gray just enough for a glimpse of what we’d be facing that day. What I saw gave me a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

This was the day my father, who was closely watching the weather and our reported positions (relayed from Thailand) from his home in Indiana, ominously wrote in a group email: "Our guys are taking a thrashing out there ... To the extent (Scott and John) are able to weather the typhoon and proceed south, the northerly drift of the storm will separate Eroica from the heavy weather, but she has to go through it (the typhoon) to achieve that separation."

By now, John, who was the best judge of the conditions, estimated 30-foot waves and 40-55 knots. Serious stuff. Occasionally, a really enormous swell would rise from behind and then a slight panic as we watched to see: would it crest before or after us. Mostly, we escaped by what seemed like millimeters, but often enough we had no choice but to take a punch, which meant a cockpit momentarily filled with water.

One of the things I recall (and this seemed more noticeable at night) was the sound of the onrushing cross swells. As they broke, speeding toward their target, they sounded uncannily like a missile being fired. When they slammed into the hull, it was like a grenade had been set off inside the cabin.

The afternoon and night of the 30th was a low point for me. I called my wife Linda and told her the situation was “horrible.” I remember saying I wasn't sure we could make it. As I was still on the phone, a huge roller smashed into our side to underscore the point. I thought of a story I had read of a mountain climber on Everest, stuck at the summit and unable to get down, who called his wife by satellite phone to say goodbye before drifting off into a hypothermic final sleep. Linda and I ended the conversation with her telling me to hold on and me saying that I thought we could.

A satellite image of Typhoon Kai Tak (2005) as it engulfs the South China Sea. Photo by NASA, courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

By now, as big of a problem as the wind and seas was the issue of own endurance.

In The Annapolis Book of Seamanship, yachting author John Rousmanierre describes his experience in the infamous 1979 Fastnet Race in which 15 sailors and dozens of boats were lost off the Irish coast. He recounts how he and his crew endured "a half a day” of near hurricane strength winds and huge waves - precisely what we were experiencing. Most of the Fastnet boats, however, had at least a handful of people aboard. John and I were alone, and we were bashed at this extreme end of the scale for at least two days.

In K. Adlard Coles' classic Heavy Weather Sailing the conditions we were enduring are described this way: "… in a survival gale of (45-55 knots) or over, perhaps gusting at hurricane strength, wind and sea become the masters."

I only remember clearly one thing about Day 4: When I reached Linda on the sat phone and she relayed my father's weather report, "hold on until Nov. 1," and things will start improving. Tomorrow would be Nov. 1, I thought, we can make it until then. Even though it turned out to be a bit premature, it came at exactly the right moment to keep me going.

Monday was a day of freak swells reaching the freakish height of 40 feet. John pointed them out. It's difficult to describe such colossal formations. I guess in the end it's kind of like combat, you just had to be there.

On Day 5, Kai Tak was barreling up from the south to intercept us. Did my father mean Nov. 1 in Asia or Nov. 1 in the United States?

I made contact with the AP in Bangkok for what must have sounded like a pretty desperate request for a weather report.

John and I talked about getting a scrap of the mainsail back up to give us a little more with which to steer. I even began removing the sail ties. Then, we changed our minds -- still too risky with the damaged mast, John pronounced, and I agreed. He started to replace the sail ties with one arm around the boom on the starboard side. I watched from port as I prepared to go below after my shift.

Then, it happened. We didn't even really see it, but it must have been one of those gigantic 40-footers.

Chart of the South China Sea that was doused when a portlight was stove in by a massive wave. The right divider point marks our position at dismasting and the left point shows Da Nang, where we eventually put in. Photo by Scott Neuman.

Short of sinking or a major fire aboard, it’s pretty much the worst thing that can happen to a sailing vessel. After cutting away most of the rigging, the mast rose up on the next big wave, threatening to come back down on us like a giant battering ram. But we never cut the backstay, Mother Nature did it for us. In the end, the whole tangled mess just drifted away to become part of the South China Sea.

John went below to check our position and made the alarming report of water in the bilge. It took only a few moments of panic to identify the problem: a port light had been smashed through by the force of the impact, and water was ankle deep.

Everything was drenched. Books, cushions, clothes. Our stash of batteries for the handheld GPS and VHF radio had become little more than a brownish alkaloid soup. Worse still, our passage chart, exposed on the navigation table, had becoming a soggy, salt-encrusted mess.

With a small backup GPS we kept in a waterproof “abandon ship” bag, John checked our position -- about 100 nautical miles off the coast of Da Nang, Vietnam - a dangerous lee shore. Not knowing how fast the boat would drift toward shore, we were very concerned about being dashed against Vietnam’s rocky coastline.

After several anxious checks on the GPS over the next couple of hours, we concluded that drift was fairly minimal. Yes, eventually we would wash onto Vietnam's limestone bluffs, but not for a few days yet. If my father's hopeful weather report of the day before was only off in its timing, we'd be OK. We were thankful for Eroica's full keel that was helping check our leeway.

It was about five hours later that, by my estimate, we passed within about 24 nautical miles of Kai Tak’s center shortly after it had been downgraded to a mere “severe tropical storm” (but still packing 45-55 knot winds).

Despite the still pounding seas the day after the dismasting, I actually got a bit of sleep for the first time in days. John and I were huddled in Eroica's forepeak, the only relatively dry part of the boat. All night we were slammed and rolled by a giant sledge hammer that seemed to lurk somewhere off our port side -- about 3/4" of fiberglass the only thing between us and the giant breakers.

Some of you are probably wondering if we ever considered a rescue. The simple answer (perhaps surprising to some) is no. We didn't carry a rescue beacon called an EPIRB, although we could, if necessary, use our satellite phone to call for help. But even with everything we'd been through, we were still afloat and unhurt. We knew no rescue could be mounted in the conditions, so even if we'd requested one, we'd have to wait out the weather.

It was on the next day that John and I, both in the forepeak, felt an enormous jolt turn us over on our starboard side -- the worst knockdown (or was it a capsize?) of the entire ordeal. I held on to a side railing to keep from falling over and it felt like we were being tossed down the side of a wave. Four or five loud booms and a very weird, wallowing motion. We assumed we were going to roll completely and I had a momentary thought that this was it.

But Eroica gently righted, and things seemed to calm down a bit. Slowly, the wind and motion started up again, but that last big knock seemed to be the coup de grace.

The post-typhoon haze obscures the headland at the mouth of the Han River. Photo by Scott Neuman

The next day, things began to improve. After diagnosing and fixing a problem with the engine, we got it going again.

But wait, nothing was going to be easy!

The transmission wouldn't engage. It was somehow jammed. We didn't really think it was the linkage, but we tried to disconnect it and jam it into gear. Shit, nothing. Forget it for today, it's still too rough, we concluded. Tomorrow's Plan B: jury rigged mast and sail.

Me, bruised and battered, at the helm as we motor toward Da Nang. Photo by John Magel

That night John finished reading a novel, while I spent a restless night thinking about the old square-rigged sailing vessels. Their simple sail plans, which really only worked well downwind, might be modified for our situation. I tried to think back on all those Patrick O’Brian novels I’d read over the years. For us, the greatest and most dangerous obstacle was just wrestling the heavy boom into place, especially if the seas were still this choppy.

With an overcast sky but considerably calmed seas the next morning, we went above deck determined to get underway, some way, any way.

As we took stock again of our raw materials, John discovered a jib sheet that led aft and disappeared under the boat. We looked at each other and shared an epiphany.

It's a rookie mistake getting a line wrapped around the propeller and I'm a little embarrassed to admit that it happened, but considering the chaos aboard and the unavoidable jumbled nest of spars, sails and line that resulted from the dismasting, I think we can beg some sympathy.

But, the problem was solvable, and that put us in good spirits. Among John's other talents is his training as a dive instructor. With a Malaysian machete called a parang in one hand and safety line around his waist, John went overboard and with three or four quick dives handed up various lengths of mangled blue nylon line.

We started the engine and it went in gear. We were finally under our own power for the first time in days.

Barefooted and about to meet Da Nang's rather surly immigration officials. One of shoes was lost in the mayhem of the knockdown. Photo by John Magel

We estimated that at our speed we'd be at Da Nang light about 0100. We had no desire to approach at night and so determined to loiter until morning. All we had for this area was our very large-scale passage chart that covered Hong Kong to southern Vietnam - the level of detail for Da Nang harbor was minuscule.

As we got closer to shore, we saw our first ship in days, a bulk carrier of some sort. Then, a Vietnamese fishing junk. Someone aboard called out as his vessel, with eyes painted forward to see through storms (hey, we could have used those!), crossed our bow. Waving, a young man pointed to where our mast should be and then up at the sky laughing and calling out "Typhoon!" It wasn't a malicious or mocking laugh at all, but more like a "you must be happy to be alive" kind of thing. It seemed clear that this boat had weathered the storm too, probably at sea, and he was rejoicing with us that we were all still alive. It was a touching moment that I won't soon forget.

By nightfall, we could see the faint, slightly haze-covered outline of the Vietnamese coast. It wasn't exactly a "land ho!" moment, but we were glad to know a hot shower and cold beer weren't too far off.

As we made it to the immigration post on the Han River a crowd of dock workers quickly gathered, squatting on the quay and gazing quizzically at our broken boat.

I scoured the mess in the boat for my shoes. I had been going without shoes since the dismasting, and now in the chaos, had apparently lost one shoe. So, I went off to meet the immigration officer barefoot.

The stern-faced officials looked over our paperwork. One major snag was immediately noticed. The name of the boat was not the same as on the outgoing paperwork from Hong Kong. I had changed the boat's name in Hong Kong, but never made it official, as Hong Kong authorities had told me not to bother. Hand ringing; phone calls. This was a major faux pas on my part.

Finally, it was determined that I needed to get a letter from Hong Kong to verify it was in fact my boat. By now, it was just quitting time on Friday for Hong Kong, which is an hour ahead of Vietnam. I tried to make calls with John's cell phone, which kept bleeping off as a result of having gotten sopping wet at some point and/or a failing charge. Anyway, this would have to wait until Monday.

We checked into a hotel across the street, resolved to have a wild night out, and then promptly fell asleep.

A mast-less Eroica secured at Immigration Pier in Da Nang. Photo by Scott Neuman

As I write this, the sale of Eroica is still pending as the Vietnamese bureaucratic wheels spin and try to gain traction on a totally new concept -- pleasure boats. Immigration officials told me I was the first American on such a vessel to have made landfall in Vietnam since before the fall of Saigon in 1975. (Three years later, however, another American made the same claim in the pages of Cruising World, so who knows?)

As I left her, Eroica was lying along a high wharf on the Han River, sandwiched between large rescue boats on one side and a rusting Vietnamese bulk carrier on the other.

Since this happened, I have heard from several people who assume that after this experience a) I would be eager to get rid of the boat, and b) I would be put off sailing forever. Neither of those assumptions could be further from the truth. Eroica lived up to her name, which roughly translates as “heroic.” Money and time, however, are obstacles too difficult to overcome. Leaving her behind in Vietnam has entailed more than a little heartbreak on my part.

As for sailing, I figure I am in at least the "1 percent" club of the world's sailors now. Few have ever seen conditions like I did, let alone endured them for so long. I still love sailing, and if anything, I have a new found confidence that in the right boat I can take anything that comes my way. And, chances are, nothing like this will ever come my way again.