The Cuban Crisis
Just before Christmas I had the pleasure of spending a few hours drinking beer with some of the salty dogs from my erstwhile sailing club. Like any gathering of boys (grey-haired or not), it was mostly storytelling and bullshittery. I loved it.
After hearing of my impending travel and sailing plans, one of them chimes in with the following story about crewing a huge yacht that sank off Cuba a few years ago. It was riveting, and I don’t think I said a word for the 15 minutes it took him to tell. I’ve tried to relate it like he told it.
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“It was a brand new motoryacht – 90’, perfectly constructed, finest finishes – and we were delivering her from the Mediterranean to the Cayman. 4 hands on board, including the helm/owner, his wife (cook), the engineer, and myself (competent crew). 90’ is a lot of boat, but she basically drove herself, with all the modern navigational equipment on board. We came on a fairly stiff storm in the north Caribbean but this huge boat held steady and you could barely feel the 20’ waves as she ploughed through them. It was April, so the weather was warm, if not the water. It was about 3am and pitch black.
As we were standing on the upper deck watching the storm that night, lightning smashing around the ocean but nothing you’d worry about, the engineer notices that half of the banks (electrical/gauges) have gone blank. We figure it’s an electrical fault, but the engineer goes down to the engine room to check it out. Comes back up sheet-white and says there’s 3’ of water in the engine room, and our listing had made it drown the port-side engine, so we were driving on starboard alone and apparently taking on a lot of water. Now picture 90’ of boat, 3’ deep in water – that’s a whole swimming pool of water inside your boat.
The wife starts to panic and the owner isn’t much better. The engineer and I splash around below decks looking for a leak or a cracked bulkhead or something to figure out how the water was getting in, but we couldn’t see anything. She was just slowly, obviously, inexorably, sinking.
At this point I knew that we had to call in a mayday. The engineer was a Canadian Coast Guard vet and refused, because the boat was still pushing through the waves and the starboard engine was still chugging – but it was professional and personal pride, not any sort of intelligent decision-making. I pushed my point and we argued. I won on logic, but it was a sore point. I started the mayday on the radio, and the engineer got on his horn to the Canadian coast guard, who called the Miami coast guard and told them where to find us.
Soon after we sounded the mayday we got a response from a nearby container ship, which we couldn’t see at all, but was probably within gunshot range. Problem was that, despite all her size, 90’ of yacht trying to hold steady up against 700’ of container ship in a blowing storm was bound to end in disaster – someone had to hold the helm because the autopilot wouldn’t cut it, and that person would end up sprinting across open decks to make a life raft being hoisted before the yacht was either crushed under the ship’s hull, or drifted away from her (possibly to come back and be crushed under the hull in 2 minutes). At this point the owner and wife were near hysterics, and it would have been 50/50 whether they made it up over the rails of the ship before falling or being blown overboard. Someone was going to die if we took help from this ship. So I radioed her off and headed for Cuba.
Miami had sent out a rescue boat, one of those Defender things that can do 40 knots (~45 mph) and she was closing in on us. But because they were American and this was Cuban waters, they had to radio Cuba to ask if they could fucking rescue us. Cuba said no, and instructed them to remain in international waters – Cuba was sending out its own rescue boat and there was no need for American assistance.
While this is going on, we’re heeling even further over, taking on water, and it’s only a matter of time until the starboard engine drowns. After that, we’ve got no way to turn her and she has four options: roll in a wave and drown us, roll up the beach and crush us, get reefed and torn open and drown us, or smash against cliffs and pulverize us. Getting this thing onto dry land was not happening. We had to get off.
There was one life raft and one dinghy with a good motor. We had already put the owner and his wife in the raft because it was more stable and would have stayed afloat by itself even if the rest of us went down. The engineer climbed into the dinghy, but with no power on board the yacht, there was no way to launch it over the side – we were basically stuck waiting for the yacht to sink, releasing the dinghy off her decks as she went down. I stayed on deck as long as possible to make sure no sudden shifts fouled the dinghy, and then climbed in at the last moment as the 90’ yacht sank under my feet into the Caribbean.
The life raft was tied to the dinghy by about 20’ of rope, and even though there was a solid 90 HP engine on the thing, the dinghy was getting dragged around in the ocean by the life raft, like trying to paddle a canoe tied to a parachute. We managed to negotiate up close enough to haul the owner and his wife into the dinghy, and I cut the rope to the raft with the knife I always carry while on the water. Lesson – always carry a knife while on the water. More sailors die from being tangled in ropes in the water than any other reason. Carry a knife.
Once we were all in the dinghy, I realized we were stuck with basically the same options as before – flip, drown or smash. There was no sign of the Cuban coast guard, despite their lackluster reassurances to the Miami boat, so I had no choice but to turn her towards land and hope it wasn’t black rocks we were driving for. We got lucky and, despite almost toppling over top of the 10’ waves as they hit the beach, managed to run full blast up onto the sand. The Cuban military was there waiting for us.
Fortunately, we’d had to sense to gather our passports before the yacht sank, and handed them over. The military directed us a half klick down the beach to the resort whose sand we had washed up on, and we walked the distance, rubber-legged, and I asked at the front desk if they had a room. They did, and we were Canadian, and they took us on credit.
They even opened the bar for us.”
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Photo Credits
- me
- Dan Cross
- Josefa Holland-Merten
- Uncredited at Pixabay.com
- Adrian Thompson