You may find yourself wondering, at the beginning of this true story, what on earth it has to do with shipping. Come on an excursion into our world, for a moment, and you will soon discover the connection...A FRIENDLY SPY IN THE SKY
 We had sailed our 71' staysail schooner out of Marina Bay, Gibraltar on 5th January 1998 and were on the first leg of an Atlantic crossing, weighing 15 tons more than our usual 38, due to minor keel damage filling the foam interior of the hull with sea-water, not inherently more dangerous than not having a foam insert in the first place, but it slowed us down a bit.
We hit some very rough weather indeed, lasting three days, 10th to 12th January inclusive and, one of the great things about schooners being their willingness to heave-to and ride out the nasties and having four novice crew with us, we decided to heave-to and watch the thirty foot swells from the comfort of the saloon, playing cards and Travel Scrabble, listening to music and taking it in turns to check for shipping, mainly using trusty Ray, the Raytheon radar, to avoid opening the companionway hatch and getting too many unnecessary soakings.
We sailed part of the time, when there were temporary lulls and returned to heaving-to anytime it all became unpleasant, one of the luxuries of cruising, as opposed to racing, and of having sufficient space for food and water supplies to ensure survival for months, this being the most economical way to provision the boat.
On this particular occasion, however, we had not counted on having four human locusts aboard. The Spanish commercial diver who had imagined sailing was pure romance (not for long!), the Scotsman with unusual ideas about finance, his young Maori girlfriend and the English mechanic from hell, had managed to consume vast quantities of food and done absolutely nothing to justify being fed even dry bread and water. They were to be asked to leave our boat at our first port of call with a minimum of delay, in the hopes that we would still have some provisions aboard and, perhaps one or two un-torn sails, after they had moved off, having done nothing to enhance the image of the young in our eyes. Gone are the idle rich, the idle young have inherited the earth...
We arrived in the port of Santa Cruz on the island of La Palma, the north western-most of the Canary Islands, on 19th January. Boat and crew were more or less unscathed but captain and mate were exhausted, having been unable to relax for fear of being unable to prevent the next lunatic action on the part of one of the youngsters or other.
The marina couldn't handle a yacht with our draught (11 feet) and there wasn't enough scope available to anchor so the port authority reluctantly agreed that we could use commercial berths whenever one was empty and skitter around the port, staying out of the way as required, using the gas and fuel tanker dock as our main spot, since they didn't come in for long at a time, nor every single day. Their dock wasn't free that night though. We eventually secured a berth and the next day were invited to occupy the fuel dock. We found a delightful crew of Spanish long-liners tied up just behind us.
The Garcia Rodriguez was a 65' commercial fishing vessel with all the modern gadgets aboard, waiting for a replacement refrigeration part for their huge fish hold.
Her twelve crew were invited to come aboard Leopard Normand III and meet Bella McCaw, the resident 'parrot', at various times during the second day of our stay. We struck up a friendship and, over the next few days, took to visiting back and forth for anywhere between minutes and hours, in groups of anything from two to six. The fishermen explained how they did their work, drawing diagrams for us and gesticulating in their delightfully Latin way, and we exchanged news and views companionably. They shook their heads at the lazy, greedy crew and helped us move the Leopard from one berth to another, and back again, as we made room for fuel tankers stopping off for a few hours to deliver supplies to the island
We had been enjoying this restful time for about four days when the news reached us that a huge container vessel, which had been travelling in the area about two hundred miles south of Sao Vicente in Portugal, bound for the very port in which we were now berthed, had gone down. Apparently it had happened during the storm we had weathered when, in the dead of night, the ship had straddled two of those thirty-foot waves we had watched and felt passing underneath us, and 'broken her back', losing her cargo onto the waters and rapidly breaking up.
210 containers were reported to have been cast into the sea and the fifteen crew had not even had an opportunity to attempt a 'Mayday' call, to try and arrange to be rescued, when the huge vessel, both bow and stern pointing skywards, began to disintegrate and sink.
Unbeknownst to the hapless crew, now facing certain death and, doubtless hoping it would be over as swiftly as possible, a military aircraft had, we were told, by a lucky coincidence, left Gibraltar that same night on a special mission to test a new, infra-red, night surveillance system. Suitably rough conditions in which to give the equipment a proper trial over the sea had been needed and 'our' storm had provided the ideal opportunity.
By chance, fate, miracle - call it what you will - the spotters had picked up strange shapes in the turbulent seas below and, although they didn't know what on earth the shapes were, they did know that something was in big trouble down there.
The crew of the aircraft had alerted the appropriate rescue services, who had managed to get to the scene and, even with the conditions as they were, rescued fourteen of the men who, surely, must have been scarcely able to believe their good fortune, having seen and heard nothing of the aircraft high in the sky overhead. One man was lost that night. That, in itself, was a tragedy, but how the emotions of those men must have been mixed as they grieved for their shipmate and rejoiced in the precious gift of their lives, spared from a premature and terrifying ending. How proud those rescuers must have felt to have achieved such a feat.
A few days later, a large recovery vessel arrived, carrying five or six of the containers salvaged from the seas. A couple of days later, it returned with a few more.
Our 'locusts' had still not managed to tear themselves away from the provisions when, a few days later, hurricane-force winds, hitting us at 185 kilometres per hour, almost got the better of the 'Leopard' during a battering which lasted from 0200 hours ( 2 am ) until just before 0700 hours ( 7am ). The 'crew' managed to sleep through the whole thing, oblivious to the groans of the hull as it was being twisted nearly a quarter inch out of true along its length, unaware of the teak rubbing strake ( the protective strip along the sides of the boat,) being ground off the starboard side, embedded in the quayside as so many matchsticks for us to find in the morning, in spite of the skipper having dashed above decks at every opportunity to wedge anything and everything he could find to use as shock absorbers between hull and quay.
Having filmed the entire event through the saloon windows, in two or three minute bursts, I was able to show them what they had managed to ignore the night before. No-one could believe that what they were seeing had been filmed inside a harbour, let alone without awakening them! We finally managed to persuade them to leave the boat within a couple of days and, within a few days more, we were on our way to the Cape Verde islands, but that's another story...
Linnet Woods, First Mate - Leopard Normand III
Have you a story, concerning any commercial vessel, to share with us? If you are interested in true hurricane stories you may like to read Maureen Pope's'Anatomy Of A Hurricane' in our Sailing section.
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