We Meet Hurricane Hannah
Trip Start
Aug 20, 2008
1
13
15
Trip End
Sep 15, 2008
St. Anthony's,
Newfoundland,
Canada
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The captain had spent 25 years on a commercial boat which brought supplies to Greenland from Denmark during those months of the year when Greenland was not completely iced in. He was used to dodging icebergs, navigating through ice floes, and handling all manner of stormy seas. Soft-spoken and grey-haired, he instilled in us a confidence that he had seen and been through everything. We were pleased to have him along on the cruise and glad for a chance to visit with him over lunch - especially when during the conversation he commented that on a trip to Greenland you were on your own. What did he mean by that?
What it meant was that the world is criss-crossed with shipping lanes and (we had noticed) most of the time when looking towards the horizon we could see a boat somewhere or other off in the distance approaching us or receding towards the horizon. At night it was comforting to see clusters of a ship's lights gliding past us in the dark. What we had failed to notice, however, was that since we'd left Iceland, there were no longer boats to be seen. And, it was not just that they were a bit over the horizon, up here, he was saying, there simply were no other boats! The standard shipping lanes were hundreds of miles to our south. If, a boat got into trouble where we were, there would be no other vessels to come to the rescue. We were on our own!
The rest of that day "at sea", we enjoyed various cruising activities, our little ship of cruisers dancing and eating our way across the cold North Atlantic towards the American continent. Seas were calm, although under a low cloud cover. Definitely pleasant cruising. The occasional iceberg or dolphins the only excitement. Towards the late afternoon, however, the wind started to pick up, kicking up the seas with it, but being veterans of the trip around Cape Farewell, we were unperturbed.
Unhappily, however, by the time dinner was over, the ship was being knocked by large waves crashing over the bow. I decided to forgo the evening entertainment since the theatre was in the bow and I knew that the thumping of the waves would make me too nervous to enjoy the show. Better to stay in our midship cabin and read. Joe, Marilyn, and Bill went to the first show which, although introduced with the caveat that the dancers might not be able to do everything in the original choreography was going to go on as scheduled. And indeed,with the floor pitching under their feet, the dancers did have to watch carefully to avoid falling. Mysteriously, too, the lead singer disappeared from the stage after the second song, never to return. But the show was lively and enjoyable despite the modifications
By the time Joe returned to the cabin, the storm was going from bad to worse, the rains having started and I was in a state of panic. Unlike the trip around the Cape, where one could follow the progress of the waves, the sea was now pitch black, only sheets of white foam sluicing past the sides of the boat visible in the boat's
lights. Looking out to the ocean was pure blackness - a blackness that was causing one to feel that the ship was heaving and shuddering far worse than when we had passed Cape Farewell where we could watch the waves. Now, the intensity of the storm could only bejudged by the sounds it created and the thrashing of the boat, both of which got more and more frightening as the night progressed. Everyone's experience of the storm, as told the next day, revolved around some sound or another.
As a background to everything was the intensifying hissing of the waves rushing past and against the sides of the boat. It reached almost a roar at its height that could only be dulled by going into the bathroom and shutting the door. At one point I fantasized about getting away from it by curling up in the shower to sleep. (No bathtub to sleep in.) Then there was the creaking and groaning of the ship that sometimes sounded as if the ship was about to snap apart. (I had to keep reassuring myself that as an engineer I knew that these noises are GOOD. They are the sounds of the component parts of the ship adjusting to the stresses on the structure and they WILL KEEP THE SHIP FROM BREAKING APART! )
Then there was an intermittent shudder that would go through the entire frame of the boat, its origin a mystery. This and an impact vibration as if the ship had suddenly crashed into a large object occurred only rarely but were attention getting when they happened.
And there was the sound of the sea itself, those invisible walls of water collapsing everywhere in a homogenous roar that was a counterpoint background noise to the walls of water breaking up against the sides of the boat that were creating the fluctuating roar like breakers crashing on rocks.
Then there were the smaller ghost-like sounds emanating from within the ship itself of who knows what scraping and rubbing somewhere. And of course the occasional sharp thump of falling objects. Chairs
falling over? Tables slamming against a wall? Who knew? It was the middle of the night. Everyone was sleeping.
And there was the wind whistling around the window frames and the gurgling of rivulets of water running across the balcony floor - and in some cabins running into the cabin itself.
All these sounds were background to the feel of the boat, increasingly tossed higher and farther. Beds
made their way across the cabins. Some felt that with the next giant wave, they would go flying out the
balcony door and into the ocean. For me it was like being on a rollercoaster ride that you could not get off
of. As the boat rode up over a wave, there would be the sensation of one's weight being hauled up a steep
incline followed by a fraction of second of equilibrium, before a weightless, stomach-churning descent crashed the boat into a roll that thrust one sideways. And on this ride with no exit, it would all begin again.
In our cabin the only mental distraction from our total helplessness was a banging that began around midnight. What turned out to be a loose closet door began to fly open periodically and then slam shut. This local noise actually gave us something to do. First figure out just what was slamming and then after we located the door whose magnetic lock was weak, attempt to secure it. Nothing we rigged up worked as the cabin was being slammed around so violently and we eventually realized that we would just have to live with it.
The noise became my barometer for the progression of the storm. Since it only flew open and slammed
shut on the very worst of the waves, I began timing the number of the slams in a half hour interval, praying that with each interval the count would go down or at least not increase. For awhile it held somewhat steady at about a dozen bad waves per half hour. Finally at 2:30 a.m., the half hour count went down to seven, and then to three, - and then I slipped into a terror-tinged unconsciousness.
Three hours later, we woke up. The sky was beginning to lighten, the mountains of the Newfoundland coast glowed in the dawn light just a few miles away, and the sea, SHOCKINGLY, stretched out placidly before us. Could we be on the same planet that we were on just a few hours before? Shell-shocked we dressed and went to breakfast.
Everyone had a story. People ejected from their beds, bottles flying off counters, t. v.'s crashing to the floor, flooded carpets, beds on the other side of the room from where they started. As far as Princess Cruises was concerned, however, it never happened. No warning. No explanation. And with our news blackout in full swing, it was only later that we learned that we had slammed into Hurricane Hannah who when WE last had known her was off the shore of North Carolina. (In defense of the captain, there was no way we could have avoided Hannah. She was jammed against the coast so we could not go around her. As we approached, she moved out towards the ocean into our path while simultaneously picking up intensity. Perhaps
September is just not the best time to be crossing the North Atlantic.)
Our day in St. Anthony was delightful. Gorgeous weather. We went on a photography tour, our first stop being a fishing village. There, our guide informed us how lucky we were in that all the boats which were generally out fishing had been called back into the harbor to ride out the hurricane. We would have lots to photograph. Great.
Thank you Hannah!
