His arms and feet fought with the pedals, joystick, and collective to keep the helicopter from crashing into the sea, at a speed much faster than his mind could ever grasp purposefully. He was now relying solely on his subconscious ability, developed over many years of flying.
No longer concerned about crashing, but simply about staying out of the sea, Tom threw caution to the violent wind.
In doing so, he overshot the helipad.
Two hundred feet past the helipad, further along the hull of the Hayward Bulk, he slowed his rate of descent, hovered for an instant, and then elegantly dropped onto the deck of the crippled vessel.
The skids could be heard breaking apart as the Sea King set down hard.
Tom immediately reversed the pitch of the rotor blades, so that instead of creating lift, they forced the helicopter down hard against the deck, stopping it from being blown off into the sea.
They were alive.
For now.
“Okay, everyone out!” Tom turned his head and saw the pale faces of his terrified passengers.
No one moved.
“The wind is going to blow her overboard pretty soon, so I suggest you all get out of here if you want to live.”
It was enough to get them moving again.
Tom watched as the four passengers struggled with the 150Kg impeller.
“Good luck.”
“Where are you going?” said one of the engineers, who looked even more startled than before, if that was even possible.
Tom smiled.
“Just cleaning up the deck.” He then raised the collective to full, locked it in position, rotated the angle to the portside, and stepped gingerly out of the helicopter.
The Sea King then disappeared into the ocean.
“Well gentlemen, there goes the only chance we had of taking off again,” Tom said calmly. “I’ve done my part. Let’s hope to hell that you’re able to do yours.”
“Come on, let’s get this stuff down below,” said the oldest engineer with an air of fatalism.
Chapter Three
Sam watched as the wall of water rapidly approached.
There was little that he could do about it. Second Chance would survive or she wouldn’t. His only option was to hold on.
He turned away, his back facing the oncoming barrage of water and closed his eyes. Taking one last deep breath, he grasped the inside grab bar with all the strength in both hands, and hoped that today wasn’t going to be his last.
The turbid wave of water hit him with the force of a Mac truck. The initial impact nearly rendering him unconscious. The strong flow swept his feet out from under him, and his hands, locked onto the grab bar, fought to prevent him from being flushed down the galley passage way.
The water was just starting to recede as a second wave struck the port side.
Sam had just enough time to take one more deep breath before the entire area was swamped with water again.
He thought his ship may broach and then roll, but Second Chance held true to her name.
Slowly, the water receded. Sam heard the familiar drone of the powerful automatic pumps deep in the bilge kick into life.
Picking himself up, he scanned the cabin.
It was going to take a lot of work to clean her, and some of the electronic equipment would need to be replaced, but all told, he had escaped lightly, he decided.
Another large wave struck, and he heard the mechanical workings of the autopilot struggling to maintain her course.
Then, he heard the sound that is every sailor’s worst nightmare.
It was the sound of a cable snapping under pressure, followed by the sudden jolt of the yacht as its rudder stopped struggling to maintain her direction. The tiny storm jib, the only sail which remained, and formed a triangle no longer than a couple feet, could now be heard flapping in the wind.
Sam didn’t wait to feel the pounding of the giant swell on his port side. Without the rudder, there was no way to control how Second Chance would face the oncoming swell.
In these seas, failure to run with the swell could only result in catastrophic damage to his yacht and his certain death by drowning.
He climbed up the stairs and stepped out through the tiny hatchway.
The storm surrounded him now. If he failed to gain control of the rudder within minutes he, and Second Chance, would be well on their way to the bottom of Bass Strait.
The autopilot was flashing and making an irritating noise as its computer tried to determine how to make adjustments. It was completely ineffective as long as the cable running from the steering block to the rudder was broken.
Sam hit the wait button on the autopilot in utter frustration.
He didn’t need to hear that sound anymore. Then, without waiting to harness up and run a travel line, he quickly made his way to the transom. There, above the enormous rudder, were the remains of his old weather vane and next to them, the emergency tiller.
A simple, direct link to the rudder, the tiller was of little mechanical aid to steering, but it was something; the emergency tiller gave Sam at least the possibility of steering Second Chance by hand.
Sitting aft Sam had little protection from the giant waves, running from behind him. If another wave flooded his deck again, harnessed or not, the force would send him overboard to his inevitable death.
As if to emphasize his exposure, a medium sized wave broke and splashed over him; its icy chill immediately jarring his mind into making a change in his course of action.
The one saving grace was the fact that up ahead, his tiny storm jib, little more than a couple of feet of canvas, provided just enough speed to maintain a strong enough flow of water over the rudder to keep a course. Sam angled Second Chance diagonally along the large, breaking swell, a motion more like surfing with the wave than fighting against it.
He was in for a long night if he were to survive at all.
His survival so far had been more about luck than skill, he acknowledged, but by the morning the storm had settled.
The next day, he limped to the outskirts of Hobart, where he was able to anchor in the lee of the mountain and make repairs. Running a second steering cable on Second Chance was easier than it sounded, because Sam had insisted on a redundant set of cables running side by side.
In the end, that repair took under an hour, but he then spent the next two days draining the bilge to protect the inner hull from salt water corrosion.
On the third day, Sam set the autopilot on a northerly heading, trimmed the sails, and commenced his long journey home to Sydney, where more serious repairs to his flooded yacht could be made.
Two hours later, well on his way north, and with the weather relatively calm, Sam took one last look at the horizon, checked his instruments, and climbed into the bunk he normally used when he was offshore.
Sam’s eyes closed, and comforted by the direction of the compass at the end of the bunk, he slept.
Tom watched as his beloved Sea King helicopter disappeared into the sea.
The wind was too strong and the landing space too poor to ever manage to keep her on the deck of the Hayward Bulk. Flying her back to the Maria Helena wasn’t even an option. She crashed into the sea a mere twenty seconds later, floating for a couple of minutes, and then swamped by a large wave.
Its sinking was enough to bring Tom back to the problem at hand.
The four scientists, who had been aboard the Sea King, along with a number of other crewmen from the Hayward Bulk, made their way down into the bowels of the ship, with the gigantic impeller.
Tom followed them to the entrance of the hull.