Endangered Species by Richard Woodman

Author:Richard Woodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sheridan House
Published: 1992-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Oil and Water

On the bridge Mackinnon considered what to do next. With the wind on the starboard quarter the Matthew Flinders would slowly move out of the path of the advancing typhoon on a curving course. This was a result of the indraught of the air as it circulated and was drawn towards the eye of the storm. The wind-generated waves did not alter their angle with the same speed, they lagged slightly, so the nearer the eye an observer was, the more the angle increased until at the centre all was confusion as waves rushed in from every point of the compass.

As the actual wind constantly created new waves, the ‘old’ waves, the cumulative residue of air that had now moved on, were left behind as swell waves. Dispensing with the landsman’s notion of ‘waves’, the seaman refers to the inequities in the sea’s surface as ‘seas’ and ‘swells’, a precise rather than a pedantic differentiation. A swell, though it might be monstrous in size, is a decreasing force; losing its angular shape it becomes rounded, like an ancient mountain. It possesses no breaking crest, but if unimpeded it will travel thousands of miles across an ocean as it gradually decays, long-distance evidence of a gale or storm, an observable early warning. In this decaying state it will do no more than cause a ship to roll if she is beam on to it or pitch if she heads into it, with a consequent corkscrew motion at other angles. With sea and swell astern the motion is called scending, for it contains a precipitate forward motion not unlike a sleigh-ride.

The swells then assaulting the Matthew Flinders were still relatively young. They possessed enormous kinetic energy and it would be a long time before they became mere benign ground swells, low and slow. Their rolling and pitching motion was a danger because they were still steep and the period between the passing of their crests remained short. More important, their angle was not yet significantly different from the wind-made waves that were constantly being produced by the screaming air as it rushed towards the vortex. The combined effect was to produce a very steep, comparatively short sea that flung the ship wildly about and in which the danger of being pooped remained.

Captain Mackinnon was well aware of this and it presented him with a dilemma. In theory there was a classic remedy: oil. The less easily answerable part of his problem was how to deliver the oil and who was to do it. There were notable examples quoted in the seamanship books of, as it was quaintly put, ‘the efficacy of oil in quelling the sea’.

Oil, and only a little of it, was necessary, spread in a thin film which damped down the breaking seas, robbed them of their crests and therefore rendered them much less dangerous.

Captain Mackinnon had seen plenty of oil slicks during the war and could vouch for their practical value; moreover, Mackinnon knew that God helped those who helped themselves.

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