“It was in January,” Gouig began. “January and February are the bad months for typhoons. We were sailing from Japan to L.A. The last port we visited was Yokohama. We were watching the storm on the weather maps, plotting two charts, one for the storm and one for the ship. A typhoon can go in two directions. Either it goes up toward China”—he drew invisible maps on the table with his fingers and pantomimed the storm, his hand cutting a line past the west coast of a coffee mug up into the China Sea—“or it brushes past Japan and spins out across the Pacific.” His fist swept toward the table’s edge.
“All the predictions were saying this typhoon was headed this way, to China. But our first mate knew something was wrong. At Yokohama they stuck us at the dock and made us wait three days. This mate, he said, ‘All hands on deck! Double-lash all the containers, tighten every twistlock, batten down all the hatches.’ We had all the ABs out there”—all the able-bodied seamen.
“We left at around four in the morning. By eight or nine o’clock we were getting hammered. After ten hours we tried to turn back. Eventually you don’t care where it was you were supposed to be going. You’re just trying to get out of the way. We kept sailing south. A little farther and we would have made it to Hawaii. This was an eight-hundred-foot container ship, and that storm blew us four days off course. We keep making the ships bigger, but we’re fooling ourselves if we think they’re safe from the sea. Big ships still sink.” He took a sip of coffee, then continued.
“I was up on the bridge. We were in autopilot, and we were getting hammered. We did three or four 50-degree rolls, buried the bow three times. Waves swept all the lifeboat ladders off deck. I said to the captain, ‘These wave crests are getting far apart.’ That’s basically why you’re up there, to watch for synchronous rolling. Suddenly everything on the bridge just goes voom.”
The ship’s captain did exactly what all captains are trained to do: he hove to, immediately turning into the oncoming waves and slowing down, letting the ship ride up and over. “All the books say that you’ve got only two minutes to break that cycle. You’ve got to make a hard turn and get the bow up on a wave or down into a trough. Another thirty seconds and I think we would have rolled right over.”
The crew were all amazed, Gouig said, that no containers had been lost. “Spills happen all the time,” he said, again. Then he told me the story of what he believed to be the most famous case of synchronous rolling, the case of the APL China.
GRAVEYARD OF THE PACIFIC. WEST OF THE INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE.
Two days ago, in the Tsugaru Strait, the snow let up, and through the fog could be glimpsed the mountains of Hokkaido to the north, the mountains of mainland Japan to the south, their black ridges striped with snow. Claire and Bob came bustling into the bridge to peep at them through binoculars, she exclaiming breathlessly, “Oh, aren’t they just breathtaking!” The next land we’d see would be American.
The weather service recommended the Great Circle route after all. We’re now way out in the Graveyard of the Pacific, and you can tell, you can feel the giant swell moving under the hull. Not sure exactly how much we’re rolling, but it feels like a lot—enough to make a port glass in my cabinet slip loose from the rack and go tinkling rhythmically around: tink, roll, tink, roll, tink. Last night, it woke me up—it and the wind howling at my portholes.
This evening, I ran into the captain as he was returning from an inspection of the outer decks, dressed in a red jumpsuit, carrying a flashlight and walkie-talkie. “A little snow,” he told me, smiling his courteous, gap-toothed smile, “is nothing to worry about.” Feeling cabin-feverish, I decided to see what it felt like to walk among the containers in a snowstorm. Gave myself something of a scare.
Back inside the Ottawa’s eight-story house, the habitable part of the ship, I learned from an oiler named Joel Nipales that solitary nocturnal circumambulations of the main deck are strictly forbidden. If an officer or deckhand has to go out at night, he alerts the bridge, puts on foul-weather gear, and brings a