He stood barefoot at the helm, the only way he could maintain traction after a refrigerator toppled over, splashing out a slick of milk, juice, and broken glass (no time to clean it up-the waves just kept coming). Above all, Avery had to position Discovery so that it rode over these crests and wasn't crushed beneath them. A breaking hundred-foot wave packs one hundred tons of force per square meter and can tear a ship in half. It takes thirty tons per square meter of force to dent a ship. Turning around was too risky if one of these waves caught Discovery broadside, there would be long odds on survival. No one wanted to be out here right now, but Avery knew their only hope was to remain where they were, with their bow pointed into the waves. Flanking all sides of the 295-foot ship, the crew kept a constant watch to make sure they weren't about to be sucker punched by a wave that was sneaking up from behind, or from the sides. And worse, they kept rearing up from different directions. While weather like this was common in the cranky North Atlantic, these giant waves were unlike anything he'd encountered in his thirty years of experience. More than a thousand wrecked ships lay on the seafloor below.Ĭaptain Keith Avery steered his vessel directly into the onslaught, just as he'd been doing for the past five days.
What chance did they have, the forty-seven scientists and crew aboard this research cruise gone horribly wrong? A series of storms had trapped them in the black void east of Rockall, a volcanic island nicknamed Waveland for the nastiness of its surrounding waters. As the RRS Discovery plunged down into the wave's deep trough, it heeled twenty- eight degrees to port, rolled thirty degrees back to starboard, then recovered to face the incoming seas. Among the ocean's terrors a wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth than reality-or so people had thought. The clock read midnight when the hundred-foot wave hit the ship, rising from the North Atlantic out of the darkness.
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