South Pacific Adventure Turns Into A Nightmare

First of three parts

``Here was my chance to do something exciting and adventurous.''

- Jim Nalepka

Last Sept. 30 four men were washed ashore on Great Barrier Island, long after most had given them up for dead. They had spent 119 days living in their upturned trimaran, the 40-foot Rose-Noelle. Yet the four - John Glennie, 49, the yacht's owner, and the crew, Rick Hellriegel, 32, Jim Nalepka, 39, and Phil Hoffman, 42 - were in such good physical condition that their story was, at first, greeted with skepticism. Hellriegel and Nalepka tell a story that is one of the great sagas of survival at sea.

JIM NALEPKA: There are 16,000 lakes where I live in Minnesota, but I'd never done any sailing. My friend Rick (Hellriegel) came over one morning. ``I'm going sailing to Tonga,'' he said, and he asked me if I wanted to go. I thought about it for four or five seconds. Then: ``Yes, I'll go. I'd love to go!''

At the Outward Bound school in New Zealand I was the catering director. I'd watch everybody else go on adventures and I'd say goodbye, see you in three days or a week, then I'd go back to planning a menu or cutting up potatoes. Here was my chance to do something exciting and adventurous, sailing in Tonga, warm weather and women in native skirts.

So I went to Picton and met John Glennie, the skipper. When I saw this boat - oh, it was like a Cadillac! It was a beautiful boat that was visually so impressive. The design was so classy and everything about it was meticulous. It had a TV set, satellite navigation, radar, wind generator, VHF and ham-radio sets, two stereos, everything imaginable in the kitchen: stainless-steel woks, even a barbecue. I thought, ``Boy, I'm going to be proud to be on this boat.''

RICK HELLRIEGEL: It was just getting into evening when we sailed out into Cook Strait. The wind was quite strong and we had to reduce sail. Even so we were doing 16 knots. It was the fastest we ever got. It's an amazing feeling hanging on to the helm of a sailing boat doing 16 knots. John and I were in the cockpit taking turns on the helm.

It was vigorous sailing, but the next day wasn't so bad. We could see the coast. The weather started to get bad that night. We threw out a drogue (a plastic drag) to try to slow us down. We weren't actually going that fast but with the size of the seas and the wind and rain and darkness it just felt too much for the crew. You couldn't see a thing. I couldn't even steer by the compass. I was steering by the feel of the wind, keeping it on the side of my face.

The conditions got so bad Phil (Hoffman) and I didn't really want to steer. I didn't feel confident on the helm. John steered for a couple of hours, then we decided to lie ahull, side on to the seas, just dropping the sails, lashing the wheel and leaving the boat to itself.

The sea was a heaving green mass streaked with white foam as the tops of the huge swells were blown off by the wind. The boat would ride most of the waves really well but the odd one would come through and break on us. There'd be a real crack and the boat would slew sideways, a feeling of shuddering across the water, doogga-doogga-doogga. It felt really unstable and we were being bashed hard.

In the morning I brought up the idea of putting out the sea anchor, a kind of parachute, to hold us bow on to the waves. Over the next 1 1/2 hours we struggled to get it set, but once we had it right the boat turned into the wind and the ride was quite comfortable.

We didn't slam sideways as we'd been doing. It held for four hours, then the motion of the boat changed and we turned side-on again. We looked outside and realized the sea anchor was only partly working. The only thing I knew about multi-hulls was that if you are side-on in those conditions, you don't want anything that will dig in and stop your sideways movement. You need to be able to skip over the water when the waves hit you. The sea anchor was not keeping us head-on any longer, but it was enough to hold us up when the waves hit us so that we wouldn't move sideways as freely. I wanted to get rid of it, but John said we'd had trouble putting it out, and there was a danger of getting our feet or fingers crushed. He thought we should leave it out and I agreed. With hindsight, we should have gotten rid of the thing.

JIM: Every so often a big wave would hit and catapult me off the bed and slam me into the floor. Rick and I were on a double bunk, so whoever was on the outside would get thrown out of bed.

Meanwhile, Phil was getting very nervous. He'd been married for years, had two nice kids I'd met before we left, and it was his first time out of New Zealand, so it was an adventure for him. He was just a nice, really pleasant person. But during the first three days he more than any of us was panicking. He kept saying, ``We're going to flip, we're going to flip over.''

He suffered from claustrophobia and he was wedged into this bunk that was like a coffin. He'd look out of the window and say, ``I can't take it anymore, I've got to get out of here.'' He wanted John to call a helicopter to come and pick him up. John said he didn't want to use the radio unless it was really an emergency because he wasn't licensed to use it. And John didn't think it was an ``emergency.''

RICK: We woke up at first light on June 4. The wind had dropped. I could just see through the portholes. The white streaks and the foam on the sea had gone. The waves weren't breaking anymore, but the seas were still enormous. John was up. We looked at each other and said, ``Today's the day we can go sailing again, we can get on our way.'' We decided to sail off after we'd had breakfast.

At that moment I felt that familiar sensation. The boat lurched, there was that split second before the wave hit that always puts fear into you. I can actually hear it. It sounded different from all the others. It was bigger and louder. It just went boom! In my mind the sea anchor stopped the boat from skidding sideways and it just went up and over without any hesitation at all, and I still don't know what size the wave was, what it looked like.

JIM: I went through a tornado as a kid. It took our whole block. Before the tornado hits it gets real quiet and eerie and then, wham! This wave reminded me of that. It gave almost no sign that it was coming, then wham, it just hit, hard and fast, and before we knew it we were upside-down and our worst fears had materialized in a second.

I didn't know what to do. Water started filling up the cabin. I asked Rick how much it would fill up and he said, ``I'm not sure.'' The water kept coming and coming. ``What are we going to do now?'' It reached our chests. Then it stopped. It was dark.

When we turned upside-down, Phil got trapped in that little coffin where he was sleeping and he was screaming. I think John pulled him out. I barely remember. Maybe with us all yelling, Phil found the direction and worked toward the noise, because when the boat went over he had to get out underneath the dinette. He was actually wedged in there with the water rising and he was a big guy with claustrophobia. According to John, he panicked so much he kicked out the doors of the companionway, which opened up the hull for everything to be sucked out. John held it against him for four months.

I looked around for John. He knew what to do. He told us to grab everything we could and throw it back into the aft cabin. We were grabbing apples and sleeping bags and anything we found floating we thought might be useful and throwing them into the cabin.

When I looked back everything was gone. All I salvaged of my gear was what I had on.

RICK: We worked hard for hours, filling in the bottom of the aft cabin, raising the level above the water. Drawers, sleeping bags, life jackets, an old mattress, cupboard doors, anything that would take up the space. The aft cabin was separated from the main cabin by an opening so small that when the boat was up the right way you had to get on your knees to get into it. John had a double berth in there. We were all working inside the boat. No one had been outside. That was really lucky. If that wave had come an hour later when maybe we were going to try and sail off, there might have been people outside.

We knew the boat was going to float. Everything I'd read suggested that trimarans filled up so far, then floated. John was quite certain it would float.

The night before when I was worried we might overturn I'd gone to the cupboard and grabbed the electronic position-indicating radio beacon (epirb) and put it in a waterproof bag. When the boat went over, the first thing I grabbed was that bag with the epirb in it.

I thought, ``What a bummer this is, but we're going to get out of here in a few days, we've got the epirb; it's the one thing we really need.'' We were cold, wet and miserable - but not afraid. As soon as we got that sleeping platform above the water we just cuddled together, lying all in the same direction, like spoons.

JIM: We're talking of a living area the size of a queen-size mattress, with four men on it. Even on that first night we argued over a space to sleep in, who was taking up the most space.

Those were the worst periods for me, when I was really scared. The waves were hitting the boat and I was worried that we might tip over again. We went through a lot more storms in those first weeks. If the boat came up the right way while we were all in the aft cabin we might never find the exit. We'd be trapped. All that gear coming down and the water pouring in. We'd all get disoriented. We'd all get stuck.

John kept saying, ``Never, we will never turn right-side up.'' But he always said we wouldn't flip over in the first place. It was one of our worst fears and I didn't believe him. Twelve hours a day it would be pitch black and I'd be in that corner position in another storm with waves smacking into us - what if we turned right-side up? All this stuff would be on top of us. How would I find the hole to get out?

I still looked to John because he was the only one who seemed to know what was going on, where things were, what to do. He had all these little compartments and lockers and so much gear on board that we were still taking things out two months later. He'd just dive into a locker and say, ``Look what I found,'' or ``God, where has that been?'' He never seemed to know exactly where everything was. He was kind of spaced out all the time.

That first week we all just sweated so much! Our perspiration gathered on the ceiling and would drip down as if we were in a cave. We were still drinking plenty of liquid - after that we started to ration the water.

RICK: We concentrated on getting the epirb to work. ``That's all we have to do,'' we thought, ``make sure the signal gets out and we'll be all right.''

Phil and John went up to the bow and cut a hole, just above the waterline, about a meter square. They used a chisel and hammer to break through the fiberglass and foam of the hull, then a keyhole saw.

We weren't sure the beacon would transmit inside a fiberglass core. We clamped it onto the inside of the hole, with the aerial pointing out. Then we flicked a little switch and an intermittent light came on straight away, as it was supposed to. It was transmitting. It was just a matter of living then, waiting for our rescuers to home in on the signal.

We decided that first hole was useless to us for getting in and out of the boat and we wanted to be able to sit on the keel to keep a lookout. We cut a second one, just outside our aft cabin. You had to be a bit of a gymnast to get through it and there were always sharp edges because it was fiberglass.

Then a few days after we got the beacon going we found a V-sheet, a bright orange international emergency distress signal with a black ``V'' painted on it. We tied it over the hull, open to the sky. We figured it was just tomorrow - tomorrow someone would see us. We had no idea we were going to have to last for months.

JIM: We all thought, ``This is all we need.'' This plus the epirb. A plane will spot us for sure. We kept reinforcing each other: ``As soon as they see the V-sheet we're back home again.'' Then, as the days went on, and the wind kept blowing, the thing slowly started to rip apart and soon there was nothing left of it. Then the epirb stopped transmitting, the batteries went flat, the light went out. Our biggest chance of being found was gone.

(Copyright, 1990, Jim Nalepka. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.)

TOMORROW IN THE SEATTLE TIMES: Thrown together, the men bicker, weaken and lose faith.