Cyclone

This is the story of a ship and 39 Australian seafarers who fought to save her from the fury of a tropical cyclone
By crew member Frank Finch

When the Adelaide Steamship Company vessel SS Ulooloo called for a full crew after being laid up for a complete overhaul I signed on as bosun. There were 10 able seamen, one ordinary seaman and one deck boy.

We loaded the last bagged sugar in Bowen, North Queensland. It was March 1955. With reports of impending cyclones in the area, precautions had been taken and extra mooring lines run out to hold us alongside the wharf.

With 4200 tons of sugar for Sydney the 31-year-old Ulooloo slipped her moorings and we steamed southwards at an extraordinarily slow rate of knots, the poor quality coal in the bunkers slowing the ship. We cleared the panoramic Whitsunday passage on Sunday morning and sailed on through the majestic islands of the North Queensland coast. The weather was fine and the sun shone brightly from a blue tropical sky.

But Captain Hartrick was receiving reports of a cyclone heading our way. Each report gave a different, incorrect, position. The first accurate report was not received until 6am the following morning.

On Sunday evening we headed for shelter, anchoring in the lee of St Bees Island, in the Cumberland group. There seemed little cause for alarm. Work and watch keeping continued throughout the ship, with only a feeling of irritation at the delay.

By Monday morning the wind and sea had risen considerably and when I reported to the chief officer, Derrick Norton, for the days work list, I was told the cyclone was now 150 miles to the south. It was due to reach us at noon.

Extra lashings were secured across the hatch tarpaulins to prevent them from billowing up. Everything movable was lashed down and when all was secured the deck crowd retired aft out of the weather, standing by.

At 12.30 pm I was listening to the radio news when Ces Burchill, a trimmer, ran down from the poop deck warning

that we were drifting very close to a large island.

In the next few seconds everything happened so quickly. An engineer on deck had also noticed us drifting and had attracted the attention of the lookout watch-keeper on the lower bridge. The same lookout man had five minutes earlier reported what looked like a mountain materialising out of the misty rain and clouds.

We all raced on deck to see a towering mountain, by now only a ships length away. The wind had increased to a howling gale and the heavy sea and rain was tearing into us as we stood spellbound at the awesome sight.

Then, an urgent message from the bridge for the bosun to heave up the anchor. I raced forward and with the assistance of the 3rd mate and stand-by man, put the windlass into gear and started to heave up the anchor.

It was only then that we discovered the anchor was gone...

Now only a few feet from the rocks, we could hear the loud roar of the surf breaking on the shore. Big seas were crashing over the Ulooloo. We lashed ourselves to windlass break handles and hung on, mesmerised by the sight all around us. Just off the port bow we could see a small white beach. But if the ship foundered now, there was little chance of survival in the huge pounding seas.

The captain rang 'full astern' on the telegraph. For some minutes the ship hovered undecided and then slowly she drew away

After securing what was left of the port anchor chain, we were called off the fo'c'sle head, much to my relief. I was wearing a T-shirt and the rain pelted down with such force that my neck was red raw.

Then we learnt it was not St. Bees island we were nearly wrecked on, but an island called Scawfell, nine and a half miles east of St. Bees. That's how far we had drifted after losing our anchor.

We continued to go astern for the next two hours, while the weather completely closed in. Visibility was no more than a few yards in any direction. It was impossible to see land and work out our position on the chart, so the captain could only surmise where we were. The charts showed many islands and reefs in the area. We were surrounded by danger everywhere. The barometer reading was getting lower by the minute, and the wind stronger. A losing battle was being fought down below in the stokehold. As the seas came crashing over the Ulooloo, pouring down the ventilator system, the water mixed with the coal was being fed to the fires, and steam pressure was dropping.

In mid afternoon, No.1 and then No. 2 hatch canvas tarpaulin covers blew out. The deck crew ventured out to replace torn out wooden wedges and relash the tarpaulins. With huge seas breaking over the decks, smashing everything, this was a hazardous job.

Miraculously, no one was washed overboard or seriously hurt. Men were being knocked down, then picking themselves up to continue working furiously at lashing down the hatch covers. Cuts and bruises could be worried about later. As we were making our way off the deck, a tremendous sea broke over us, sending seamen sprawling in all directions. I finished up with one AB in the scuppers on the port side with our feet dangling through the overflow scupper doors that let the water run back over the side.

The chief steward standing by inside the steel watertight door opened up and pulled us inside, a little shaken up, bruised and soaking wet. With foredeck secured, we made our way to the safety of the lower bridge.

It was now 4pm and the full fury of the cyclone was upon us. Horizontal rain hit with such force that it cut the exposed skin. The barometer had fallen to 28.33. (959.3m'bars) and the wind was shrieking at 100 miles an hour, the wind and rain destroying everything in its way. Bending steel bars, stripping paint from the funnel down to bare metal. The whole day had gone crazy.

Most of the seamen had made it to the shelter of the poop deck, before the full force of the wind struck. However there were three of us left standing on the lower bridge, waiting our turn to dash aft. We noticed No. 3 hatch's tarpaulin breaking loose on the starboard side. Without hesitation, able seaman Keith Akins jumped down onto the hatch and crawled along on his stomach to the damaged blown out corner. The aft deck was now much worse than the foredeck. With massive seas continually breaking over us, it was just one big swimming pool. Several times we lost sight of him as the seas crashed down, only to see him reappear and continue to hammer home the wedges holding down the tarp.

The cyclone continued its havoc with terrible force. Canvas awnings were either blown away or torn to shreds. One section of the starboard wing of the bridge was torn away as if made of matchsticks. Wheelhouse windows were smashed, broken glass everywhere. The crew mess-room, sleeping quarters and officers' cabins were all flooded and reduced to shambles. Worst of all was the damage done to both our lifeboats. Neither boat could be launched. The rope falls were shredded and useless. Canvas covers on the boats were blown away, wooden awning spars and steel stanchion poles damaged, split and bent. No one could stand upright on the boat deck without being blown over the side. Such was the force.

The engine room and stokehold were flooded, and in our waterlogged quarters and cabins hundreds of sea birds were now perched. Many died as they crashed aboard. We tried to save the others but most died during the night.

Debris floated everywhere in our living quarters and the bridge timberwork was later found floating in the ocean.

Darkness was closing in and the storm showed no sign of easing. We were losing steam rapidly, surrounded by invisible reefs and islands. Our situation seemed hopeless. Only a miracle could save us from foundering. Several ships would hear our SOS, but not one could get to us, all fighting to save themselves.

There was little more that we deck crowd could do except wait.

The men adjourned to wherever they could find safety -- bathrooms, toilets, the galley and in the cook's side house working space. With the danger of hitting a reef imminent, it was unsafe to venture down into flooded quarters. But "Lofty" Jones, a Kiwi, amazed me when I found him resting peacefully in his bunk with knee deep water lapping around him. My cabin was flooded and one hell of a mess with two dead sea birds floating around and around in the swirling water. One live seagull was perched on top of my shaving cabinet. It was one of the very few birds able to fly away when the cyclone had passed.

I cleared some debris from the cabin and sat down. With water swirling around my knees I thought of the past several hours. I guess I must have been talking to a photo of my wife and two young boys and lost track of time. A voice from the doorway brought me back to the present: "Don't sit there Frank, come and join the boys."

In the galley I asked fireman Ken Setches how things were down in the stokehold. Ken replied. "It's sheer murder. The stokehold is flooded with waist-high water and every time the ship rolls, the water washes the coal out of the pockets (little doors) to the coal bunkers." He added that they couldn't keep going much longer; the port boiler was already shut down, and with water washing around it was a wonder the boilers hadn't already exploded; the engine room would be evacuated.

The bilge pump in the engine room wasn't working so we organised a bucket brigade. But the ship's roll hampered us so much we couldn't even get started. The pumps had been blocked by an estimated 60 tons of loose coal. Able seaman Bobby Faucet went down into the stokehold and with a fireman, began filling buckets and hooking them on for us to pull up. But with the roll of the ship, we spilled every bucket of water and coal over him. Bob came out of the stokehold looking like one of those Black and White Minstrels.

I then went down into the stokehold. I thought I was in hell. Firemen were trying to coal the fires in water swirling around their waists, with a temperature of 80 degrees and the water getting hotter. The firemen looked like demons as the steaming mist rose in clouds around them.

Large chunks of coal, some two feet in diameter, crashed back and forth across the stokehold plates. Firemen jumped on to the escape ladder, steam pipe casings, anywhere they could, to evade the coal as it came crashing by amidst a swirl of water. Then they would leap down to continue firing the boilers, one man opening the fire doors, the other throwing large lumps of coal into the furnace. Some men were burnt and gashed in the process.

Alan Keating, the 2nd engineer, asked me was it possible to rig something up to stop the coal in its mad passage across the plates. I asked an AB to give me a hand. Together we crawled across the wind swept boat deck, littered with broken and smashed awning spars, torn canvas and tangled wire everywhere, to a pile of spare wooden hatch boards. We selected one nine-foot board and dragged it down through the engine room out into the stokehold. I will never forget the look on the old chief engineers face as he stood at the controls, water around his waist, as we waded past, floating a hatch board.

We rigged the board across the stokehold plates and wedged it hard up between the two boilers. The other end we lashed up against the escape ladder. I have never felt so scared in all my life, not even in my war years, as I crouched that night between the two boilers, watching the steaming water lapping the bottom of those boilers. We worked rapidly in seawater becoming unbearably hot, and steam swirled around us in the dim lights that were growing weaker by the hour.

We were only too pleased to get the hell out of there and back on deck. The hatch board was not to hold against the force of the water and it was soon adrift. We tried wedging it again but the water was too strong.

At 10.30 that night the port boiler was shut down, and there was just enough steam on the starboard boiler to turn the propeller, ever so slowly. The stokehold plates were all lifting and fire rakes, shovels and slice bars were careering wildly back and forth with the rush of water and coal. Most of the firemen had lost their work boots but they kept working like the devil to keep enough steam to run the generator for lighting.

The engine room was now flooded to a depth of four feet; engine room plates were also lifting. The rushing water had torn off the asbestos lagging around the boilers and it was impossible to clear the pipes to the bilge pumps. The steam cock of the water indicator blew, making one hell of a noise, adding to the confusion.

Elsewhere, the three mates were on the bridge with the captain all through the cyclone, spending many weary hours peering into the wind, rain and darkness, looking for the reefs and islands that they knew were in the vicinity.

Light-hearted relief came in the form of my good shipmate, Jimmy Calder. Jim sat at the wheel of the Ulooloo at the height of the cyclone with the wind whistling through the broken windows. The Captain said to Jim, "Well Calder, things don't look too bright." Jim's reply was to break out in song in his strong Scottish accent: "It's a brave man that dies in the morning." Captain Hartrick cracked up, he thought that was great.

At 1.30 am on Tuesday March 8th, the fight to save Ulooloo seemed to have been lost. The 1st mate, Derek Norton, sent for me. "Bosun," he said, "do we have an empty 44 gallon drum back aft"? I replied that we did. "I want you to make an improvised sea anchor with the drum and stream it over the bow attaching the for'ard spring wire to it. Also put over all the mooring lines on a bight, to drag through the water." I reminded him we also had a brand new mooring line under the fo'c'sle head. There was no use for it if we didn't survive. "Use it as well," he said.

We cut the top off a drum, shackled a short wire bridle to it, then dragged and carried the drum to the fo'c'sle head. We were being blown side ways and losing the drum in the seas breaking over the deck, retrieving it again before it too went back over the side with the outgoing water.

We shackled the drum bridle to a 3-inch wire rope and with a mighty heave threw the drum over the bow into the boiling sea, letting it pay out for several hundred feet. All our mooring lines were then thrown over and made fast on deck. The drum and the ropes took the full force of the water as Ulooloo drifted through that stormy cyclonic night. It worked. The ship's head came a full point up-wind, which slowed the drift of Ulooloo and its 4000 odd tons of sugar.

It was at this point that everyone aboard realised that nothing more could be done. Human effort had nothing more to offer. We all gathered aft in the safety of the ship's galley, adjusted our life jackets and secured short lashings to our waists, for securing our bodies to floating debris. The ship's foundering seemed inevitable.

Hope, that magnificent yet invisible thing, deeply stowed in the hearts of men, was at its lowest ebb. Now, we had to sit and face adversity, that cruel inexplicable demon. Each of us transmitted the silent, unmistakable knot of understanding that now was the time to recognise our fate. To accept it meant death, to defy it meant priceless life.

At 3am on Tuesday all lights failed, except a few poor emergency lights from a 12-volt battery. Darkness was the most demoralising factor of all. The waiting, just sitting there in the dark, blind, but hearing the rushing water in the now evacuated dead engine room and stokehold.

The last two firemen to come up out of the flooded stokehold, Leo Carr and Bluey Miller, had to admit defeat. The 2nd engineer, Alan Keating, who had been injured earlier, said: "It is not humanly possible to do any more."

Several firemen were burnt and cut and all were now barefoot.

Just as daylight was breaking, while we sat, soaking wet, soggy blankets wrapped around us in a vain attempt to keep warm, a red glare, and then another, lit up the stormy misty sky around the Ulooloo. Distress rockets were being fired at half hourly intervals. We had received three answers to our radio and SOS signals. The rockets were fired to guide any ship coming to our rescue. But they were not seen.

Finally, daylight. And the wind and sea had eased. A new world. Miraculously, we had seen it through. No one will ever know how or why. As the weather cleared, we saw we were completely surrounded by islands. And we were practically in the same position from where we'd started to drift. We had missed islands and reefs by the barest of margins.

About this time and in poor visibility, we sighted the powerful Dutch tug Rode Zee racing to our rescue. By a million to one chance, the tug was sailing from Hong Kong to Sydney when the cyclone forced her to shelter in the lee of Blacksmith Island, 70 miles distant. However, on hearing our distress calls, the Dutch Captain, Cornelious Kalkman, immediately ordered the tug out from her safe anchorage. Now as she came up under our bow, we could only be thankful for that Dutch crew who put their own lives at risk to come and save ours.

As I turn back the pages to that dark and stormy nightmare, I can only wonder at how lucky we all were. Had one of the world's most powerful tugs not been nearby to answer our SOS, this story would surely have had an unhappy ending. As it was, one small vessel did sink with the loss of seven lives.

Ulooloo is an Aboriginal word meaning 'permanent watercourse'. SS Ulooloo certainly lived up to her name during that stormy night 50 years ago as thousands of tons of ocean rolled over her decks.