Storm surge rages over point at Cape May in recent Northeaster (Andrew Mills, The Star Ledger). 

By John Townley

I was raised as an only child aboard the 56-foot motor-sailor Escape, home-schooled, and one spring in the early 1950s while sailing northward off Cape May we ran into a serious gale and began taking green water over the bow. As a child, I thought this an enormously fun adventure, and never noticed my mother's white knuckles clinging to the rails as she lashed me down in the cockpit, fearing for our lives. Trusting our Graymarine diesel to push us through, I expect my parents' outlook changed distinctly for the worse when the steering pin broke while trying to make port, leaving us wallowing helpless in the storm. My dad set the jib to keep her into the wind and then, naturally, discovered we had no replacement cotter pin. Davey Jones loomed. All too classically, as if in a movie, my mom actually produced a hairpin and my dad used it to fix the problem, just in time to make the dreadful right angle of the channel between breaking shoals into Cape May. After a few more close calls with hurricanes and being stranded high and dry in the Bahamas, my parents swallowed the anchor and we moved ashore.

#1: 56-foot motorsailor Escape escaped foundering, despite broken steering pin...

But this was to be only the first time I was delivered from the jaws of death at exactly this spot. Many years later, in 1989, I found myself crewing aboard the 125-ft Baltic schooner Alexandria (nee Lindo)on her way to Maine in January to get her rotten stem repaired (the yards gave a discount in this unlikely time of year). As we headed out of the Delaware River and into the Atlantic, it happened again. 

My journal the morning after describes it first-hand:

While I was still trying to stow flying objects below, there was a magically uneasy moment when everyone was trying to figure just what was going on, the crew from the forecastle having just been literally washed out of their bunks. Then everyone went into action to remedy the situation, half on deck to get sail going, half to figure out the pump situation. Apparently, the engine pump had failed and then the main pump had clogged, which made it seem like the bilge was being drained when it wasn’t (the ship is in a very leaky condition right now, one of the repairs she is scheduled for).

A third gasoline deck pump was rigged, which helped, and the manual pump was manned – which had been rusted frozen for ages and only yesterday George decided it should be put back in action, if only for a shanty or two! Meanwhile we altered course due East straight out to sea to get into deeper water where the swells would be longer and not toss the ship about so crazily. So we proceeded entirely under sail for a while, the engine being used entirely for powering the pump, apparently in good enough working order now to keep the engine room from flooding. Steering was a little dodgy with the wind and swell strong on the starboard quarter, but not a serious problem (wind 15-20, swell about 3 feet – not bad, just at exactly the wrong pace & direction). At no time did I ever feel really in danger, just that necessary measures need to be taken expeditiously. Not so for a trawler I heard on the radio while at the helm – she also had bilge pumps out with no backup and the Coast Guard was racing to rescue her.

Author fiddles as Capt. Leigh Ross walks the deck of Alexandria, after his swift actions saved her...(photo: George Salley)

The Grim Reaper was foiled again, Davey Jones delayed. And I was in much greater danger than my journal's bravado suggested or I even knew. Alexandria was later to sink off Cape Hatteras of almost identical causes, fortunately without me on board.

Finally, only a couple of years later, I crewed with the same captain (Leigh Ross) taking a little, brand-new 29-foot sloop from Annapolis to Mystic on what turned out to be a multiple-disaster ridden voyage. Our troubles began as we were headed out at night underneath the Chesapeak Bay Bridge-Tunnel with captain, mate and owner all beyond functioning from seasickness, leaving me to singlehand her into a light headwind through a dense fog and rising seas. Fortunately (I believed for the moment) she was an all-electric vessel with an automatic pilot which held course while I handled the lines, tacking back and forth in the narrow channel between shoals ominously marked "Unexploded Ordinance" and dodging incoming container ships. It was an adventure, until the batteries gave out and everything on the boat stopped working - no engine, no automatic pilot, even the electric head went out. It was all I could do at three in the morning to turn her around and sail wing-and-wing back into Norfolk harbor.

A day later, with new batteries installed, we were happily cruising farther up the coast when the head blew up - the wonderful electric device had overpumped the holding tank, blown out the valves and hoses, and you can imagine the rest. There is nothing like being in close quarters with three other people all covered in raw sewage. There is truly no place to run.

It took the rest of the day to clean up, make repairs, and finally recover at least in part from the smell, and the following afternoon found us in better spirits off Cape May in a brisk, changeable wind out of the west (20-30 knots) on a choppy sea surrounded by spotty thundershowers mixed with sunshine. It really did seem like fairly harmless weather - small craft warnings, for sure, but ideal for a racing skipper. Captain Ross decided this was a fine time to bend on full sail and "see what she could do." The owner and mate agreed - but I had some serious reservations.

What I believed I saw around us was a weather pattern recognizable from tales in sailing ship journals spanning the centuries. It was the seemingly-innocuous setup for the serious danger of windsheer, long-called the "white squall." Don't confuse it with the movie of the same name, in which a ship foundered in a serious, first-rate gale. Traditional white squalls as often as not come out of an almost clear blue sky, just as you pass under a brief thundershower. The sudden downdraft there, accompanied by a white blast of descending rain (a great danger to airliners landing or taking off as well as ships), can flatten you.

That can be perilous enough, but the real danger is it can hold you down until you are swamped - a fate that befell the tall ship Marques off Bermuda during the 1984 tall ship races, sinking her and drowning nineteen of her crew. She was coming out of the edge of an overnight gale and had the double bad luck of hitting a pair of rogue waves on top of a downdraft. Her helmsman Philip Sefton, 22, later described, "Suddenly a heavy gust of wind pushed the Marques down on its starboard side." At the same instant "a freakish wave of incredible force and size," slammed the ship broadside, pushing its masts farther beneath the surging water. A second wave pounded the ship as it went down. The Marques filled with water and sank in less than a minute. Most of the crew were trapped as they slept below deck.

I remembered the Marques survivors' all-too-recent description of the weather that day, as well as other accounts I had read from tall ships in her vicinity, and Cape May's skies sure looked similar. But, my worries were dismissed by my shipmates, and on went every sail aboard.

#3: A modern sloop nearly identical to ours which didn't fare so well, washed ashore at Cape May... (Cape May Times)

Heeling well-over, with main, jib, and spinnaker set, we began to pass under the edge of a flat line squall and then to everyone's surprise but mine suddenly found ourselves with mast, booms, and all sail in the water, lying flat on our starboard side. As we lay supine with sheets locked up in the blocks, it turned out that not one of the four-person crew possessed a proper sailor knife with which to cut away the sheets so we could right ourselves as we took on ever more water. The one time at sea I failed to have my trusty Green River knife on my belt, and this had to be it. As I hung onto the port railing and made my way forward on the side of the cabin towards the bow where the owner was grappling with the jib, I remembered that deep in my pocket was a small Swiss Army knife. I opened it and passed it up to him out on the boom, where he cut away the jib and spinnaker sheets. After that it was only a moment until the small lifesaving utensil made its way back to the cockpit to dispense with the main sheet, and shortly we were successfully cut away and righted, booms flailing, sails and rigging flapping, in time to bail her out, with the squall behind us and the sun shining.

The whole event lasted only a minute or so, though it seemed like an eternity at the time as we clambered over the mast and stays and struggled to disentangle ourselves. In retrospect, it seems like a minor adventure, but had we remained down much longer, it might have come out much differently. The unpredictable waters off Cape May, where wind, swell, tide, and sea bottom conspire to produce a matrix of potential trouble, have seen a lot of minor incidents turn to tragedy. It is a place to take extra care, especially in the spring as the prevailing conditions become particularly fickle.

It was my last near miss off Cape May, and I still have a lovely blue Swiss Army rigging knife that Victorinox gave me as a souvenir for relaying them that tale ("How A Swiss Army Knife Saved My Life"). Well, three's the charm, and although the south Jersey shore isn't my favorite cruising ground, I won't hesitate to traverse those waters again, albeit with greater care. After all, as they say, if you're born to hang, you'll never drown...