When Good Waves Go Rogue
Early in the morning on Sept. 11, 1995, the cruise liner the Queen Elizabeth 2, on its way from Southampton to New York, was being lashed by the tail end of Hurricane Luis, somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland. As if sensing its imminent demise, Luis had galvanized one last time, twitching to life and whipping the North Atlantic into a torrent of 130 mph winds and 40-foot waves. None of this caused undue concern for the ship’s captain, Ronald Warwick, a 30-year sailing veteran well acquainted with rough seas. Luis was hardly unexpected; since leaving England, the ship had steadily tracked the storm’s path. “This was fair game for us,” the retired Commodore recalls, from his home in Somerset, England. “We are a transatlantic liner.”
At dinner, Warwick had advised the ship’s passengers that things might get a bit rough during the night, and to secure any loose possessions in their cabin. He then did what any captain would do in heavy seas. With the ship steered into the waves, Warwick slowed it to a few knots. “Heaving to” it is called, the idea being to ride out the waves as gently as possible, while maintaining just enough speed to maintain steering control. Far below the ship’s bridge, where winds roared and whipped against the armored windows, a handful of passengers held casual vigil in a bar.
Just after 2 a.m., Warwick and his officers suddenly saw a surging monster of water and convulsive white froth in the near distance. “If you’re standing on the bridge of the QE2,” he says, “your height of eye above sea level is 90 feet.” From what they could discern through the rain-soaked darkness, the crest of the looming wave was as high as the bridge itself. Warwick, who says he had never encountered anything so large in the ocean before, said it was as if they were heading into the “white cliffs of Dover.”
A minute or so later, the wave crashed across the forward deck of the QE2. “We didn’t go over the top of it,” says Warwick. “We virtually went through it.” A series of judders shot through the ship. The wall of water crashed down on the ship’s deck, buckling its steel plates some 18 inches. Still, this was all within the operating bounds of the ship. “We weren’t knocked off our feet or anything,” he says. “Most passengers were in bed.”
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