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Book review:

This is an amazing story of bad luck and subsequent survival aboard an upside-down trimaran east of New Zealand during the winter of 1989. 

John Glennie, the author and owner/builder of the multihull Rose-Noelle, planned to sail through the Pacific Islands with his first port of call Tonga, some 1200km north east of the Marlborough Sounds, from where he sets sail.

Through a combination of bad management and bad luck, John leaves port with an inexperienced crew and delivers them into the teeth of a typical winter gale. Winds are blowing 30 to 40 knots, gusting to 50, and it does not take long, at all, to create gigantic seas. 

1988 and 1989 were La Nina years and all throughout the autumn of 1989, weather had been poor. There were few 'weather-windows' available to sailors planning an escape to the tropics. Most of the cruising fleet remained in port, waiting for an opportunity to head north in better weather.

Just 24 hours out of port and in the middle of a winter gale, John's inexperienced crew panics. They refuse to run downwind with the waves, demanding instead to set a sea-anchor and lie head to wind. John, the skipper, has never used this drogue before and within hours the parachute has partly collapsed, twisted around its nylon retrieval cord. Rose-Noelle lies a-hull, or broadside, to the advancing army of waves. As the trimaran slips down the face of every liquid mountain, the boat's increased speed forces the partly-collapsed parachute anchor to open, suddenly dragging the boat's bow into the guts of each approaching wave. The whole darned thing makes for a most uncomfortable night.

"I don't know if any of us really slept. Around 4am the wind began to drop and the fear on board began to evaporate with the diminishing sounds of the storm. The waves were no longer topped by boiling white foam and the crew thought that was a good sign ... By six 'clock we had had enough of being at the mercy of the weather. We decided to have breakfast and get underway again. But privately I knew that the seas would not die as quickly as they had come up. Huge waves can roll for miles and suddenly join together to form one massive wall of rolling water, 9 to 12 metres high. It was then we heard the roar of that final wave, which set us neatly on our heads and continued on its way. Our lives would never be the same again."

For the next 119 days , the skipper and crew of the Rose-Noel drifted at the mercy of the elements. They survived on stores within the boat and only when they dwindled resorted to serious survival skills - like catching rainwater, fishing, even collecting crustaceans growing on the upturned hull. Relations between those on board were always tense and helped to create a little hell. If anyone thought some quite time on the high seas might solve their personal problems, they were wrong. 

But, oddly enough, their time on the edge of life was, in fact, a beautiful experience - although only skipper John realised it. Unlike his crew, John and his brother David had seven years of cruising experience, sailing throughout the Pacific aboard an Arthur Piver-designed trimaran during the late 1960s. From the beginning of their ordeal John realises they will survive, even if that means many months at sea. 

The others fear death from the start, and yet it is only when they return that life becomes a burden: One crewman finds a tumor in his brain that had been in remission returns with a vengeance. He also finds his asthma returns, whereas at sea it never bothered him. Another crewman, no doubt changed by his experience, fails to maintain a relationship with his dearly beloved girlfriend 

Despite the drama, Rose-Noel drifts back toward New Zealand, washing up on Great Barrier Island just east of Auckland. The crew manages to swim to shore on an isolated beach before Rose-Noelle breaks up and sinks. After spending a wet night in the bush our intrepid explorers break into an abandoned house, stocked with food and clothes. After a luxurious meal, hot bath and warm, dry clothes, they rest and later find a nearby house with a phone, break in and call the police.

Unbelievable, but true. This tale reads like something out of the 1800s, except for the fact that it takes place on a multihull and mentions words like sat-nav, GPS and EPIRB.

Of course the big question on everyone's lips at the time was - how did the Rose-Noelle make it BACK to New Zealand, when it should have drifted to South America?

Shortly after the ghost-like return of all on board, New Zealand Yachting magazine asked the Auckland Weather Office to track Rose-Noelle's path based on weather reports. Only the wind was taken into account, not the currents. Anyway, the New Zealand Oceanographic Institute noted that prevailing currents in the area of Rose Noelle's drift were heavily influenced by prevailing winds. 

Because of time constraints the study was limited, but the resulting drift chart is fascinating and is shown above.

Forecaster Greg Reeve took on the job of plotting a rough course for the 119 day drift starting from the capsize position on June 4 and basing his chart on a midday average of the wind direction and speed in the area. Reeve decided to make an educated guess at the boat's drift and came up with an average of a half a knot per hour for a 20 knot wind.

"He laid out a pile of weather charts dating back to June and sat down to work. As the line of track progressed, Reeve thought to himself, 'no way can these guys have ended up back in New Zealand'. The line was heading east, straight across to South America. By his calculation we should have still been on our way to Chile.

"It wasn't until he had worked for hours that Reeve realised he was mistakenly using weather charts from the previous year. Cursing himself for wasted work, he repeated the exercise using 1989 weather information and this time the line of drift looked quite different."

The key to this change was the fact that in 1988/89 the Southern Oscillation Index moved from an El Nino, or weak trade-winds pattern to La Nina, in which south-east trades in the southern hemisphere are much stronger and extend further south.

Rose Noel drifted initially to the north east, with prevailing westerlies, typical of that part of the southern ocean, and especially for that time of year. But as it clawed to the north, it picked up prevailing south-easterlies and easterlies, which delivered the boat and crew to safety.

As if to dispel the knockers of Rose-Noelle's unusual path, cruising friends of John Glennie dropped a message in a bottle over the side of their yacht in the vicinity of Rose-Noelle's capsize, three weeks after that tragic event. These friends were also on their way to Tonga for a winter's cruise in the sun, but had delayed their departure because of poor weather. Both the bottle and Rose Noelle washed ashore within nine days of each other, and only 50 miles apart.

Thank god for La Nina, say some!

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