The Black Tide
Authors: Hammond Innes
CONTENTS
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Karen and Trevor have seen too many oil tankers run aground near Land’s End, their poisonous cargo turning the waters black and suffocating all natural life for miles around. The Petros Jupiter is the latest devastating wreck, and tired of local committees that have no effect, Karen resolves on more drastic measures. It is left to her husband to unravel the tragedy and mystery that follow.
Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, on 15 July 1913 and educated at Cranbrook School, Kent. He left school aged eighteen, and worked successively in publishing, teaching and journalism. In 1936, in need of money in order to marry, he wrote a supernatural thriller,
The Doppelganger
, which was published in 1937 as part of a two-year, four book deal. In 1939 Innes moved to a different publisher, and began to write compulsively, continuing to publish throughout his service in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War.
Innes travelled widely to research his novels and always wrote from personal experience – his 1940s novels
The Blue Ice
and
The White South
were informed by time spent working on a whaling ship in the Antarctic, while
The Lonely Skier
came out of a post-war skiing course in the Dolomites. He was a keen and accomplished sailor, which passion inspired his 1956 bestseller
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
. The equally successful 1959 film adaptation of this novel enabled Innes to buy a large yacht, the
Mary Deare
, in which he sailed around the world for the next fifteen years, accompanied by his wife and fellow author Dorothy Lang.
Innes wrote over thirty novels, as well as several works of non-fiction and travel journalism. His thrilling stories of spies, counterfeiters, black markets and shipwreck earned him both literary acclaim and an international following, and in 1978 he was awarded a CBE. Hammond Innes died at his home in Suffolk on 10th June 1998.
Air Bridge
Attack Alarm
Atlantic Fury
Campbell’s Kingdom
Dead and Alive
Delta Connection
Golden Soak
High Stand
Isvik
Killer Mine
Levkas Man
Maddon’s Rock
Medusa
North Star
Solomons Seal
Target Antarctica
The Angry Mountain
The Big Footprints
The Blue Ice
The Doomed Oasis
The Land God Gave to Cain
The Last Voyage
The Lonely Skier
The Strange Land
The Strode Venturer
The Trojan Horse
The White South
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
Wreckers Must Breathe
To
Marjory and Ian
In admiration, for reasons that will be apparent to all their many friends
The Black Tide
Prelude to Pollution
1
It was New Year’s Eve. The last weather forecast had given wind south-westerly force 5 increasing to 6 with poor visibility in sleet or snow showers. Between Land’s End and
the Scillies, and already in to the northbound traffic lane, the tanker
Petros Jupiter
, with 57,000 tons of crude for the Llandarcy refinery in South Wales, made a long slow turn to starb’d, finally settling on to a course of 95°.
Her cargo had been resold late that afternoon, but delay in obtaining signature on certain documents had meant that it was not until 22.54 that her master was informed of the transaction and instructed to alter course for Rotterdam. Less than an hour later, at 23.47, the alarm bells sounded on the bridge.
Like many of the early VLCCs, the
Petros Jupiter
was just about worn out. She had been built for the Gulf Oil Development Company in the sixties, at the height of the Japanese expansion in shipbuilding. Her design life at maximum efficiency was about eight years and GODCO had sold her to a Greek company in 1975. She was now in her seventeenth year and, since rounding the Cape, steam leaks had been creating an almost permanent fog in the engine-room with the evaporator barely able to produce sufficient distilled water to replace the loss. The log would show that on two previous occasions loss of distilled water had been so great that the automatic cut-out on the single boiler had been tripped.
For ships taking the inside route between Land’s End and the Scilly Islands the northbound traffic lane is the one nearest to the mainland. But the
Petros Jupiter
had been on the outer edge of the lane when she had made the turn to starb’d, and being on a slow-steam voyage she was moving at barely 11½ knots through the water, so that when the alarm bells sounded and the single high pressure boiler cut out, bringing both the steam turbines to a halt, she was still not clear of Land’s End.
Engine-room staff immediately switched to auxiliary power to keep the alternators going and to provide electricity, but power to drive the ship could not be restored until the accumulation of leaks in the steam pipework had been repaired and the loss of distilled water for the boiler reduced. The ship gradually lost way until finally she lay broadside to the waves, rolling sluggishly.
There she remained for over two hours, during which time she drifted about three miles in the general direction of Land’s End. By then emergency repairs had been completed and at 02.04 she was under way again. And then, at 02.13, the unbelievable happened: the secondary reduction gear, the gear that drove the single propeller shaft, was stripped of its teeth. A journalist would write later that it had made a very expensive sound, which was the phrase used by Aristides Speridion, the Greek second engineer, who had been at that end of the engine-room when it happened.
With the secondary reduction gear useless, there was no way the
Petros Jupiter
could proceed and at 02.19 the master contacted Land’s End coastguard station on VHF to inform the watch officer of the situation and enquire about the availability of a tug.
The tanker was now lying helpless, wind-rode and wallowing heavily, her hull broadside to the seas, which were big and breaking. If she had been fully loaded she might still have survived, but half her cargo had been off-loaded at Corunna and she was riding quite high out of the water, her huge slab-sided hull acting as a giant sail.
Her position at this time was 8½ miles from Land’s End with the Longships light bearing 058°. The wind was still south-westerly, still increasing, and the barometer was falling.
The latest forecast was for SW 7 increasing to gale 8, veering later with a possible temporary increase to strong gale 9.
The coastguard officer on watch at Land’s End told a reporter later that at this point, in the early hours of the morning with the threat of another
Torrey Canyon
on his hands, he very much wished he still had his SAR radar capability so that he could have monitored the tanker’s drift. Unfortunately, the radar had been dismantled when the new coastguard station for the South West on Pendennis Point at the entrance to Falmouth had been completed. Even so, it did not take him long to figure out that the
Petros Jupiter
would need to have a tow line on board within the next four to five hours if she was not to be driven on to the rocks at Land’s End. He informed the master accordingly, warning him not to place too much reliance on his anchors and only to use them when the depth of water was shallow enough to give him a good scope of chain. At 02.23 he alerted the Falmouth station officer of the tanker’s situation enquiring, on behalf of the master, whether there was a tug stationed in the vicinity. Fortunately the Dutch tug based on Falmouth was in port.
Nevertheless, almost another hour went by before the master finally requested the coastguards to inform Lloyd’s that tug assistance was required. This delay may have been due to the
Petros Jupiter
contacting other ships in the vicinity. It would certainly explain why she did not speak direct on W/T with Telecom International at the Land’s End radio station, all their messages being routed through Land’s End coastguard station on VHF.