Article February 6, 2012 Issue

Safe at sea

By Nils-Ivar Lindqvist

First published in the Swedish online Herald of Christian Science in October 2011.

In 1990, when I finished my career as sea pilot on the Swedish east coast, I was offered an assignment to take a ship from Gothenberg in Sweden to Darwin, Australia. As I hadn’t been on the high seas for a long while, I asked a friend who was an experienced captain if he would sign on as captain, allowing me to sign on as chief mate, and he accepted.

We loaded a full cargo in Bremerhaven, Germany. It was 1,600 tons of ammonium nitrate, intended for mining in the north of Australia. We departed in mid-January, a time that is known for storms, and were confronted by increasingly strong southwesterly winds in the North Sea. We had an excavator lashed down as deck cargo, and this large and heavy piece began to move in the strong wind and heavy seas.

I was on duty before midnight as we were passing Greenwich, about 24 hours before we would round the Ushant lighthouse at the northwest corner of France and head out into the Bay of Biscay. The wind had increased to 60–65 knots (30–35 meters per second). I began to feel uneasy about the safety of the ship and its crew. I heard on the news that a large container ship had lost several containers that had been loaded on deck, and French fishing boats had capsized.