KATHRYN DALLAS still remembers the waves grey, menacing and as tall as four-storey buildings, they broke over her head twice a minute, repeatedly forcing her below the waters of Wellington Harbour. For more than two hours she had battled to live, but now the numbingly cold sea and the constant assault of the water from all directions was starting to overwhelm her. She was struggling to stay awake. To stay alive.
Gripping a lifebuoy with one arm, her other holding her ill-fitting lifejacket in place, the 19-year-old Canterbury University arts student could see the harbour%26#39;s shore a few hundred metres away. But it was out of reach. She and the two men sharing the lifebuoy were being swept out to sea on a fierce tidal flow during the worst storm in New Zealand history the storm of April 10, 1968, that had rolled the interisland ferry Wahine and forced 735 crew and passengers to abandon ship.
More than 400 of those had had to swim for their lives, and Dallas and her companions 16-year-old Whangarei farmhand Paul Field and Cambridge farmer Brian Townend, 55 were the last people waiting for rescue. Strangers until they met in the sea that day, they had clung to the lifebuoy and each other for an hour. They were bonded in a remarkable tale of heroism, survival and at the end, the very end, tragedy.
Dallas, now a Wellington businesswoman named Kath Henderson, has particularly clear recollections of the day because her parents, in the days following, persuaded her to write down an account of the day. As the 40th anniversary of the tragedy approaches, she has publicly shared that journal for the first time.
%26quot;It got so I couldn%26#39;t stand watching the waves coming,%26quot; she wrote. %26quot;They were ENORMOUS. I just shut my eyes and the other two took it in turn to say when a wave was coming, then you held your breath while the wave broke and boiled all over you. After each wave I rose to the surface, checked that the others were still there, then shut my eyes again.%26quot;
Dallas was unlucky to be in the water still. When she leapt from the Wahine, wearing a lumpy, orange lifejacket, she was pulled almost immediately on to a rubber life raft. But, in one of the many disasters within a disaster on that day, the raft was run down by a lifeboat and was punctured and sunk. Back in the water and, fearing she would be sucked under when the ship sank, Dallas had dog-paddled her way clear of the Wahine. Sometimes alone, sometimes with other passengers, she would spend hours in the bitterly cold water, drifting more than 7km in total.
IT HAD started out as a jolly short break. A trip from Lyttelton to Wellington on an almost new passenger ferry advertised as the world%26#39;s best overnight sea journey to attend a friend%26#39;s 21st birthday party.
Excited about the visit to Wellington, Dallas rose early and left her four-berth cabin just before 6am on April 10, a Wednesday, as the ship crossed Cook Strait. She headed upstairs, ready to be one of the first to disembark when the Wahine completed her 11-hour voyage.
It had been an uneventful passage till then, and even though the weather had deteriorated overnight, the five to six metre swells and southerly gusting to 85km/h were not unusual conditions for the Strait.
But with a ferocious suddenness the weather worsened. One minute the crew on the bridge of the Wahine were able to see the Baring Head lighthouse 16km away, the next visibility was zero, wiped away by torrential rain and the sea spray being licked off the ocean by 160km wind gusts.
The sea changed too. The ocean floor rises rapidly near the entrance to Wellington Harbour. As it shallows, it forces the swells into higher peaks, with shorter gaps between. Swells which a few minutes earlier were easily manageable were now powerful waves of 7m or more, racing at almost 30km/h.
The Wahine was in trouble. One of the waves caught her at just the wrong moment. Her stern was raised, her rudder and propellers out of the water. The 8944 tonne ferry raced down the wave like a vast, out-of-control surfboard.
Dallas, sitting in the %26quot;smoking lounge%26quot;, five decks above the waterline, noticed the violent change. She found herself soaked seawater was %26quot;forcing its way through the tightly shut and bolted windows as waves washed over them%26quot;. The Wahine had broached and lost all her way. She was beam on to the wild sea and rolling alarmingly.
%26quot;It got so rough that the furniture which was not bolted down on the floor began to slide from one side of the lounge to the other. I held on to the curtains to avoid being thrown across the room.%26quot;
Three elderly women were sitting in the lounge too. One was thrown from her seat and %26quot;fell under a table and furniture fell all over her. She looked shocked and started crying%26quot;.
For 30 wild minutes, the captain, still with no visibility, attempted to turn the ferry and head back to sea. But at 6.43am the Wahine struck Barrett Reef.
%26quot;The ship seemed to lift and crunch, crunch down on something. I looked out the window. It was still fairly dark but I saw four or five men in orange lifejackets run past towards the stern and look over the side. The ship seemed to be almost still, which was wonderful after the roughness.%26quot;
Passengers were ordered to put on their lifejackets and go to their muster stations. Soon, however, soothing messages over the ship%26#39;s tannoy system assured everyone the ship was safe and rescuers were on the way.
For six hours Dallas sat in the lounge, chatting to people and laughing as groups started singing among the renditions: %26quot;Row, row, row your boat…%26quot; Stewards handed out hot chips, ham sandwiches, ice cream and %26quot;sweet and mucky coffee%26quot; as passengers listened to radio reports of havoc ashore. They heard that most of the homes in the Wellington hilltop suburb of Kingston had lost their roofs, and that an eight-year-old girl was dead after roofing iron blew through her bedroom window, %26quot;decapitating her%26quot;.
%26quot;So you%26#39;re only thinking, `Well we%26#39;re quite safe here really%26#39;. I think they might have had the anchors out, and we were getting all this food brought to us. It was quite comfortable.%26quot;
But then, six hours after striking Barrett Reef, around 1pm, the Wahine started listing, and the call came to abandon ship.
Of the Wahine%26#39;s 735 passengers and crew, more than 400 were forced to swim for survival. Some lifeboats could not be launched, and inflatable life rafts were whisked away by the wind. Paul Field and Brian Townend were, along with Dallas, among those who jumped in to the sea.
Townend made a clear choice not to get in to a lifeboat. He helped Clare, his wife of more than 30 years, into one but, in spite of encouragement from other passengers, refused to join her, saying there were people more deserving of one of the precious seats. Townend instead hugged Clare goodbye. A former seaman on the schooner Huia, which transported explosives from Australia to New Zealand, he was comfortable on ships and wanted to help with the evacuation.
Around the same time Field jumped, but quickly became separated from the friend with whom he had spent a few months on a South Island working holiday.
DALLAS DRIFTED alone for about 40 minutes before washing up against two soldiers. %26quot;[Then] we drifted down on top of about 10 other people hanging on to each other%26#39;s lifejackets, so we joined up too.%26quot;
Soon there was hope. The tug Tapuhi appeared out of the misty gloom. %26quot;It tried to pick us up but we were in very heavy seas and it was impossible.%26quot;
Lifted by the crest of a wave the tug%26#39;s great black hull would sit menacingly over those in the water, %26quot;then it would be down in a trough and we would be looking down on the deck. This was really frightening it looked as though the tug would run us over or we would be smashed on to the deck%26quot;.
The Tapuhi plucked more than 100 people from the sea that day, but this was one rescue it abandoned. As the tug backed away its crew threw those in the water some lifebuoys. Dallas grabbed one. Townend and Field grabbed the same bouy. The others the Tapuhi had attempted to rescue were now, again, scattered.
%26quot;The three of us two men and myself drifted on, each with an arm hooked round the little lifebelt.%26quot;
Dallas remembers passing bodies still in lifejackets. She also saw people being smashed on to the rocks along the shoreline. Others were scrambling up the pebbly beaches.
She and her companions, though, were being swept out to sea. The great storm had driven an extraordinary amount of water in to Wellington Harbour, forcing a premature and record high tide. Now that great mass of water was trying to escape. Dallas%26#39;s group was the farthest from land and trapped in the tidal outflow.
It was at this time the waves reached their peak. The wind had abated but the enormous swell it had whipped up, later estimated by Niwa experts to have peaked at about 14m high in Cook Strait, was still surging into the narrow and shallow entrance to Wellington Harbour. The tidal outflow only forced those incoming swells higher, into enormous cresting waves.
These were the relentless waves which had Dallas closing her eyes as they %26quot;broke and boiled%26quot;.
%26quot;It was really all you could do to keep breathing. Water kept washing in your nose and mouth. You could scarcely gasp to talk to each other, let alone shout.%26quot;
The cold, the exhaustion and the never-ending breakers were taking their toll. %26quot;It was starting to get very difficult to keep awake. The others said they were sleepy too. We talked to each other to keep awake.%26quot;
It was then that Brian Townend came in to his own. A hardened farmer and active polo player who had once been a professional sprinter, at 55 Townend was in good shape. As Dallas and Field faded, Townend talked to them, encouraging them. Dallas remembers she and Field were struggling to keep their heads above the water %26quot;and often felt it would be easier to give in%26quot;.
In a letter, Dallas later wrote that %26quot;it was Mr Townend who kept us conscious and determined to live. He said again and again that we would reach shore as others appeared to have done. He said that we would make it and see all our relatives and friends again.
%26quot;The intense cold began to make us lose consciousness so he kept us awake by asking about where we came from and other things about us. He worked out that with the three of us on the lifebelt we could all face different directions and warn each other to hold our breaths as the huge waves broke over us again and again.%26quot;
When, even with his cajoling and questioning, the two teenagers began to slip away, Townend started to pray. And whether it was the prayers or not, a small miracle happened.
ALLAN PAIN is the second hero of this story. The Lower Hutt businessman and weekend boatie joined the flotilla of little pleasure craft which set out to save lives.
Pain%26#39;s boat. the Nereides, was a 13m, high-sided wooden launch. Slow, and 42 years old, it was one of the last on the scene. Instead of heading toward Eastbourne, where most of the boats were involved in rescues, Pain went south towards the heads where, he discovered to his horror, the waves were at their worst.
Auckland businessman Peter Ward, then aged 12, recalls being terrified.
%26quot;They were 30, 40 feet high [9-12m] and they were starting to break.%26quot;
Ward%26#39;s mother Joan, who died just before Christmas last year, described the scene as surreal. %26quot;There we were, a man, a housewife and a schoolboy, in the middle of these wild seas. None of us were prepared for that.%26quot;
Rescue was no longer on Pain%26#39;s mind. He was concerned about survival. But then, on the crest of a wave, everything changed. Pain spotted three people in the water.
%26quot;We were all petrified,%26quot; Joan Ward recalled. %26quot;I know I wanted to run away and I think Allan did, but we just couldn%26#39;t. Allan was scared for us, but he also knew those people were going to die if we didn%26#39;t help them.%26quot;
Dallas remembers her heart surging as %26quot;suddenly I saw the mast of a boat. We thought we were too far out and no one would find us. It was so rough out there you couldn%26#39;t see very far%26quot;.
Pain tried to manoeuvre the Nereides toward those in the water, but it was dangerous and difficult. %26quot;They circled us several times but had the same trouble as the tug in getting close to us without coming down on top of us,%26quot; Dallas noted.
Realising Pain would not be able to get to them, the trio abandoned the lifebuoy and swam to the boat. But once there they discovered a new problem there was nothing to hold on to and no way to climb on to the boat.
The Nereides was now perilously close to rocks off the Pencarrow coastline. One rescue boat, the Tahi Miranda, had already been wrecked on rocks near Eastbourne.
Pain, with the help of Peter Ward, hauled Field from the water. Field had been chosen first because Pain mistook his long hair for that of a girl. Once on board the 16-year-old tried to help with the rescue, but collapsed with exhaustion.
Townend demanded Dallas be next. Although petite she was too heavy to quickly lift on board. With her sodden clothing %26quot;slacks, a natural wool jersey, a corduroy coat, Hush Puppy shoes%26quot; and a handbag attached to her lifejacket, Dallas was a dead weight of more than 80kg.
The rocks were looming. %26quot;We could see the kelp, see the bottom, it was very frightening%26quot; Peter Ward recalled. Pain decided to save his boat. He hooked ropes under the arms of Dallas and Townend, gunned the motor and dragged the pair several hundred metres away from the rocks.
%26quot;It was terribly painful, and that%26#39;s about the last thing I really remember very clearly for a while. But they said we were really only semiconscious and that we were screaming,%26quot; Dallas wrote.
Finally, with Joan Ward on the wheel, Peter Ward dangling half over the side and Pain using every ounce of strength he had, Dallas was rescued.
%26quot;I was laid out like a sardine on the deck next to Paul. I couldn%26#39;t believe I was safe. I had just about given up all hope.%26quot;
Too weak to even talk, she just lay there. She could hear the struggle to rescue Townend but had no energy to help.
Then a stroke of luck. Another boat, a rubber Zodiac from the passenger liner the Southern Cross, appeared. On board were four men, three in diving suits. Two jumped into the sea while the third leapt on to the Nereides.
Sometime after 4.30pm, more than three hours after abandoning the Wahine, the last of the 735 who had been aboard the Wahine was out of the water. But it was bittersweet. Just moments after he was pulled aboard the Nereides, Brian Townend died.
The following month, the coroner found Townend had died by drowning. But the same cause of death was given to almost everyone who died that day, even those whose heads were split open on rocks. It is thought likely that Townend died of a heart attack, possibly brought on by being laid flat on the Nereides%26#39; deck.
Inside Story: The Wahine Disaster, screens on TV1 at 9.30pm on Monday, March 31.
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