Remembering the Wahine disaster
On April 10, 1968, the Wahine foundered in Wellington Harbour in a vicious storm, claiming 53 lives. It was a day of tragedy, and of everyday heroism. From the arms of strangers came comfort, hot soup and survival. Nikki Macdonald reports.
John Wauchop was in the shower when the Wahine hit Barrett Reef, about 6.40am. The graunching lurch that tore a great gash in the ship’s starboard side wrapped him around the taps.
A poor Lincoln College student coming up for the inter-university Easter sports tournament at Palmerston North, Wauchop was sharing a cabin on F deck. Any lower and you’d be in the bilge, he jokes.
By the time he’d dried off they’d already closed his cabin. The call came to grab life jackets and head up to muster stations, so Wauchop followed the crowd to the smokeroom on B deck, dressed only in longs and a towel.
The 19-year-old found the rest of his cricket XI, borrowed a teammate’s sports jacket and settled in to play poker. He was the team’s opening bowler, but never got to bowl a ball.
Outside a gale was thrashing and waves were steadily building, but the ship was still level and they weren’t particularly worried. ‘‘We were in the harbour, for god’s sake, how the hell can you have a major accident in the harbour?’’
It was a question many would later ask.
Also in the packed smokeroom were Brian Papesch and Lyn Brittain, and her 16-month-old daughter Joanne. They hadn’t met yet. In fact, they never actually introduced themselves until 20 years later, when Papesch outed himself as Jo’s saviour.
At 21, Papesch had just finished national service and had been boozing with mates in Christchurch before returning home to Auckland. He was all partied out by the time he boarded the TEV Wahine on the evening of April 9, so had an early night. The ship was rocking and rolling when he awoke the next morning, but he’d grown up with fizz boats and wasn’t alarmed. When they called passengers to muster stations he figured it was a drill.
In the smokeroom, Papesch joined some students, who were entertaining themselves with renditions of Michael Row the Boat Ashore and There’s a Hole In My Bucket. Some elderly people and families with children looked understandably stressed, but there was no panic.
6.50am: ‘‘Our position is Barrett Reef where we are aground.’’
Below decks, things weren’t quite as calm. Fourth engineer Phil Bennett, then 23, had only been on the ship five days, having reluctantly transferred from an oil tanker. When he retired from watch at 5am the ship was barely moving. About 6.20am his desk contents flew towards his bunk. Shortly after that the panic bell donged, summoning the engineers to the engine room.
They’d been trying to manoeuvre for 20 minutes before they hit the reef.
Conflicting evidence meant investigating exactly how the Wahine ended up on Barrett Reef was ‘‘like putting together a jigsaw of evidence of which some of the pieces are out of shape’’, the court of inquiry later found.
The weather wasn’t unexpected, but Cyclone Giselle outstripped predictions in both speed and ferocity.
An 8pm navigation warning on
April 9 expected the centre to hit Hawke’s Bay by noon on the 10th, bringing heavy rain and high winds. Instead, the cyclone bore down on Wellington, tussling with another storm system from the south and creating conditions ‘‘of awesome violence’’.
By 5am, Wahine’s log recorded a strong south-south-west gale, rough sea, a heavy southerly swell and wind of 40-60 knots
(74-111kmh). Wellington Airport clocked average winds of 59 knots
(109kmh) at 6am, building to gusts of 100 knots (185kmh) from 9am12pm.
The best guess is that Giselle’s full force hit the ship about 6.10am, just as it slowed to half speed to enter the harbour. A huge wave spun it around. Torrential rain had already rendered the radar unusable, then they lost control of the ship. The helmsman steered hard to starboard, but there was no response.
Apparently confused about the ship’s position, Captain Robertson reversed to avoid where he thought Barrett Reef was. Instead, he motored straight into it. In the engine room, it was already like a rodeo, Bennett recalls.
‘‘It was like a Christmas tree down there. Lights and bells and alarms going off in all directions.
‘‘The noise when we hit the reef was horrendous . . . There was a large electrical cabinet and I swear it appeared to come about two metres toward me and then go back again.’’
Bennett’s job was to start the emergency bilge pump in the motor room, which housed the two electric motors that propelled the ship forward. The water was already up to his mid-calves – gushing through a 40cm wide gash in the side that stretched for more than 2m. The port motor was still running, but the starboard motor had cut out after the starboard propeller sheared off on the reef.
By the time he got the pump going, the water was up to his chest. He couldn’t help thinking that seawater is a good conductor of electricity. ‘‘My head knew it was OK, but my heart said – standing next to a 9000-horsepower electric motor, in seawater, is not a good idea.’’
Then the port motor blew out, spraying molten copper. It was time to get out. He half-swam to the ladder. By the time he returned with the chief engineer, the compartment was completely flooded. ‘‘Dog down [seal] the door and leave it,’’ the chief engineer said.
They abandoned the engine room and took stock in the chief engineer’s cabin. He had a bottle of good whisky he wasn’t about to let go down with the ship.
8am: Slowly drifting on Pt Dorset. I think she will be ashore next swing.
In the smokeroom, doubt cut cracks in the forced jollity.
Following the ship’s initial grounding report, the tug Tapuhi left Queen’s Wharf at 7.40am to help. The conditions were so bad it had to shelter off Seatoun, before heading out again around 11am. By then the Wahine’s dangerous drift further into the harbour had been stemmed by a heroic effort to drop two anchors, which eventually held fast just off Steeple Rock.
Papesch and Wauchop watched as the Wahine crew fired a towline to the tug. And they watched as it snapped, and snapped again.
‘‘A big wave would lift the Wahine and then another one would lift the Tapuhi and bang,’’ Papesch recalls. ‘‘Suddenly the rope would be taut and just snap . . . At that point we knew, ‘Shit, we’re in trouble here. They can’t tow us’.’’
Papesch sat down next to an attractive young woman with her young flame-haired daughter. She was six months pregnant and couldn’t swim. Could he look after her baby if the worst came to the worst, she asked him. He agreed, before wandering back to his mates.
9.37am: ‘‘Riding to two anchors. Not touching at all. No danger of sinking.’’
When the ship seemed to have stabilised, Bennett and his fellow engineers went back to work.
It was ‘‘blowing like stink’’, gusting up to 120 knots (222kmh), but they still reckoned they could save the ship.
The vehicle deck was a giant eggnog, where tossed trailers of eggs and coking coal had mixed with seawater leaking in from the flooded compartments. The water sloshed across the broad deck, creating a free surface effect – rolling with the waves and making it harder for the ship to right itself. Bennett made a filter from egg cartons to extract the water without the pump-clogging coke, but it was a losing battle. The ship was leaning further and further to starboard.
A starving Bennett had just finished cooking salvaged eggs in a steam drain when the call came to abandon ship. They were too hot to eat. Wet and tired, he scrambled up the slippery steel ladders – already on a 20-degree tilt – to the lifeboat deck.
With the port side high out of the water, only the four starboardside lifeboats were usable. Even at full capacity – 99 for the three main lifeboats and 50 for the motorised lifeboat – they could carry fewer than half the Wahine’s 734 passengers and crew.
Bennett was told to also deploy the 20-man inflatable liferafts. They took off on the wind like giant orange kites.
1.25pm: ‘‘We are abandoning ship. Would all passengers proceed to the starboard side of B deck.’’
Papesch watched, dismayed, from the smokeroom as the liferafts soared on the storm. Some weren’t even tied on. When the call came to abandon ship, fear quietly took hold.
‘‘Everyone was like double their normal size because those jackets were huge bloody things. This great band of people trying to get out. That was the first time I saw panic. Still nothing like you might have seen in scenes of Titanic but it was there all right. People started to yell and push and stuff.’’
Then he remembered that young mum and her daughter – Lyn Brittain and baby Joanne.
Lyn was in quite a panic. There were no children’s lifejackets, so Joanne had been tied into a bulky adult lifejacket. Worried they wouldn’t get out the starboard doors in time, Papesch took the pair to the high side of the ship. They edged hand over hand around the stern to the starboard side, only to find all the lifeboats and liferafts already gone. They had no choice but to jump.
‘‘All these things were happening to make me think – shit, this is for real. This is not a movie . . . The ship was on quite a steep angle. So you’re trying to make your way round a slippery deck hanging on to this rail and you’ve got a baby in one hand and you’ve got a woman who is not very strong as well, and I do remember an older person losing their grip on the rail and sliding all the way down the deck and hitting their head on the way on the rail on the starboard side with a sickening thud. And then they kind of slid through into the sea. I really thought that person probably didn’t survive.’’
Wauchop almost suffered the same fate. He, too, came out the high side, too late for the lifeboats. He saw someone floating, spreadeagled in the water below, obviously drowned or unconscious. In the ship’s shadow, the sea was a join-the-dots of floating lifejackets and liferafts, as if an orange freighter had spilled its cargo.
‘‘We tried to slide down the deck and on the way down somehow I caught one of the bollards or something halfway down and rolled on to my front and whacked my head on the deck, right between the eyes, and thought for a horrible minute – I can still feel the thought I had – ‘For God’s sake don’t pass out and fall into the water, because you’ll drown’. So I didn’t. Sheer willpower I think more than anything else. I caught the rail at the bottom and popped under the rail and dropped into the water.’’
1.25pm: ‘‘All passengers being put in lifeboats, have all trawlers and small craft available sent.’’
John Gibbons had already had a hell of a day. The 24-year-old rower was studying at Victoria University, ahead of competing at the Mexico Olympics later that year.
His Dad Gerald owned a 37-foot motor sailer, Rewanui, that was berthed in Wellington’s central boat harbour. They’d been helping secure gale-tossed yachts all morning.
‘‘The conditions were horrific. It was blowing; white water. I got in a plywood dinghy to row out a rope to the boats on the outside wall. The wind picked me and the dinghy up and turned me upside down. It was just screaming.’’
They were showering in the yacht club to get warm when the phone rang, asking for small boats to help rescue Wahine survivors. Gibbons was angry no-one had alerted them earlier – many potential helpers had already headed home. Gibbons’ father later told the inquiry he and others could have safely sailed as early as 12.30pm if they’d known, rescuing survivors before they reached the treacherous Eastbourne coastline.
Gibbons had no qualms about setting out into the storm. He’d learnt all he knew about boats from his grandfather. ‘‘He said the ship is always braver than the crew.’’
As Rewanui motored into the unknown, a handful of craft became a small flotilla. Yachts, fishing trawlers, motor boats Wellington’s mini Dunkirk. Jim Toulis and Billy Bell launched their 5m home-built kauri dinghy, against police advice. Worser Bay Surf Lifesaving Club unleashed its rowboat and motorboat. Two hopefuls even braved the waves on surf skis (they had to turn back).
By the time the volunteer armada set out about 2.15pm, the weather had suddenly turned. The wind had twisted from south to north, dropping from a 50-knot gale to light.
But that was little comfort to the orange figures bobbing in the waters like little oblong buoys.
The water was warmer than
Wauchop expected. He was in the lee of the ship and a couple of liferafts remained within easy reach. Ten minutes after jumping, he’d clambered into a raft. They felt safe enough, until they drifted into the lurching seas. There were no oars – to steer they had to paddle with their hands.
There were waves on top of waves, so high you got vertigo on the crest. The foamy curl was as big as your average breaker. It wasn’t long before the seas upended the raft, dumping him back in the water.
‘‘You couldn’t see anything of the shore when you were in a trough, and when you were on top you felt like you could see the whole country . . . They were pretty big waves.’’
Minutes floated by – 15, 30, 45. Wauchop drifted towards Eastbourne and the inhospitable craggy coast that claimed 49 of the 53 lives lost as a result of the disaster.
A Zodiac rubber dinghy threaded its way among the floaters. They’d set out from the airport with volunteer fire crew, carrying more inflatable liferafts, one of which they released near Wauchop. It was only youth, strength and bareback horseriding experience that dragged him aboard the slick-skinned craft.
It was colder out of the water than in. The wind gnawed at sodden fatigue. They tied on to another raft carrying a steward and a married couple with two or three kids.
‘‘He was thunderstruck and she wasn’t much better – one of the kids had got caught under their raft when they got flipped over. One of them didn’t look very good. I still don’t know if that was one of the children that died.’’
Their raft of rafts drifted into the swirling mash of debris just before the breakers, about 50m off the eastern coast.
There was no sand to land on, just brutal rocks. The ferry Aramoana was standing off, but too far to be of any use. Rescue looked a forlorn hope.
‘‘I actually punched him.’’
By the time Rewanui reached the Wahine, the ship was nearly right over. Gibbons couldn’t believe the bloody thing had tipped over in the harbour.
They headed for the eastern coast and its orange drift of survivors. Gibbons edged into a small liferaft close to the pounding surf, holding fast into the wind. Inside were four young girls, a boy of about nine, two women and two men, with another two men hanging off the side ropes. One of the men was Wauchop. He was overwhelmed with instant, enormous relief.
John’s father Gerald hauled the raft’s occupants on board, before setting off to pluck survivors from the water. They seemed dazed, bewildered.
Gibbons worried about one woman sitting with hoisted skirt and no knickers. He relaxed when, after about 20 minutes, she snapped out of her fug enough to rearrange herself.
Another bloke demanded Gibbons abandon those still in the water and take them immediately back to shore.
‘‘Finally he tried to grab the wheel. Well, this was hopeless. I had to concentrate like hell, so I actually punched him. They did say later somebody had a broken jaw, which I might have done. He crumpled to his knees down there and I thought ‘Well, that’s sorted him out’.’’
Restored by whisky, Wauchop helped with the rescue. Both he and Gibbons remember the couple bound together by a handbag. ‘‘My everlasting memory will be trying to get elderly women through under the running rail round the boat. You have to climb through it. Trying to get elderly women from other rafts under that rail, still holding on to their handbags is a frigging nightmare. They just wouldn’t let them go.’’
Like all the rescue boats that day, Rewanui carried a heavy cargo of sadness and survival; of gratitude and grief. The men who had lost their wives. The mother – Judith Hicks – whose 21⁄2-year-old son Phillip had suffocated when a wave folded their liferaft in half. They desperately slashed a hole in the skin, but the child was already dead. She shelved her grief and silently took the boy handed to her for safekeeping.
And the tragedy wasn’t over. Beyond the breakers on the coast beyond Eastbourne, Gibbons watched waves dumping survivors on the beach. A road block meant there was initially almost no-one to help them in. Police said the road was compromised by slips, but would-be rescuers were angry.
A lifeboatman who stayed to help compared the scene to images of people fleeing the Blitzkreig – vacant faces, staring eyes, utter exhaustion. Reinforcements did arrive, but for many it was too late. The inquiry estimated 12 people made it ashore alive, but died on the beach.
‘‘All they needed was to be pulled out of the water,’’ Gibbons says. ‘‘They’d crawl up and waves would take them out again. They’d crawl up again and then they’d give up. I’m sure one or two drowned there. It was pretty horrific watching them getting weaker and weaker.’’
Having safely delivered his cargo to Seatoun wharf, Gibbons and his father went out again to search for stragglers. It was the only time he feared his number was up.
‘‘We were cruising along the coast looking for anyone else and I looked ahead and suddenly saw the tide was roaring out and we suddenly saw there were huge breakers ahead, right at the entrance to the harbour. Big breakers. So I panicked and gave the throttle full ahead and hard to turn around. One of the breakers caught us and tipped us over. People watching on another boat said the mast was actually downhill. So it was touch and go.’’
The Tahi Miranda pleasure yacht was not so lucky, a wave smashing it against the rocks. Its volunteer crew barely made it ashore with their lives.
Papesch hit the water without going under, still cradling baby Joanne. The rushing tide and swell quickly divided them and Jo’s mother Lyn. Too bad – he could only focus on the baby.
He lay on his back, Joanne riding on his lifejacket like a raft, and kicked out for the lights of Seatoun, which he could see behind him. A sailor, surfer, swimmer and surf lifesaver, Papesch reckoned he could make it. He knows now he couldn’t have.
When Joanne fell quiet he slapped her – her crying a welcome relief.
An hour, maybe 90 minutes went past before Papesch saw his saviour emerge from the gloom.
‘‘It’s a funny feeling when a ship dies.’’
Third engineer Bennett had been assigned to take charge of starboard lifeboat No 2. Passengers seemed more stunned than panicked as they jumped the 50cm from ship to boat.
They pushed off with 60-65 people aboard – any longer and the davits would have pinned the boat underwater.
They were the last lifeboat to leave and Bennett could still see people jumping from the ship. The three big lifeboats could be steered only by a hand crank turning a propeller. The one motorised lifeboat was supposed to tow the others, but that had been swamped.
He, too, faced a mutiny from passengers when he hung around, picking people from the water. Two 20-something young men threatened to throw him overboard. He in turn threatened them with an axe from the lifeboat locker. They went quiet.
Among the waterlogged survivors, Bennett spotted a baby lying on a lifejacket like a raft. Unfamiliar hands reached down and plucked Joanne from her perch. She was handed into the arms of another stranger – passenger Lesley Morgan, who would become a precious friend.
Papesch was also hauled into the crowded craft. They watched as the Wahine exhaled for the last time.
‘‘It’s a funny feeling when a ship dies,’’ Bennett says. ‘‘She went over and water went down the funnel and the next thing a big cloud of rusty coloured steam came out of the water.’’
Starboard lifeboat No 2 caught a tow with Jim Toulis’ kauri runabout, then fishing trawler Ho Ho, before being handed back to Toulis to pull in to Seatoun wharf. It was about 3.45pm.
Papesch watched as an ambulance carried Joanne to safety. His job was over. He caught the free Limited Express back to Auckland with no money. A fellow passenger shared his bourbon in a paper cup.
Bennett was quickly bundled into a Union Steam Ship Company blanket and sent to get clothes. He was given a terrible tweed jacket, then billed for it – only passengers got free threads.
Gibbons and Wauchop got on with life. There was no counselling or insurance; no apologies or accountability. Just memories that have endured for 50 years.
It was 25 years before Joanne Finlayson met the man who held her life in the balance.
Papesch knew her mother Lyn was looking for him, but didn’t want to get involved. He didn’t understand then how traumatised Lyn was.
She was rescued by a lifeboat crewed by Aramoana volunteers, but that smashed on the Eastbourne coast. Her feet were so cut from the rough landing and long walk past the dead that she was taken to Wellington Hospital, where she spent the night consoling Shirley Hick, who had lost her 3-year-old daughter Alma, and whose son Gordon suffered brain damage, eventually dying 22 years later and being added to the Wahine death toll.
Eventually Lyn found her daughter, and the husband who’d been frantically searching for them all day. In July 1968, Lyn gave birth to a healthy boy, Grant.
Finlayson now works as a theatre nurse in Tauranga and has two boys of her own. She still has the toy train salvaged from her cabin, and the whistle from her mother’s lifejacket.
‘‘I‘m lucky to be here really and have the life I’ve now got, have the job I do that I love, and have kids of my own.’’
Wauchop farmed by the sea at Tokomaru Bay, had two kids, and kept up with his team-mates, who all survived.
In 1998, they played together for the first time, at a reunion game. The bodies are now too brittle for cricket, but they’ll meet again in Wellington for the 50th commemoration.
Bennett also returned to the water. He once had so many boats they nicknamed him commodore.
Gibbons runs a car parking building. He’d do it all again today. He no longer owns Rewanui, but her reassuring bulk still floats in Wellington’s boat harbour.
Papesch lives in the Bay of Islands, where he’s a member of the yacht club and helps with kids’ sailing.
Every year on April 10 he calls Finlayson for a chat.
Like many who put others first that day – from the schoolkids spooning soup on the beach to the volunteer armada of rescuers – he dismisses talk of courage and lifethreatening drama.
‘‘It was just a day of following your instincts and doing what was right.’’