Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Gemsbok a monument to lost loved ones
The utility vessel is now a popular site for wreckage enthusiasts, writes SONYA RUTHERFORD
IRECALL my mother waking me and my sister and bundling us into her little Toyota, piled high with blankets and flasks of coffee. I must have fallen asleep on the drive from our home in Table View to the dockside in the harbour, but I can clearly recall the traumatic scenes as the survivors were stepping ashore in the early hours of September 3, 1975.
My dad, Tom “Sticks” Stickland, was one of them.
On the fateful day of September 2, the LM Gemsbok and her dedicated 17-strong crew had been carrying out a routine marine supplies job.
The tanker Cetra Centaurus had lost her anchor and chain rounding the Cape of Storms, and the Gemsbok was tasked with supplying a replacement.
The anchor and chain weighed 135 tons, each link roughly 100kg, meaning the delivery had to be done in sections.
The Gemsbok had left her Duncan Dock mooring earlier in the day to deliver the first load of 65 tons of chain to the waiting tanker. This done, the Gemsbok returned to load the last 52 tons of chain and the 18-ton anchor, suspended between the “horns” over its bow.
The vessel reached the tanker and the second stage of winching and loading the chain and anchor commenced.
The 50m Gemsbok must have been like a toy boat alongside the tanker. Then tragedy struck. In the swell, a number of unsecured chain links on the deck slid to one side and, as the vessel listed, the anchor swung, pendulum-like, the combined weight of chain and anchor proving too much for the Gemsbok and, in a moment, it turned turtle.
Over the next 20 minutes, the cold waters of the Atlantic gushed through the corridors, cabins, bridge and galley and eventually filled the engine room, deep in the base of her hull. Then, almost as if she had sighed a last breath, she sank, still attached to the tanker with rigging ropes and wires and the anchor and chain.
Her ocean-bed grave, 50m down, was just 3 nautical miles off the Cape Coast and within signalling distance of the Green Point lighthouse.
As the second stage of the operation commenced, Peter Jackson, chief engineer on board, and a very close friend, had invited my father to his cabin for a whiskey. My dad always said it was the first whiskey he had ever refused.
He told us he had a gut instinct that something was going to go wrong.
Because of this, he had climbed up the ladder of the horns, and was positioned up there watching the operation on the deck below, when the tragedy happened.
He dived off the horns into the icy Atlantic and swam as hard as he could.
He reached the anchor chain of the tanker, still attached to Gemsbok and climbed the links up to the tanker’s hawsepipe and onto the deck, and raced to the mammoth vessel’s bridge. The captain of the tanker had had no idea of the disaster happening far below.
As the distress signals went out, my father radioed his boss to let him know.
“Tommy have you been drinking?” was his first question. “No, no, Dai… the Gemsbok has sunk.” Of the 17 crew on board, eight were lost: my dad’s close friend, the chief engineer Peter Jackson, cook Kenneth Wilcox, steward R Muller, engine room greasers Danny Nomdoe and Jacobus Ham and deckhands Benjamin Johnson, Gilbert Saulies and Ismail Teegler.
Along with my father, other survivors included the Captain Tim Cowley, Sigmund Muland, Andrew Goodall, Benjamin Conrad, Alan Woods and Bill Beresford.
Within 15 minutes of the distress call going out, rescue vessels arrived to pick up the survivors and ferry them to shore where family members and colleagues waited anxiously for news of their loved ones.
My mother handed out her blankets and hot coffee to some of the tired and traumatised crew, and when it seemed there would be no further news that night, everyone returned home to sit it out until the next day.
Weather conditions and poor visibility hampered the rescue operation on September 3, as the company management and dive teams planned their next move.
On the morning of the 4th, divers were sent to the scene, and at this stage there was probably still some faint hope for the waiting families that there may be yet more survivors. The Gemsbok was still attached to the tanker and so the initial operation was to release the ropes, wires, anchor and chain tying the two vessels together, to allow divers to search for the missing crew.
As the Gemsbok had sunk, she had rolled in such a way that the anchor chain was underneath her and the anchor still lashed to the horns, so divers had first to release the anchor and, using the swells, buoyancy of the tanker and winching, pull the chain and anchor from under the vessel. Once released the Cetra Centaurus was able to steam off on her journey.
In 1975 the diving world was still quite limited in terms of equipment, and mixed gases were not yet in use. This meant that, at 50m where the Gemsbok lay, bottom time was no more than 10 to 15 minutes, and the risk of nitrous narcosis or decompression sickness (the ‘’bends’’) a very real fear.
A specialised decompression chamber was loaded onto the rescue vessel, which would then allow a bottom time for the dive team of closer to 30 minutes. Severe weather and gale force winds on Thursday September 4 prevented any further recovery efforts, or confirmation that the missing eight were inside the vessel.
My father, still traumatised and in shock at the loss of his fellow crew members, was barely sleeping and my mother had the GP administer some sleeping tablets. He woke up on the Friday morning and told my mother he had had a dream in which chief engineer Peter Jackson was in the captain’s cabin, and that, as the vessel capsized, the force had flung him across the cabin, and he had gashed his head above his left eye.
Uncannily, when Jackson’s body was recovered just minutes before bottom time was up on the last dive of the day, he was found in the captain’s cabin, and with a gash above his left eye.
One of the deck hands, Benjamin Johnson, was also recovered that day, on the first dive. It was found that his overall had snagged on a structure on the deck.
The bodies of steward R Muller and cook Kenneth Wilcox were recovered on Saturday, September 6, both in the galley.
The body of Ismail Teegler – who, on the day of the tragedy, had been married just three days – was never recovered.
Due to the depth at which the Gemsbok lay, and the risk to the dive team of getting into her engine room, the bodies of the greasers Danny Nomdoe and Jacobus Ham were never recovered.
Today, the Gemsbok is a popular dive site for wreck enthusiasts. To others, she is a monument at the bottom of the ocean to the lives of loved ones, gone, but never forgotten.
This is an edited extract from Sonya Rutherford’s manuscript for a book on the sinking of the LM Gemsbok.