Sea Control - Sea Control 522 - Catastrophe in the Antarctic with Tom Sharpe (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 25, 2024

Links1. "Mayday in Magellan; Leadership Lessons on Flooded HMS Endurance," by Tom Sharpe, Wavell Room, December 16, 2018. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. This is part two of a two-part episode featuring Commander Retired Tom Shark. It's a harrowing account of almost losing his ship in Antarctic waters. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Tom Sharp, and we're going to discuss a series of articles that you wrote, which appear in the Weibel Room, entitled Mayday in Magellan, Leadership Lessons on the Flooded HMS Endurance. So Tom, welcome. So you're forced to make a number of calls about this. We'll link to the article in the show notes. I recommend you go back and read it so you can read Tom's words as he's writing at the

time, back when this was published in 2018. But what is the feeling about making some of those once-in-a-lifetime calls, whether it's having to report back to fleet headquarters this catastrophic casualty or making mayday calls which no captain wants i can remember a captain telling me is like we had experienced some engine casualties like i'm not putting up not under command like i'm refusing to do it it's like and the casualty was resolved within a few minutes you're not in that situation though and there's really no choice like you're gonna have to make some of these calls and you're literally making what i think you probably recognize later life or death decisions about

about how long to keep the engines in operation. What did it feel like to make some of those decisions in the moment? I think the first big one was what to do with the ship. I knew we were going to lose propulsion. That was obvious. Because as I say, we'd put water in the engine room before and it didn't take long for them to be picked up by the engines themselves and lose power. So I knew we would lose power. So what do you do? And my first instinct was to look for somewhere to ground the ship. Again, which is a pretty remarkable thing when you consider how much of your life you dedicate to not running agrar, to then actively want to do so. But as I say, the topography there was very Norwegian and it's sort of, you know, prospect. It was very

vertical. So what you saw is what you got. So there was no beach, there was nowhere to shallow water to put the ship. Then it was a case of, right, okay, let's head into wind because obviously once we lose propulsion, we're going to go beam on and we're going to drift back down. So let's just increase to six knots. I didn't want to go too fast because again, at this point in the first couple of minutes, I wasn't entirely sure what it was. We shut down one engine. The engineer wanted to shut down both to protect them, which to me meant that he hadn't quite made the transition to the seriousness of the situation we were in. It was very obvious to me that they were going to both die and both be underwater before very long. So we kept one running so that I could keep the

ships headed to wind. And then the second sort of one in the early stages was what to do with the helicopters. One of them was about to take off. So we shut that down. Then rather than stow that helicopter, which took about 17 minutes, and get the other one back. We turned the second one back to Punta Arenas, and they spent the rest of the flood there, having a very different experience to us. And various restaurants, God bless the flight. And then, so that was the very, very sort of early stages. But eventually, the engine that we kept running started to arc spectacularly and ground to halt. So we made the Mayday at around that point on Channel 16, which is grim, as you say i mean how many maydays have we answered in our careers and when you get there there's an

element of maritime buffoonery nine times out of ten isn't there they've done something dumb a yacht or a fishing boat and now it's me doing it so it's intensely embarrassing actually but as you say it's got to be done but it gets worse it's not like it's even helped we're so far in the middle of nowhere there's no one within vhf range to hear the call so i then get on a sat phone and call northward again this is still early on i think we're still probably 10 15 minutes in at this point. And they kick into gear and they close up a thing called the FERC, a Fleet Incident Response Cell, which was an organisation put in place after HMS Nottingham grounded in Australia, because the command and control of the Nottingham grounding got quite messy quite quickly as

everybody tried to get involved. The FERC was really configured to make sure that everything in Northwood and in the headquarters barriers went through one guy, the Fleet Operations Officer, and I could ring him. So we had like an hourglass of communications, which I have to say worked really, really well. And I spent most of the incident on the phone to the fleet ops officer. My ops officer would ring the deputy fleet ops officer and my engineer would ring Abbey Wood, where the engineers are there. And that was about it. Because of where we were, we were largely kind of unbothered by outside influences, which weren't well. And then we weren't distracted so yeah there was the mayday that was very awkward shortly after that we are

now stopped in the water beam on an increasingly poor watertight order for a reason i'll explain in a second i got a tap on my shoulder there's a chief engineer and the diver the leading clearance diver so qualified up to 80 meters or whatever insane depth those people go down to and the engineer is basically telling me that if the diver can get in the engine room and get to this valve in the far corner he can manually shut it okay you know looking at the camera into the engine room it's this is not good we are we're rolling 30 degrees either side of the vertical here and we're stiff you know we've ditched all the top waste we ditched our roll reduction tank which is seven tons of water we are flailing around and we want him to go in there and close

this valve that was one of those things where i i sent a chief away so i could have a one-to-one very very quickly with the diver to go yeah you you okay with this and it was one of those conversation where he wanted me just to stop talking. He was like, yeah, got it. Let me get on with this. And so he did, and he went, and he did get to this valve, but got spun off it. The water was coming in past him. He got disorientated and just thought, okay, that'll do, and got himself out of the compartment pretty much as they had to shut the lid. And I got a hard time in that board of inquiry for sending him in there, putting his life at risk, which I undoubtedly did. And the reason I got a hard time was because that valve was never going

to do anything. It was a totally flawed mission. And when I look back and I think about the engineer who gave me that advice was part of the problem. He was part of the reason the work was being done so badly in the first place. I should probably have interrogated his advice more closely, but you know, hindsight, right? I mean, yes and no. I would say in that situation, if anyone is in your shoes and you're being offered what sounds like a relatively straightforward solution put someone who is qualified to go in that space in that condition and shut a valve i have a real difficult time figuring out how you get to the answer being no other than the person telling you i won't do it yeah um no it was worth a shot i think at the time it was worth a shot and

um we knew we both knew because we looked each other in the eye what what the risk levels were so you know crack on but but yes i was given a i was given a hard time afterwards which is which is fine, frankly, because throughout this incident, no one died. And I touch wood every day as a result because of that. But that was a tough call to make. Another really bad one, all in the first half an hour, I went down to the scene of the incident to have a look so I could see for myself what was going on. And on the way back up, we had the British Schools Exploration Society on board, a bunch

of 18 to 21-year-olds who had come to us to learn leadership, ironically. We put them ashore in South Georgia, and they'd done bits of the Shackleton Walk, and I needed to basically speak to them. I needed to talk to them, and they were in the wardrobe, which is between the engine space and the bridge, so I dropped it. I was out of breath, because I'd just come up five flights of steps, and I'm confronted by a bunch of very scared kids, all looking to me for reassurance that I couldn't give them.

That was deeply uncomfortable, not as uncomfortable as the Mayday, perhaps, but still not a nice position to be in. But anyway, we spoke and I went back up to the bridge and we carried on fighting the fight from up there. How did the incident ultimately resolve? Where did you get taken back to? Were you able to restore propulsion? What was interesting, perhaps the bit that threatened us the most, after the first phase that I've sort of stuck to at the moment, the first half hour, we went into lull. So the engine room, when the engine room was a meter from being flooded to the deckhead, we had a real problem, which was obviously we were now beam on and rolling as I've described, but there were condensation drains running the entire length of the accommodation deck above the engine space. these little holes inside about 18 inches of lagging so each accommodation cabin would have a false bulkhead 18 inches of lagging and then the hull and that hull had these little holes in

that would drain the condensation the sweat into the engine room and nobody knew about these holes nobody knew that these things existed what it meant was every time we rolled to 30 degrees the water in the engine room would hydrostatically force its way up through these holes so we were now flooding across the entire length of the ship on the deck above and no one knew why but it was just at one point we had something like 12 different floods to deal with we're bringing up carpets we're hacking down bulkheads but it's impossible to control and we're now flooding the aft hold is now flooding quite badly and also we've got 1200 tons of water perhaps more we're sitting so low in the water the waves are breaking over the back end and the provisions hatch into the aft hold

isn't quite as watertight as we might've hoped. So that is now, we're now flooding in the aft hold. Now, if we lose the engine room in the aft hold, we're going to sink. I don't need anyone engineer in Abbey Wood to tell me that. It's obvious. So we had to control that. We had to control that flood arc. We had to try and control a flood. And really, again, whilst we had no chance of controlling the flood in the engine room, actually on most of the accommodation deck, we had very little chance of controlling that. We had to just contain it using the hydraulic systems we had. And then the water that was emerging elsewhere. So on the port side, the accommodation deck also fell to the deckhead. So we now had floods appearing on the deck above

that. Now that we could control using what little pumps we had left and hand-to-hand bailing with silver trash cans forming a human chain. So there was a lot of that going on. There was also a lot of damage control going on in terms of sawing timber and propping up. The aft bulkhead of the engine room was was bulging ominously and if that went if that collapsed then clearly everyone in there's going to die instantly but then the water is free to go work from the engine room wherever it likes and then we would have had a free flood throughout the whole ship and so they were they were in there chopping up wood and doing sort of good old-fashioned damage control to keep that bulkhead in place so all this all the while we're drifting further and further down the magello

in a southeasterly direction and we've got somewhere in the region of two hours before we're going to hit the land. And I can see the land and it's now dark. Wind is up to about 60 knots. And it's not looking particularly nice. And at one point, Northwood headquarters came, we've got some charts here, but it doesn't tell us what the name of this island is, this bit of land you're going to hit. Can you tell us? So we went back to the chart table to have a look and it was called Desolation Island. This isn't funny at all, but that's where we were heading. And now we also had a little ship come out to us, a little fishing boat was heading towards us the only thing that was around called mv pudu and they got to within about half a mile

of us in the dark and then just scurried off never to be seen again which was annoying i had hoped we might at least persuade them to take a line through the bow and hoik the ship's head back into wind so we could stop this um roll it was what that was killing us because of the water that was coming out of the engine room they didn't they ran off which was annoying now so now i've all the folks available to use uh i decided to put the starboard anchor which is slightly longer out to its fullest extent let's see if that slows us down and it didn't but what it did do is it did it altered our our angle of drift only by about five degrees so it was subtle but that was now taking us across a rocky pinnacle that had a minimum depth of 30 meters and we were cutting

we were cutting across the 80 meter contour on this rocky seam out about you know about sort of 100 yards to the south of that it dropped down immediately to 600 meters so we were literally aiding at this 80 meter line on the side of a seamount and we had about an hour to hope that nothing changed and we would continue to drift over the top of this mountain so all the while the damage control efforts going on we're clearing water we're doing our communications with home with northward with abbey wood getting some interesting advice from abbey wood i was at one point being in order to abandon ship, which I strongly disagreed with, it turns out that they were operating on out-of-date loading information, stability information.

So they were predicting us to be in a worse situation than we were. And we actually were in a bad situation. But again, back to my years at sea, every time I looked out of the window, I just thought this is what we would get. This is nothing unusual. It's obvious we're unstable, but there's nothing in the ship's movement that suggests that the next one is going to be the one we don't come back from. And abandoning would have been very, very hard to do.

We had no hydraulics. We had inflatable rubber dinghies that were just going to end up on the rocks getting smashed to bits. It was a terrible option to take, and I think would have resulted in loss of life at some point. So we stayed put whilst drifting towards this sea map. And we caught it. We caught the sea map in the middle of the night.

And I refused to believe we had. Even when I sensed the ship's head was coming back into wind, I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me. But actually, no, it wasn't. we had caught it. So we then swung, we yawed all the way around on the anchor we had, and then dropped the second anchor again just to sort of double up. And that's where we stayed. That completely changed our situation. We're still in trouble. We've now got about 2,000 tons of water on board that we weren't expecting. So we're sitting very low in the water,

we're listing quite heavily to port, but at least we're not heading imminently for the rocks, and we can get control of the water to an extent. And by now, the cavalry's starting to arrive. If there's a cruise liner that's come along, they could take turn around. And if we'd slipped off that rock, I think we could have taken a line from them and they could have kept us at least in position. Salvage tugs are coming from Punta Arenas. They didn't arrive until the next day, quite late the next day. So we had a long time to hang on and they're sort of by our fingernails.

But that was the time which the situation changed for the better, was when we were at Twinker. So I think a lot of the things you described, to get back to sort of the systemic issues that you faced when you're talking about ships architecture and these drainage holes it's probably the difference between a vessel taken up from trade a civilian vessel versus the watertight standard that you would expect on a warship to prevent things like progressive flooding where you know you expect some sort of battle damage if you're going to hazard your vessel what was crew's response because i can imagine it tumbling towards panic very quickly not just

the engine room but when you start to see the flooding pop up in all the other spaces it makes the situation seem so much worse than just isolated to that engine which is also already a massive problem for you and what was the sort of cruise response what was sort of your response to seeing it pop up in all these other places yeah the cruise response was absolutely first class endurance was quite a soft ship in warship terms very comfortable carpets and steps and a gym and a sauna you know it was built as a cruise liner stroke research vessel so it attracted quite a lot of older sailors in coming towards the end of their time because everybody wanted to kind of you know sign off from the navy from endurance so so there was a bit of an alcohol problem as well

lots of sort of you know old school whatever that means but people they're basically drinking too much when i joined as the xo people were walking around at sea in slippers i was like well hang on what what the hell's this completely alien to me as a warship guy and it turns out that that you know well we've always done it that way and that was a real problem so we had this sort of slightly soft not you know not entirely focused culture a little bit of it's the endurance way about us a little bit of um a little bit of drink culture but when the hammer was dropped and the water came in it was like a different beast and suddenly you got a hundred people absolutely going at it hammer and tongs and there was uh there was no panic there were one or i think probably one or

two who struggled a little bit for various reasons during but most people you know did exactly what they were asked and and a good handful far exceeded what you expected of them in terms of performance so there was never any panic i remember very clearly trying to control this after half an hour There were people taking huge risks, huge personal risks in that first half an hour. So not panic as such, but just a sort of heroic risk to try and fix whatever it was they were tasked to do. And I actually wanted to dial that down a little bit after 30 minutes. Once the engine room was flooded, the massive ingress of water into the ship had at least

slowed a little bit. I didn't want anyone falling over the side, for example, and that very nearly happened. one person was actually swept off their feet by a wave breaking over the back end and was caught by the wrist by another sailor as they were about to go over the side we wouldn't have got them back and your survival time in that temperature waters in minutes you know so i wanted to try and i wanted to actually funnily enough try and dial back the heroics a little bit after about that first 30 minutes so yeah like i say the ship's company really did the navy and themselves proud that day we had a ship's photographer i got her very quickly in to get her camera and start

recording it because i knew that it would be very important it was a bit annoying because all the photos of the of the ship's company they were all smiling but all the way through trying to find a trying to find a picture that represented how serious this was actually became difficult because in classic sailor style you know the humor comes out very very quickly and they're just dealing with this with this terrible situation we're in as you'd expect so yeah it was a definitely a game of two halves before and after the flood is it fair to say that having you mentioned having a number of sailors who are kind of on their last tour in the navy meaning at this point and i don't know exactly i don't think you do this sort of like 20 year stretch that the u.s navy

does i think you actually do like most european navies quite a bit longer than that if you're making a career of it you're in for 30 30 plus years i would imagine that that amount of experience is actually helpful once we've kind of refocused everyone on the seriousness of the problem was that the case yeah absolutely i mean the chief stoker so the we had two chief stokers so they're marine engineering mechanics they are generally amongst the older more experienced people on board and we had two of them um one of them was the casualty he got hit by the he got hit by the valve lid as it blew off in the very first instance so when i said right at the start was a casualty in the engine room. That was him. I mean, this lid was two feet in diameter

and half an inch thick. I mean, it could have taken his head off. He was also, by the watch and station bill, he was the person who was in charge of the scene of the incident, or should have been but couldn't because he'd been taken out by the valve lid. Somebody on the flight deck, Petty Officer Reiter, so the guy who runs the shit's office, realized this, took his headset off because he was part of the helicopter team, took his his headset off, completely untrained, and went down to the scene of the incident, and was there for 36 hours pulling an absolute blinder, really coordinating things, controlling people in and out of the scene of the incident, maintaining morale.

The guy was absolutely brilliant. The other chief stoker went in there as part of the attack party, again, very old and bold, and talking to the younger lads who were in there with him in those first 10 minutes, those first horrific 10 minutes. It was very interesting listening to their tales of keeping an eye on him. They were going to keep attacking this flood until he said otherwise. And the sense of relief when he went, okay, lads, we're done here, let's get out, they just shot out of the compartment.

But they weren't going anywhere until he said so. And I think that's indicative of the sort of experience and calmness that you've just outlined that we got from some of these more experienced people on board. At what point did it kind of wash over you, what you had just survived? Is that when you're back pier side all the way, or was there a sort of sense of relief when those tugs make up the first time? You're like, okay, well. The first salvage tug came to us, and we had been promised that they were going to be full of all sorts of pumps and cavalry and a hundred salvage experts. No, none of that. In fact, they didn't speak any English at all, and there were only four of them on board. So that was disappointing, but it was very clear, and this thing was massive, and it was very

clear that this was their job, and they were very good at it. So we're clinging on. We've been clinging on to this seam out all night, and I'm getting pretty fed up with it, and I can see over my shoulder, further down the Magellan, almost calm water. It's just white horses, but not these waves we're having to deal with. So I'm quite keen to get there. So I'm quite keen to take a line off this tug, gas-axe the anchors, that was pretty spectacular by the way, but get this tug.

Now I'm being told to wait, I'm being ordered actually to wait for the second tug, but the second tug's not coming for another six hours, and the weather's getting worse, the wind is now gusting, routinely gusting over 70 knots, it's horrific. So I'm sitting there sort of tapping my fingers going, well, I've been told to wait for the second tug, but that seems rubbish. And I'm talking to my ops officer going, I think we should go, don't you? And he's going, well, we've been told to wait. Anyway, eventually I went, no, come on, let's go.

So we did. We gas axed the anchor. He took us in tow. The single tug took us in tow. They did have to take us 180 through the wind, which was horrific because, of course, we immediately started rolling again and all sorts of things were coming loose down below and it was very unpleasant. But we got around, we did the 180 turn, we're now going downwind, and within half an hour,

we're in these much calmer waters. And I ring northward to report my position, course, and speed, which we've been doing every half an hour routinely. Of course, it's a completely different position, completely different course and speed. And they're like, say again, because we've basically disobeyed that order and gone anyway. Then the second tug was coming to meet us. So probably four hours later, that came and that strapped alongside us to act as our rudder. That was the moment.

Yeah, that was the moment. We're now in calm water. We've got two salvage tugs in attendance. We're heading towards Puerta Reinas. That was the moment. You know, I remember very clearly I was on the bridge roof. The sun was coming up and I was looking around going, you know, on any other occasion, this would be absolutely stunning.

I think I rang home at that point, first phone call to my wife, who had been kept very well in the picture by people ashore, as had all the next of kin, actually. They'd all been contacted. That was the moment I thought, okay, we're over this. We're through this now. We're safe. We're not out of it. We've still got to get alongside. And even then, we've got a job to do. But we're now, you know, the likelihood of this unraveling to the point where we might all drown has now passed. I'll close on a final question. We may have already talked about which decision it was, but what was the most typical leadership decision that you faced? Yeah, good question. I was most annoyed about that anchoring, because that indecision

that was being forced upon me probably delayed us by half an hour once the weather was getting worse and worse and worse. So that one really annoyed me. The best decision I made was the one to put the anchor out, because that was what altered our rate of drift and took us over the seamount. But that wasn't a difficult decision to make. That's just seamanship, right? It's obvious. I got a lot of credit for that in the subsequent reports, but I wasn't sure I totally agreed with that. I think it was the little things, managing people's sleep cycles, telling people to go

to sleep, go to bed, go and take an hour off. The relationship I had with my engineering officer and the damage control officer and also the executive warrant officer who was doing a lot of the work down below, that was really good. He came to me and ordered me out of my chair, he said, you need to get out and about, go go and see this person, or go to this part of the ship, which was brilliant advice. He was exactly right. I'd been on the bridge for too long, and he basically forced me off it to go and get amongst

it. So that was the most satisfying part of this, was watching these little pockets of teamwork really come through. And then we got alongside Puntarenus, and before you know it, we're in the pub using the tried and tested pub debriefing method. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Tom Sharp. Tom, where can we find you online, and what else are you working on?

StrongSharp 134 is my Twitter handle. That's where I spend most of my time. My side hustle of defence commentating is going very well. I now write twice a week for the Daily Telegraph. I write opinion pieces for them, which of course is fantastic. I spend a lot of time doing that. I also run this communications agency as well. I mustn't forget that that's my actual job, because sometimes the writing overtakes that. And inevitably, I've been bullied, cajoled, persuaded into writing all this up in a book. So eventually, at some point, this whole story and the lead up to it hopefully will appear in a shiny hardback book somewhere. But TomShark134 on Twitter is probably where I spend most of my time. Well, we'll keep an eye out for the Daily Telegraph things if there is anything we want to bring you back for.

Certainly, there's a lot of maritime content out there being produced for you to comment on, both in the red and the black seas and just the normal goings on. But thank you again for joining us today. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Bully in the alley, way, hey, bully in the alley, help me, Bob, I'm bully in the alley, bully down the shimbo now. A porter, oh, and a porter, gin, oh, way, hey, bully in the alley, a porter, wine, both white and red, oh, bully down the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm pulling in the alley. Why, hey, pulling in the alley. Help me, Bob, I'm pulling in the alley. Pulling out the shimbo now.