Early in the morning of 30 November 1969, cruising many miles north of Hawaii, heading east, Biddle received an unpleasant surprise.
The cruise across the North Pacific had been generally uneventful. We had experienced two 28 Novembers, as we crossed the International Dateline in the direction opposite to that in June. Four+ days to go before we reached San Francisco.
I had the midwatch, 0000-0400, as CIC Watch Officer on the morning of 30 November. At some point, as part of ongoing efforts to stay awake, I started experimenting with the NTDS display. I changed the distance of the display, extending out to maybe 60 miles. Hunh? What’s that? On the left of the display, there appeared a very solid large return . . . of a weather front.
I didn’t remember having seen any warning of potential bad weather. Oh. Maybe it’s not going to have an effect on us. I put the ball tab on the return, which would indicate whether the speed of the front toward us was below our speed. After several sweeps, I realized the front was indeed moving faster than we were and sufficiently fast to catch up to us very quickly.
Walking out to the bridge, I asked the Officer of the Deck if we had received any messages about approaching bad weather. He said we had not. I went to the radar repeater on the bridge and motioned to the OOD to look. I extended the range so the front would be visible and I noted that the weather was approaching fast.
The OOD directed that the captain, asleep in his sea cabin near the bridge, be notified. I believe CAPT Olsen requested updates on the storm.
Within maybe an hour, it started raining and we began to take heavy rolls. The captain had come out to the bridge. From my journal: “Looked just like the movies out there. Huge waves (25+ feet), 30-knot winds spraying water all over the place. The ship took a couple of 45-degree rolls.” Than in a little bit of understatement: “I was a little bit scared.”
Right after I got off watch, Biddle had its biggest roll up until that point, “must’ve been 50 degrees plus.” I was back on the bridge at the time and saw the then-OOD, LT Cashman, lose his balance in that roll. He slid into the base of the captain’s chair. According to the account in my journal: “Captain looked down. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Dave, sir.’ ‘Well, come a little left.'” (Or would he have said “port”?) 🙂
I remember walking back to my stateroom, alternating walking on the deck and the bulkhead. I doubt I was in my rack for more than a minute or two when I fell out due to another extreme roll. I, and just about everyone else on board, realized there was no way anyone was going to sleep. I remember the mess deck being full of sailors.
Again, I went up to CIC, just to have a better sense of what was going on. I remember someone had written on the status board “All the life jackets are stored below.” When we had been on the line, life jackets were in a more accessible location. Now that we were “safe,” they were inaccessible.
ENS Roberts recalls the events as well: “I remember the storm! Gale force winds, if my memory is right, about 60 knots with a following sea. I remember going into the radio room and into the secure room with the CRT 47 and seeing a typewriter that had fallen upside down off the shelf.
“I went up to the bridge and as I stepped through the door we took a big roll and the five or six men on the bridge went sliding to my left onto the deck. The captain was in his chair and so wasn’t knocked down. I knew we were going to roll the other way, so I grabbed the overhead cable and watched the gauge (don’t remember what it’s called) and the bubble went to 30 or 40 (don’t remember now). I had a memory that a warship could take a 60 degree roll so I figured we wouldn’t capsize, but it was unnerving. Then I watched the bow dip below the blue water and the spray go over the bridge – impressive, but it seemed we were safe enough.”
And ENS Graham sent in his recollections: “For some reason (maybe exaggeration) I recall 80-foot seas and 100 knots of wind across the deck. I also recall, more vividly, the 47-degree roll and the ship shuttering at the bottom before the righting arm took hold. I remember blue water over the bullnose (I think for several days we “buried the bullnose” at least once a watch), and all hands were confined to their bunks unless on watch.”
I didn’t personally view this, but I remember overhearing conversation among shipmates that fish had been found, captured by gear, on the 05 level, six levels above the main deck.
CAPT Olsen was more experienced at sea than all of us on board except for a few and I was struck by his relative calm. I expect it is also what a captain is supposed to show whether he is calm or not. He certainly made no big deal of the storm in his report to Biddle families in BIDDLEGRAM #6 dated 20 December. Two days after leaving Guam, he wrote, “we rolled a bit, but never plowed into the sea. We crossed ahead of the high winds that hit Hawaii in early December . . . .” That was not how I remembered it.
The storm that had caught up to us easily moved past us in a similar manner. I reported in my journal that I had gotten to sleep around 0600.
Surfer Magazine in 2006 reported that the storm had been generated by a “massive 960-millibar low pressure system whose cyclonic winds cover almost a third of the entire North Pacific. [A system with 960-millibars of barometric pressure would classify as a Category 3 hurricane, marked by winds of 120+ miles an hour.] Storm surf described in the 30- to 40-f00t range (60 to 80 feet by today’s standards) batters the coast between Kaena Point and Kahuku.”
A note in the Journal of Geophysical Research reported that a buoy about 350 nautical miles north of Oahu recorded a wave height of 14.9 meters (48.9 feet) on 1 December 1969.
If the storm had lessened a bit for us, it had not for the island of Oahu. According to media reports at the time, 60 homes on the North Shore were destroyed or badly damaged in the three days following the storm’s outbreak. Two people were reported swept from shore and drowned.
In the surfing world, the early days of December 1969 on the North Shore are days of legend. According to a 2009 article in Hawaii News Now, marking the 40th anniversary of the swell, “Many surfers consider it to be the biggest swell in recorded history to ever hit Oahu’s North Shore.
“The four-day swell peaked at midnight on December 2, 1969. State senator Fred Hemmings, who surfed with Eddie Aikau, remembers:
“‘We got to Makaha and obviously the North Shore was closed out. Everything was breaking out on the horizon. You couldn’t even paddle out to a location on the North Shore, it was so wild,’ said Hemmings.
According to another account: “’The swell had peaked overnight on the North Shore, but it wasn’t getting into Makaha in the morning,’ Albie [surfing filmmaker Albert Falzon] recalls. ‘We drove to the North Shore, but there were roadblocks and police turning people around. It was mayhem, shit everywhere. The North Shore was completely wiped out. We drove past all the cars to the front of the roadblock and told the police we were an Australian news crew. They let us past and we drove down and saw the destruction and we saw Waimea Bay – a total washing machine.’”
While the focus of the video below is on a reported legendary surfing ride at the time, it shows scenes of the wave action and damage of early December 1969 on the North Shore.
The next couple of days for Biddle was its own distinctive experience, on which I will report in a December 2 post . . . with video!
(As promised, here is Riding the Swells.)