NEVER SET SAIL ON FRIDAY — W
hen Andy Whittaker rowed ashore February 26 to clear out of Chile's remote Robinson Crusoe Island, the plan was for him and his wife, Rhian Salmon, to set sail for Easter Island that
most city — and spent the better part of a year refitting her before setting out for New Zealand late last January.
D
uring that fateful Friday night, while Andy slept soundly, Rhian's intuitive powers kicked in, as she sensed something odd. The heavy ferrocement hull seemed to be rocking with a peculiar motion. Uncommon gurgling noises coming from the head and sinks caused her to get up and shut off several throughhull fittings. Then around 4 a.m. Andy woke up suddenly: "'What the heck is that'? I thought. I heard the sound of water rushing by the hull, as if we were sailing — fast." Outside, it was a pitch-black night. He shined a light around, but all he could see was water streaming past the hull. "It was as if we were doing 20+ knots." Zephyrus was moored in the southeast corner of Cumberland Bay, lying in 75 feet of water on a huge mooring that had been set by the Chilean Armada (Navy). Having dived on it himself, Andy knew its construction — a 4-ton concrete slab augmented by four 50-lb fishing anchors secured to its corners — and he was confident that it was secure. At the head of the bay lay the waterside town of San Juan Bautista. There were no other cruising boats on the bay that night, only unoccupied fishing boats. "Initially I had no idea what was going on," recalls Andy. "For the life of me I couldn't work out what was happening." Then he and Rhian heard a thunderous rumble ashore. "It sounded like thousands of tons of earth being poured out of a giant dump truck all at once," explains Andy. Both he and Rhian assumed it
afternoon. But something in his gut told him to stay another day. It was, after all, a Friday, and as the centuries-old superstition dictates, sailors should never leave port on a Friday. There was something more than that, though; something intuitive that urged him to linger another day. Later, when he told Rhian of his decision, she was delighted, as the extra day would give them time to thoroughly secure everything on deck and get a bit more rest. They were, in fact, still a bit worn out after their rough 550-mile crossing from Puerto Montt, on the Chilean mainland — which was the first blue-water crossing either of them had ever made. Typically, most sailors break into offshore voyaging gradually after years of instruction and practice in sheltered inshore waters. However, this feisty British couple is anything but typical. They met and fell in love while working in Antarctica. Andy, 36, is an ex-Royal Marine who often earns his pay suspended from industrial structures hundreds of feet in the air, when he's not mountaineering in places like Patagonia and Antarctica. Rhian, 35, holds a PhD in atmospheric chemistry, which led her to spend four seasons with the British Antarctic Survey. After somehow getting the sailing bug, they bought the stout 37-ft sloop Zephyrus in Ushuaia — Argentina's southernPage 90 •
Latitude 38
• November, 2010
ALL PHOTOS ZEPHYRUS
Happier times: Rhian and Andy fell in love while in Antarctica and decided to explore the world under sail.
must have been a massive landslide. But it was, of course, the roar of an immense wall of water crashing against the shoreline; a tsunami estimated to have been 15 feet high which traveled to the island at roughly 500 mph, generated by the now-famous 8.8 earthquake that had rocked the Chilean mainland less than an hour earlier. The epicenter was nearly due east of this tiny island and its three smaller neighbors within the Juan Fernandez archipelago. It is darkly ironic that Andy had actually heard that exact crashing sound before, but in the confusion of that dark, eerie night, he didn't make the connection. Amazingly, he'd been in Thailand on December 26, 2004, when a catastrophic tsunami struck, but he was just far enough inland to avoid the fate of so many others. More than 8,000 Thais and vacationers perished. On Robinson Crusoe, as in Thailand, there had been no warning.
The character in Daniel Defoe's famous novel, after whom this normally tranquil island is named, was modeled after Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned here from 1704 to 1708.
