Remembering 9/11

I was sailing with a predominantly American group on a three-masted barque called the Statsraad Lehmkuhl on September 11 2001. It’s a beautiful Norwegian training ship, based out of Bergen. It’s about 85m long and 12m wide at the widest point. This is long and slender for a ship, so it looks fast. It can deploy about 2,000sqm of sail, although no one is going to risk doing that. It was built in Germany as a training ship before being transferred to Britain in 1921 as part of reparations related to the first World War and almost immediately sold to Norway where she gained her current name in 1923.

She was seized by German occupiers during the second World War and although she survived, needed significant refit to bring her back into service after the war. Hilmar Reksten privately funded her preservation in the late 1970s before donating her to the Statsraad Lehmkuhl foundation in 1978.

She’s beautiful. When you read her name and the number of masts, that image which came to mind of a long white ship, crashing through ocean waves under billowing white sails? That’s her. She’s practical too, with a steel hull, batteries, a diesel engine and modern navigational equipment, but at her heart, she’s a tall ship, and watching the ocean from her nest is slightly more wonderful than you think it would be. Much as looking out from the top of a mountain is just more of everything than you expect it to be.

There’s a lesson in perspective there. The captain while I was aboard explained it to us. When you stand on the deck you are about 4.5m above the water. The horizon is about 8km away. If you climb to the next your horizon expands to about 18km away. From the deck you can see about 200sqkm of ocean. From the nest? About 1,000. Theres more good news, other ships have height too, so you can see them beyond the horizon. The top of the mast of another ship like the Lehmkuhl can be seen when it is around 30km away, that’s an area of some 2,800sqkm.

What a lesson! You can increase your awareness immensely by moving yourself to a better place to see and knowing what to look for when you get there. In her years, the Statsraad Lehmkuhl has seen a great deal. She’s survived two world wars and multiple transfers of ownership. On the morning of September 11 2001, she was well-prepared to care for her passengers and crew as they learned about what had happened in New York.

It was the isolation. There was one internet-enabled device onboard the ship, a satellite phone and modem. This was 2001. I don’t know precisely, but the connection was most likely somewhere around 2.4kbit/s. I’m not even sure how to explain how slow that is compared to what we take for granted now. It happened while we were between Gran Canaria and Bermuda. A 22-day stretch of sailing. We often went days seeing only ocean and the sky. We dropped the launch to pick up a bucket seen floating in the water because it was the first object we had seen in about a week.

We had longwave radio of course, and I was pleased to learn this was largely BBC World Service. Because of the rolling swell in the ocean the ship would move up and receive the signal cleanly, then down and it would fade into static before coming gradually back as the ship was lifted by the swell.

As news came in through the ship’s radio a group gathered around it to listen. The report was in bursts as we climbed up into the air and then lost as we descended. “New York, DC, the Pentagon”… “Massive terrorist attack”, “The World Trade Centre, gone”…

There were a few minutes when we all thought the US had been largely wiped out, possibly by Nuclear attack. People began to speculate about whether the Western states would also have been affected, who might have done it, but the main thing was this moment of panic and terror when this small group of people thought they may have been spared because they were aboard this ship, while their families and friends had been annihilated. The satellite phone was expensive, very expensive, but it was immediately in full-time use. Very quickly we learned what had happened and the sense of doom dissipated. Many onboard took their turn on the phone, to call their family and confirm everyone was ok. The moment passed.

I hadn’t planned to remember it or mark it in any way, but found my mind scrolling back regardless.