#Crazy shipping in bad weather videos Patch

Partway down the length of the ship, dangling like an afterthought, is a rope boarding ladder. White-over-blue and as long as two football fields, it has 'Honda' emblazoned big and red across its ample stern. When the Rainbow Wing finally materializes out of the scud, a dozen miles out to sea, it looks like a ten-story-tall anvil plowing through the water. 'It's a pretty big storm out there,' Jordan says. Jordan has a rendezvous with the Rainbow Wing, a car carrier running in ahead of the storm with $72 million worth of vehicles fresh off the assembly line in Japan.

#Crazy shipping in bad weather videos Patch

Winter storms whip the sea into a ship-hungry maelstrom that long ago earned this patch of water the nickname 'Graveyard of the Pacific.' Pilots guide ships at every major harbor around the world, but the bar pilots here have distinguished themselves by working a potent brand of maritime mojo in the face of what a 19th-century naval officer called 'the terrors of the bar.'

The bar, where the river's mighty current collides with ocean swells, is one of the most treacherous harbor entrances on the planet. Dan Jordan, who routinely works in all manner of awful weather to guide ships into and out of the Columbia River. It feels as if we're riding a mechanical bull through a dunk tank, and I'm fighting the odd urge to yodel and retch simultaneously.īut this is just the morning commute for Capt. 'She's built stout,' yells Ken Olson, the boat's operator, and I want to believe.

Long as a locomotive and painted rubber-ducky yellow, it powers through the angry water with a thunderous boozh-boozh-babooozh! that sends explosions of spray hurtling past the pilothouse. A gathering storm is chasing crab boats back to port, but the Chinook is running out to sea. At first light on a winter morning off the Oregon coast, the sky begins to luminesce the same creepy shade of doom you might expect at the Apocalypse.