PANDEMONIUM ON THE PANDEMONIUM : Thanks to a Little Luck, Crew of Sinking Yacht Saved From Voyage to Bottom of the Sea

One recent lazy afternoon, the crew of Pandemonium was sailing comfortably toward San Francisco, a day and a half out, without a care in the world.

Below decks, skipper John Frisch and Graham Gilchrist were taking naps, and Grant Senner read a book.

On deck, Nancy David was at the helm, with Rick Carolus on watch. A 20-knot breeze carried them along at 10-12 knots. There was no cause for concern, no problem.

Then, in an instant, their 66-foot sailboat was upside down, and they were all in the water, cold and confused, 300 miles from land.

They had no idea what happened. They hadn’t hit anything. There was no rogue wave, no surprise squall. But suddenly they were in the middle of their own Poseidon Adventure, fighting for their lives.

Without warning, the fin-shaped lead keel beneath the boat dropped off. Suddenly top-heavy without those five tons of ballast, the craft took a 180-degree roll, its mast pointing straight down to Davy Jones’ Locker. Carolus was pitched into the water. All spent the next few minutes scrambling to survive. The five were ferrying the boat back to San Francisco from Hawaii, where it finished 19th in the Transpac race last month. They credited their survival to modern technology, the U.S. Coast Guard and luck.

The technology was an Emergency Position Indicator Radiobeacon (EPIRB) on board that signaled the crew’s distress to a Singapore Airlines jet and pinpointed their position. The plane alerted the Coast Guard, which directed a South Korean freighter, Green Ocean, to pick them up from two inflated life rafts about seven hours after the incident. The water was cold, with the air temperature in the 50s.

Without the signal, Frisch said: “We would have probably been dead. Hypothermia would have set in within a couple of days, and in that traffic flow I don’t think anybody would have seen us for a long ways.”

Frisch, 35, lives on a boat in Marina del Rey, where the crew, except for David, gathered after returning to the mainland. David, 34, is from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; Gilchrist, 23, from Scotland; Senner, 18, from Hawaii, and Carolus, 28, lives in Newport Beach.

The incident occurred at 4:15 p.m. Aug. 3. Why the keel fell off may never be explained. It was installed earlier this year at Long Beach.

Without the keel, the boat not only became top-heavy and unstable but lost all leverage to offset the force of the wind on the sails. Nobody heard or felt anything unusual before the boat suddenly rolled belly up.

Senner, below in his bunk reading, said he wasn’t alarmed at first.

“Usually, when a puff hits, you kind of broach over on your side, and then you come back up,” he said. “We went over on our side, but we just kept on going.”

The flip took 20 to 30 seconds, Senner said.

Frisch awakened, he said, when things started falling on him.

“First thing I said was, ‘Ease the main(sheet) . . . ease the main (to release pressure on the mainsail),’ ” he said. “But when I started seeing water rushing in the hatch, it was time to get out of there.”

Carolus jumped to help David.

“I thought it was a knockdown,” Carolus said, meaning a sudden, severe heel caused by a strong gust of wind. “I grabbed the wheel to help her try to turn it into the wind, but there was no helm. The boat was too far over. I kind of got launched from there.”

Gilchrist was asleep in his bunk. Luckily, his sleeping bag was just thrown over him. But he was strapped in to prevent his being thrown from the bunk in rough seas. He recalled waking up upside down and wet.

“I knew it was serious when I heard everyone shouting,” he said. “You can tell when someone’s not joking. First I tried to untie the straps, then I just slithered through them and exited as fast as I could.”

He said two things probably saved his life--not being inside his sleeping bag, and Senner’s waking him.

“That’s one of the things that runs through your mind. What if . . . ? Grant stayed back to make sure I got out. I’m grateful for that.”

Senner said: “John swam out through the hatch. I was about ready to follow him, but Graham was above me asleep. Everything was moving really fast. I yelled at him--’Graham, let’s go!’--or he would have still been asleep. I followed him out and got in the first life raft--me and Rick.”

Carolus, tossed into the sea, was struggling to swim back to the overturned boat in heavy rubber boots and foul weather pants, which had filled with water.

One raft had been stowed in front of the wheel in the cockpit.

“Somehow, it was right there in front of me,” Carolus said. “I was just lucky that it came my way.”

Carolus inflated the raft, and Senner joined him. In the strong wind they quickly drifted away from the others, who were scrambling to climb up onto the hull. David, wearing the horseshoe-shaped lifesaver from the stern pulpit, was the last.

Frisch said: “It was a little tricky to get Nancy up on board. The bottom being so slick, there was nothing to grab. Graham held onto the rudder and then held onto me. I put my feet underneath her armpits and swung her up on top.”

That maneuver was possible, Frisch said, because the boat was sinking at the stern. With the three temporarily safe on the hull, they planned their next moves.

Frisch remembered the EPIRB. He dived down inside the cabin, but the device had fallen out of its bracket, leaving Frisch to grope in the dark.

“There was an air pocket in there, but not very much,” he said.

Then, another lucky break.

“A flashlight came floating by and I finally found (the EPIRB) way in the back of the boat. I was getting some other stuff together in a sea bag when they started yelling something on top. I said, ‘Well, obviously, something is going wrong so there’s no reason to stick around in here.’ ”

But there was no cause for sudden alarm.

“They just hadn’t heard from me for a while,” Frisch said.

The EPIRB activated, they set about getting the second raft, which was lashed down in the rear of the cockpit and was underwater.

“When I left I’d grabbed one of these little Ginsu knives,” Frisch said. “Graham went down once and cut one of the lashings, then he went down and cut the second lashing. The third time he went down, the raft popped up on the other side of the boat and started inflating. He came back up with a real depressed look: ‘It’s gone . . . it’s gone. The damn thing’s gone.’ ”

Frisch told him: “Don’t worry about it. It’s on the other side.”

After dark, Senner and Carolus lost sight of the other raft in the heavy seas. The rafts had canopies to shield occupants from sun and spray but, Senner said: “It was really cold, and some of the waves were breaking, so we tried to stay down below. We were lucky it was only six or seven hours.

“I didn’t think the life rafts were prepared. I would have liked some food and a blanket in there. They had some water (and) flashlights, but the batteries had touched the saltwater, so the battery acid was all over, so we tossed those.

“Then at 12 o’clock I was down in the life raft and saw a light on the (canopy). ‘What’s this?’ I stuck my head out and saw the biggest ship I’ve ever seen. I thought it was going to run us over. You could see the props because it was empty, and it was just going foom-foom-foom-foom . ‘Hey, Rick, let’s get next to this thing.’ They tossed us a rope and we climbed up the ladder. We had a hot shower and some food.

“About an hour after we got picked up, we picked up the other life raft.”

To the sailors, it seemed that an unseen hand had helped them: the raft floating to Carolus, the flashlight to Frisch, the Singapore jet in the right place at the right time, the South Korean freighter finding two tiny rafts in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night. Said Frisch: “We had a lot of lucky events. Just pure luck.”

The freighter dropped them off at Long Beach the Sunday after the capsizing. The abandoned Pandemonium was last seen floating upside down, “like a 60-foot whale,” Senner said. “The rudder was still on, and that looked like a tail.”

Frisch said the 70-foot mast was separated from the deck by about a foot, hanging straight down by the shrouds. It could remain so indefinitely because of air trapped inside the hull.

But aerial searches by the Coast Guard and the boat’s insurer have been frustrated by a persistent cloud cover at 500 feet.

“I’ve been watching the weather,” said the boat’s owner, Desmond McCallum of Los Altos. “If it breaks it might be worthwhile. We’ve got a good fix on where it should be.”

McCallum, who chartered the boat to Donahue Wildman of Chicago for the race, would not say what the boat was worth, but estimates ranged from $500,000 to $700,000.

Earlier the morning of the incident, Senner said, he and another crewman noticed nothing amiss in the critical area of the keel.

“We had looked at the bolts when we were pumping the bilge,” he said. “There was no water in the compartment. The bolts are still tight, I’m sure. When we were floating away you could see eight of ‘em sticking straight up, like little sticks.”

Pandemonium is--was?--a Nelson-Marek 66 ultralight displacement boat, otherwise known as a ULDB or sled, designed primarily for off-wind races such as the Transpac and those to Mexico. It was built in 1984 for Bill Packer Jr. of Philadelphia and sold in ’86 to McCallum.

Jim Elliott of Ardell Yacht Brokers in Newport Beach handled the sale. “It’s been a very consistent ultralight,” Elliott said.

Designer Bruce Nelson has built many successful ocean racers, as well as assisting with the design of the 12-meter Stars & Stripes ’87 that Dennis Conner used to win back the America’s Cup.

The keel, the third one the boat has had, was constructed in Mexico and installed at Far West Marine Services in Long Beach before the boat competed in the Newport-to-Ensenada and Cal Cup events this year.

Nelson’s associate, Rob Walker, said he had no idea why the keel would have fallen off, although it has happened with other racing boats.

“We’re totally in the dark,” Walker said. “It’s going to be difficult to determine anything unless they recover the boat. It’s all pure speculation at this point.”

Carl Fredricks, owner of Far West Marine Services, said he received the keel fully assembled.

“I don’t think there’s any mystery to what happened,” he said. “The whole keel was made in Mexico. (We) just hung it on there.”

Fredricks said he suspected that the keel bolts--about an inch thick and three to four feet long--were not welded properly to the interior frame of the keel in Mexico.

“The crew said all the keel bolts broke off in a straight line about nine inches below the attachment point. That means the bolts didn’t pull out of the lead, (that) they all broke off at some high-stress area. I suspect that’s about where it was attached to the fabricated frame inside (the keel). They probably broke off where it didn’t get heat-treated properly on the bolts. But that’s all speculation.”

However, Frisch seemed to concur. The keel fell off, he guessed, from “some sort of sheer load . . . failure in the keel bolt cage. You would think they would shear off at the hull, but they sheared off inside the keel, so something was out of whack.”

Fredricks added that “keels fall off all the time. The owners of the boat are asking for a keel to be light and thin. You make ‘em light and thin until they break, and the next keel you build an eighth-inch bigger.”

Frisch doubts that the boat will be found.

“Whatever’s floating of it, if there is anything, would look just like a whitecap,” he said. “Probably just be the bow section.

“If it stays floating, it’ll probably end up down on the Mexican banks someday.”

But most likely, its secret will rest forever at the bottom of the sea.