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NARRATOR: Crossing the earth's oceans is always a battle against nature.

Out there, there's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

If the wind doesn't get you, the waves will.

Watch out! Watch out!

It takes skill, courage and luck to survive storms at sea.

♪ Theme music

Over two thirds of the earth's surface is covered by oceans.

At any one time, there are hundreds of thousands of ships at sea...

...and it's not always smooth sailing.

With little warning, severe storms can come out of nowhere.

High winds howl across the oceans.

Waves reach heights of more than 15m.

When this happens,

even the largest ships can get into trouble.

And for mariners, a pleasant voyage

can quickly become a life or death struggle.

On average, two large ships sink every week.

Some of the most dangerous seas around North America

are just off the coast of Newfoundland.

On February the 14th 1982,

hurricane-force winds caused a disaster

that shocked the world.

The day before, weather forecasters had issued a warning

about an Atlantic storm heading up Canada's eastern seaboard.

Directly in its path were several huge oil rigs.

Owen Myers was working as a weather observer on one of them.

He'd been through his share of bad storms,

but nothing had prepared him for what was about to happen.

This one really came very quickly

and intensified really rapidly too.

It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

The waves were pounding into the rig.

You're looking around and you're thinking,

'Well, something's going to fall off.'

As the winds increased to over 160km/h,

enormous waves began to break higher than the rig platform.

Instead of being 60ft up, looking, you know,

down towards the waves, you're actually seeing the crests of waves

that were above you.

Just 25km from Owen's rig,

84 men were working on the Ocean Ranger,

the largest rig in the world.

That night, the storm was moving straight towards it.

This rig wasn't attached to the sea floor.

It floated on giant ballast tanks.

Inside one of the legs,

operators pumped water into and out of the tanks

to keep the platform level.

The portholes were just 8.5m above the waterline.

Around seven o'clock that evening,

a giant wave struck the rig and broke through.

(SIREN WAILS)

The tons of sea water that surged into the leg

short-circuited the ballast controls

and water poured into the ballast tanks.

The weight of the extra water

started pulling the platform down on one side.

The crew sent out a desperate mayday.

MAN: We're listing badly and we need to get the people off the rig.

MAN: Roger.

MAN: We may not be able to save the whole rig.

The crew had no choice. They abandoned the rig.

90 minutes later, Ocean Ranger sank.

On Owen's rig, the crew were glued to the radar screen.

Target just disappeared. It was astonishing.

You were just looking at it and it's gone.

It's a terrible finality,

because you know when something that big isn't showing up,

it just can't be there any more. It's sunk.

The next day, all that was left were the remains of the lifeboats.

The waves had smashed them to pieces.

None of the 84 men survived.

Any time you go to sea,

whether it's on an oil rig or any other kind of boat,

anything that's floating can sink.

Like the Titanic,

Ocean Ranger was supposed to be unsinkable.

Now, like the Titanic,

it lies on the ocean floor.

Stern's clear. Onboard. Onboard.

Someone who knows well how dangerous the ocean can be

is Chief Shawn Winters of the US Coast Guard.

His team patrols Cape Disappointment in Washington State -

one of the most treacherous areas on the Pacific Coast.

In this area that we work,

we can go from conditions kind of like today

where it's not so rough to there'll be breaking surf

all the way across this entrance

anywhere from 15ft to 20ft to 30ft.

In the winter, huge amounts of water

flow out of the mouth of the Columbia River

and collide with the Pacific Ocean.

Storm conditions can be so hazardous here

that it's earned the nickname the Graveyard Of The Pacific.

The Coast Guard is called out every week

to rescue people in trouble.

It's extremely dangerous, it's very treacherous.

For people that think or say, 'Oh, I'm not afraid,'

well, you should be.

If you don't have respect for what the ocean is,

what Mother Nature's gonna throw at you, you shouldn't be out here.

It's a big ocean. We're a little, small part of it.

To describe conditions at sea,

sailors use the Beaufort Wind Force Scale.

Force zero is calm.

When winds reach 29km/h, it's a force five.

Small waves have breaking crests with light foam.

At force seven, winds can be 50km/h

and waves a terrifying 6m.

A force nine. These conditions, with 75km/h winds

create a serious challenge for ships.

Much more dangerous are storm force winds -

force ten on the Beaufort Wind Scale.

Winds gust at speeds greater than 80km/h

and the sea appears almost white.

But the ultimate nightmare is a force 12 - hurricane force.

Winds blow over 117km/h.

The water is completely white with foam and spray.

Waves can reach 14m and higher.

Despite the dangers, some sailors are still willing to take the risk

and one of them paid the price.

He found himself trapped and fighting for life

far away from land.

Most sailors do all they can to avoid storms at sea,

but there are some who take on the challenge

of sailing the most dangerous seas in the world.

The Southern Ocean surrounds Antarctica.

As the westerly winds race around the planet here,

there's nothing in their way to slow them down.

They can reach speeds of more than 240km/h.

These are the strongest average winds found anywhere on earth.

Sailors know that high winds mean high seas

and the Southern Ocean has higher waves

than any other ocean on the planet -

big enough to swallow a yacht whole.

November 2008, on the Atlantic Coast in France.

30 sailors are preparing for the Vendee Globe race.

Each will single-handedly sail around the world,

crossing the Southern Ocean.

It's the ultimate sailor's challenge.

They face a greater risk of dying that climbing Mount Everest.

The Southern Ocean's a pretty fearsome place.

The most unpleasant place on earth.

70ft waves, 70 knots of breeze, icebergs.

Not the place you'd go for a holiday.

Family members know they won't see their loved ones for three months

and then only if they're lucky.

Woo!

As the lone sailors set out, over 300,000 people see them off.

(PEOPLE CHEER, HORNS BLOW)

Experienced skipper Tony Bullimore has sailed the Vendee Globe before

and knows how tough it can be.

You've got hundreds of spectator boats everywhere,

then, slowly, all the spectators disappear.

You might be close to one or two of the other competitors

and you wave once more to them and they wave back, 'Good luck,'

and then you're on you're on.

Day 1 and the yachts head out into the North Atlantic.

From here, the shortest way around the world

is to sail close to Antarctica,

across an area of the Southern Ocean known as the Roaring Forties.

In the 1997 Vendee Globe race,

Tony Bullimore discovered the unpredictability

of this ocean for himself.

When it's bad down in the Southern Ocean,

it's the worst sea in the world.

Parts of this ocean are so remote

that only astronauts have been further away from land.

It's all very lonesome.

The boat becomes your world.

You can't call on anyone. You're on your own.

When Tony was 800km from Antarctica, things turned nasty.

There was a black line coming from the south,

which was a big roll of dark clouds that was coming over me.

The wind kept increasing from sort of 20, 25, 30, 35, 40

50, 60, 70, 80.

At one time, it was gusting 100mph winds.

So I'm beginning to worry about pitchpoling -

you know, with the boat rolling over.

The heavy seas and strong winds finally took their toll.

I hear this crack.

Within seconds, literally,

two or three seconds, the boat had gone shht!

The keel had snapped.

As the boat capsized, Tony found himself standing on the ceiling.

Then things went from bad to worse.

The boom hit one of the viewing windows,

which was now under the boat, and it just burst open

and the water started to come in.

It was quite amazing. It was like the Niagara Falls upside down.

It just shot up in the air.

Freezing cold water was filling the cabin.

Tony was left with just a tiny pocket of air to breathe.

He had seconds to get into his survival suit

or he'd freeze to death.

His automatic radio beacon sent out a distress signal

picked up by the Australian military.

But the nearest rescue team was well over 2,000km away.

No-one had ever conducted a rescue this far south.

Three days later,

a search plane miraculously spotted his overturned boat.

But they had no way to pick him up

and no way of knowing if he was still alive.

I've got no real water, I've got no food,

I'm getting very, very cold.

I decided I'm not going to last more than a day and a half.

The Australian Navy sent a ship to the rescue,

but it was still two days away.

By now, Tony had been trapped inside the overturned hull

of his boat for over four days.

He struggled to survive in the icy water.

All of a sudden, I heard this banging.

It was a team from the Australian Navy

pounding on the hull of his boat and looking for signs of life.

My ears pricked

and I could distinctly hear the English language.

I took a few deep breaths...

...swam down a few feet, then swam out about 15ft...

...and then I headed for the surface and a big grin came over my face

and I said, 'God, I've been saved.'

His rescuers were amazed that he'd survived so long

in the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean.

The planet can be an awful place anywhere on any of the oceans,

but in the Southern Ocean, that's the daddy of them all.

OK, big smiles there, guys.

Come here!

(BOTH LAUGH)

From start to finish, the Vendee Globe race

is a test of human endurance.

In 2008, only 11 of the 30 boats finished.

Once again, it was the Southern Ocean that took the greatest toll.

One sailor fell and suffered multiple fractures

when a huge wave smashed into his boat.

Several others were overwhelmed by high winds.

In all, 12 skippers were defeated by the extreme conditions

of the Southern Ocean.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Atlantic Ocean

has some of the most ferocious storms.

Many begin off the coast of the US and head east.

As a storm crosses the huge expanse of the Atlantic,

there are nearly 500km of ocean with nothing in its way...

...so the waves can just keep growing.

It's only recently that scientists discovered

exactly how big these waves can get.

The ship Discovery is the scientific research vessel

for the UK's National Oceanography Centre.

Dr John Allen is one of the research scientists.

He's made many trips onboard this ship,

but when the Discovery set off in January 2000,

little did he know the voyage was going to make history.

It's not something we'd want to see again and, frankly,

a few of us would rather not have seen it in the first place.

The research team was heading out into the Atlantic

for some routine observations of ocean currents.

When the ship was 240km off the coast,

they ran into several big storms.

The first storm was very severe

and the first storm whipped up much larger waves

than most of us onboard had ever seen before on its own.

MAN: This is force ten in the North Atlantic.

Lovely jubbly.

The storm made life onboard very uncomfortable.

Basically, your world is being thrown around rather like a cork.

Maybe you could imagine a can going over a waterfall.

At that stage, we didn't realise that it might get somewhat worse.

It did get worse. The waves grew.

You're looking at something quite monstrous -

waves that appeared, literally, almost as big as the ship.

It was, um, quite humbling.

John tried to take a photograph.

This wave breaking over was so violent,

I couldn't actually take my finger off the button.

Down below, a recorder was measuring wave height.

When the scientists got back to base and checked their data,

they found out why their experience had been so terrifying.

They had plowed through a 29m wave - the highest ever recorded.

It was a pretty awesome experience.

It made you feel as though you were definitely part of something

much bigger than yourself.

Scientists have discovered there's a mathematical formula

to determine exactly when a wave becomes a danger to ships.

In this tank in Denmark,

they test model ships in different types of waves.

The wave generator produces increasingly larger waves.

At first, the ship rides over them with ease.

But the situation gets critical

when the height of the wave becomes greater

than one-seventh of the length of the wave.

When this happens, the water at the top of the wave

starts to move faster than the rest of it.

That can be lethal.

A breaking wave 90m high and 91m long weighs 45,000 tons -

a danger to even the most experienced seamen.

The Atlantic Ocean can be rough, but if you're a fisherman,

the worst place in the world to work is on the Bering Sea.

Being a crab fisherman here is dangerous.

Mountainous waves frequently overwhelm their fishing boats.

Oh!

Alaskan ocean storms are among the deadliest on earth.

If a crewman gets swept overboard,

he has just minutes before he dies from hypothermia.

These fishermen risk their lives

to haul in millions of tons of seafood

and they keep fishing through the most severe storms.

Working in these seas is a test of endurance.

The fuel for the storms in the Gulf Of Alaska

is wind coming off the coastal mountains.

Gary Hufford is a scientist with the National Weather Service.

Much of the mountains along the Gulf Of Alaska

are considered some of the highest in the world.

There are mountains in this area

that go as high as 12 and 13,000ft.

These huge mountains produce a deadly wind called a gap wind.

When the air blowing from the land towards the sea

hits a narrow gap in the mountains,

it's forced through and the compression speeds up the wind.

This is a perfect example.

We're looking at a very narrow valley

where the mountains go up on either side,

giving a perfect route for the winds in the interior

to come out all the way here to the ocean.

Satellite pictures show the gap winds as streaks of red,

shooting out from the land.

It's like a squirt gun.

If you open it up and you squirt it without much pressure,

it sprays out all over,

but when you tighten it up and make it go through

a very tight hole, it shoots far and fast

and these winds do the same thing as they go through the gap.

When these high-speed winds blow,

they travel up to 500km off shore and can be a serious threat

to fishing vessels.

In November 2007,

Alan Ryden was alone on his fishing boat,

The Pacific Lady, in the Shelikof Strait

south-west of Anchorage.

The wind was just funnelling down through there really intensely.

On boats, you're used to taking really big rolls,

but they come back and you're ready for another big one.

But this, the wind pushed the boat over and held it over.

The gap wind was so strong, Alan's boat didn't stand a chance.

I knew almost immediately I was losing the boat.

As the boat sank,

Alan was left at the mercy of the seas.

I was getting rolled by these cresting, breaking waves

that were picking me up and throwing me

down the face of huge waves.

Even worse, the wind snatched his life raft out of his hands.

Thing just screaming down the face of the wave.

It's just like... (GASPS)

So I swam and swam and swam

and it was still, like, right out of reach.

Then I caught up to actually one of these lines that was dragging behind

and then, obviously, after that, I tied it to my wrist.

That was pretty scary.

Back at Alan's home port, no-one noticed his boat was missing.

Meanwhile, the powerful gap wind

pushed him further off shore and the waves got even bigger.

They just got progressively larger.

I think that they were about 25-footers

throughout most of the night.

Finally, six hours after Alan's boat capsized,

the Coast Guard picked up his emergency signal.

They scrambled a search and rescue plane.

It was a dangerous mission.

Pilot Steven McKechnie wrestled with the controls

through winds gusting up to 95km/h.

It was very turbulent on the take-off, on the climb out.

The guys in the back jet altitude

were starting to get a little queasy.

The crew flew towards the spot where the boat had capsized,

but by now, Alan was miles away.

Finding him seemed impossible.

It was 20ft seas, not to mention it was pitch dark.

It was real turbulent and everything,

but we really couldn't see much on the surface at all.

When the Coast Guard was still 11km from the boat,

they had an amazing stroke of luck.

Lo and behold, I saw right out the left window

this one white strobe just flashing.

It was the sound of a C-130, Coast Guard C-130 flying low

and fast, full bore right over -

it seemed like they were right over my left shoulder, just wrrrm!

Even though they'd found him,

there was no way to pick Alan up.

All they could do was improve his chances of survival.

So we came back around, then we dropped the flare

and then - so we have a better visual for him.

And then basically dropped the life raft.

It literally bumped into me. I never paddled a stroke.

I put my left arm out into it and rolled right into it.

2.5 hours later,

another fishing boat spotted Alan's flare

and pulled him out of the water.

He was lucky to be alive.

He was in the water ten hours, we found out later on.

It was unbelievable.

Even seasoned rescuers were amazed Alan had survived.

The Cape Of Good Hope on the southern tip of South Africa

is on a major shipping route.

Bartolomeu Dias, the first European to reach here in 1488,

named it the Cape Of Storms.

Since then, over 1,000 ships have foundered

in these treacherous waters.

In many cases, there were reports of rogue waves,

which had been written off as sailor's tales,

but scientists now know that these legends are true.

These waves arise as the wind blows across the sea.

They begin as capillary waves just a few millimetres across.

When the wind increases, the waves build in size.

As they travel across the ocean, some waves move faster than others

and as they catch up with one another,

they combine and grow until they produce giant waves.

Captain Dai Davies

is one of the leading salvage experts in South Africa.

He's seen first-hand the damage these waves can do.

I've been involved with five major incidents there

where ships of 365,000 tons

have lost up to 5,000 tons of steel.

Since 1990, over 20 big ships navigating this busy route

have been crippled by giant waves.

The Mimosa was one of them.

A huge hole was punched in her side.

The captain there was a very, very experienced man

and he said he'd never seen anything like it in his life.

It was like a bomb had hit there.

In 1991, the Atlas Pride lost most of her bow.

The waves took out 5,500 tons of steel.

No-one could explain why there are so many rogue waves here

until scientists plotted the positions of the damaged ships

and overlaid them with an infrared image of the ocean.

Suddenly, a pattern emerged.

The ships all lay in the path

of one of the world's strongest ocean currents,

the Agulhas Current.

This runs around the Cape from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic.

It can flow up to 16km/h.

Like the jet stream does for airliners,

this ocean current can cut travel time for ships.

It can save up to a day as they round the coast of Southern Africa.

But it also comes with a high risk.

Scientists have discovered that when the wind blows

in the opposite direction to the current,

it pushes against the waves and slows them down,

allowing waves behind to catch up.

As the waves combine, they can grow to record heights.

Sailors have reported waves of up to 30m

that appear out of nowhere.

These are the rogue waves that have turned this coastline

into a ship's graveyard.

Now that scientists have discovered

exactly why this part of the world is so hazardous,

most ships take the safer, slower route

160km further south.

Taking the old route is a devil's bargain.

Most mariners will do anything to avoid dangerous seas.

But a captain of a pilot boat often has no choice.

They have to guide ships into port in all weather conditions.

Today, boat designer Frank Kowalski

is sailing out into a stormy Atlantic sea

to test his latest design.

It was designed specifically as a pilot boat

search and rescue boat, so its hull is designed

specifically to deal with rough weather - big waves, storms.

The only way to find out if it's tough enough for the job

is to test it in the worst weather.

Today we're expecting force nine.

We've got 50mph winds.

It should be nasty conditions out there.

Frank heads out alongside another of his boats,

right into the oncoming wind.

OK, Keith, if you just pull in front of me,

go straight over the harbour rocks. Over.

(MAN YELLS)

Frank is battling 6m waves.

But he's designed his boat to take the force.

Tremendous force, you know.

One cubic metre of water is a ton.

Luckily, we've got a big wave deflector on the foredeck there.

The wave deflector splits the wave and dissipates its energy

so you're not hit with such green water.

A series of massive waves slams into his boat.

We had three big waves there. The first one broke over the boat.

That's always the dangerous moment.

If you were beam onto that, possibly a capsizing situation there.

In seas like that, you've got to line up, keep it square

and take it on the nose.

These boats are tough,

but even the strongest ships on the planet

can't withstand the mighty force of a hurricane.

When a hurricane, typhoon or cyclone surges across an ocean,

it stirs up the most dangerous seas on the planet.

On land, you can escape hurricane winds by taking shelter.

But at sea, there is nowhere to go.

Even the largest ships in the world, like aircraft carriers,

are no match for these extreme conditions.

The chief meteorologist on the USS Eisenhower

is Lieutenant Commander Elizabeth Higgins.

This ship, even though it's well over 90,000 tons,

is not invincible and Mother Nature is a very fierce force

that we have to reckon with.

The ship's weather room has all the technology

the commander needs to avoid hurricanes and typhoons.

The mariner rule of thumb

is always to never cross the track of the storm.

You see these areas here with the semicircles,

that shows that it's a significant area of impact

and that we would not want to have a ship of any sort

drive through that area.

Keeping the ship out of harm's way is a matter of life and death.

There could be significant damage to the ship

and possibly personnel on the ship if we rode through a typhoon

or any type of heavy seas at all.

Before the days of modern weather forecasting,

the only way to avoid hurricanes and typhoons

was to avoid sailing in places where they strike.

But during World War II, the Navy often had no choice

but to sail straight through ocean storms.

On December the 17th 1944,

the US Navy's Third Fleet was sailing east of the Philippines

when a meteorologist noticed a sign of an approaching storm -

a drop in atmospheric pressure.

In those days, the ships would have used a barometer,

which measures the atmospheric pressure.

The needle actually went well below the actual scale.

The scale goes down to about 27.7 inches of mercury

and they said the needle was recorded to be

down around the U in the US Navy.

Radar was a new invention.

A radar operator onboard saw this unusual image on his screen,

but had no idea he was looking at a typhoon.

Without knowing it, the whole fleet was heading into the storm.

They ran straight into 225km/h winds and 24m high seas.

The storm crippled the fleet.

Three destroyers capsized and sank...

...and 790 men lost their lives.

For the US Navy,

it was one of the worst disasters of the Second World War.

Today, technology means the Navy can stay one step ahead of the weather.

But they still have to steer well clear of hurricanes at sea.

The fact is no ship ever built

can withstand the most extreme forces on the ocean.

This can be the most dangerous place on earth.

When storms strike, there is nowhere to hide.

The smallest mistake can be fatal.

And nothing can prepare you for the unexpected.

Only the brave or the foolhardy dare to risk storms at sea.

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