Mariners say the ocean can be unforgiving. During a voyage as a junior officer, Robert Buck found just out how much. Although he didn’t know it, he was a little more than four minutes from disaster.
“We knew the cyclone was out there,” Robert recalls.
The crew were carrying steel on the Newcastle-Auckland route in a general cargo ship. The voyage takes about five days, but bad weather adds an extra couple of days. One day out from...