It is 1978.
The cargo ship Munchen set sail to cross the Atlantic. Munchen was a state-of-the-art cargo ship. The December storms predicted when she set out to cross the Atlantic did not concern her German crew. The voyage was perfectly routine until at 3am on 12 December she sent out a garbled mayday message from the mid-Atlantic. Rescue attempts began immediately with over a hundred ships combing the ocean.
The ship was never found. She went down with all 27 hands. An exhaustive search found just a few bits of wreckage, including an unlaunched lifeboat that bore a vital clue. It had been stowed 20m above the water line yet one of its attachment pins had twisted as though hit by an extreme force. The Maritime Court concluded that bad weather had caused an unusual event. Other seafarers could not help but consider the possibility of a mythical freak wave.
However, oceanographers are skeptical about the existance of monstrous waves.
They point out that in a storm with a significant 12m wave height, there could never be anything larger than a 15m wave height, and that in the storm, this would be rare, a statistical blip if it existed at all.
And yet, inexplicably, some 20 ships have been lost around the coast of South Africa since 1991.
Then on New Year's Day, 1985 a wave of 26m was measured hitting the Draupner oil rig in the North Sea off Norway.
This was a full 11m higher than predicted by the standard model.
What was going on?
Oceanographer turned their attention to the Agulhas Current off South Africa, and to their suprise found that waves larger than 15m were indeed possible, because of freakish conditions when warm water currents ran up against cold water currents.
So that was it neatly wrapped up.
In March 2001, however, two ships the Caledonia Star and the Bremen encountered near fatal wave monsters.
The Caledonian saw a wave 30m high crash over her, tearing out her navigation and communication equipment. She limped back to port.
The Bremen fared worse, losing control of the ship for hourse, tossed around like driftwood on a storm.
Luckily, the engineers managed to restart the engines and a disaster was averted.
But the mystery was that there were no opposing currents clashing like titans in the South Atlantice where these two ships were sailing.
Only one theory has been put forward to explain this strange phenomenon.
Quantum theory specialists have pointed out that in certain circumstances particles can suck energy from their neighbours, fuelling their own cravings and rendering their neighbours lifeless.
The same might be happening with killer waves.
By sucking the energy out of their neighbours they can achieve the status of a collosus, wreaking havoc on even the calmest of seas.
Modern ships are designed to withstand a pressure of 15 tonnes per square metre. Vampire Killer Waves can exert a pressure of 100 tonnes per square metre.
Perhaps this is the reason for so many nautical disappearances.
Whatever the reason, the facts are now known, the sea is indeed a harsh mistress.
And all those salty tales of Killer waves woven around a sputtering fire by ancient sea-dogs deep within their rum-cups, were probably true.
yechydda,