“The water looked cold, and I remember thinking it also looked hard,” Swenson recalled. There were fifteen-to-twenty-foot-tall whitecaps, “and I had heard that when you land on water and hit a wave the effect is very much like flying into a stone wall. “It was. We laid her in a belly landing, as slowly as we could, with the tail well down. But even at that we hit so hard that it threw the crew all over the ship.”
