Deadliest Sea (24 page)

Down below, Heller was still working to get Byron seated properly when, all of a sudden, the basket lifted above the surface and started rising. Heller hadn’t given the signal to lift the basket, but now it looked like Byron was in there pretty good. The swimmer felt relieved as he watched the basket rise toward the helo and saw Byron seem to slump down into the compartment.

The basket was fifteen feet above the waves when Heller turned and began swimming back toward the debris field, where Jim Madruga was waiting.

The older fisherman was still floating alongside the net.
Finally, he thought, as Byron was pulled up out of the waves. Jim watched the basket rise about twenty feet above the surface, then spotted the rescue swimmer coming back toward him. It felt like it had been a long time since the Coast Guard swimmer pried Byron from the net. Now it was Jim’s turn.

From the open door of the helicopter, Musgrave saw Byron drop down a little bit inside the metal basket. Everything looked good. The flight mech watched his swimmer turn and start moving toward the next survivor.

He continued with the hoist.

“The survivor is in the basket,” Musgrave reported into the ICS. “The basket is out of the water. The basket is above the water.”

Halfway up, Musgrave saw that Byron seemed to have lifted himself onto the rail. He looked like he was actually sitting on a shorter edge of the rectangular basket; his butt was on one corner and his feet were hanging over the adjacent side. Byron had his arms wrapped around the bales. He wasn’t where he should be, but he still looked relatively stable.

But with the basket moving up, more than halfway there, Byron slipped. From above, it looked like the lower part of his body was now outside of the compartment.

“The survivor is hanging from the basket,” Musgrave announced.

“What?” Schmitz said.

“What did he say?” Gedemer asked.

Schmitz was confused, but from the right seat, he couldn’t see what was going on in back. The hoist was Musgrave’s show and he was the only one to see the basket reach the cabin door—with Byron hanging by his armpits from its side.

He seemed huge, as if he were seven and a half feet tall. Most of his body was outside the basket, with his legs hanging straight
down below the bottom of the basket floor—and between the bottom of the basket and the helicopter. Byron’s position made it impossible for Musgrave to pull the basket into the cabin.

Instead, he brought the hoist in as far as he could without getting Byron wedged up against the aircraft. He started trying to haul Byron into the helicopter.

Musgrave had never been in a situation where he couldn’t manhandle somebody into the cabin, but he could barely budge Byron’s legs. Kneeling at the doorway, he was just about at eye level with him. Byron’s red neoprene hood was up, but quite a bit of black hair was hanging out. With the suit’s mouth flap fastened, all Musgrave could see of the fisherman was his eyes and the bridge of his nose. There was no point in trying to say anything over the roar of the rotors.

Musgrave looked into Byron’s eyes and saw that his face was frozen in terror.

All Byron had to do was move his legs a little bit, but he wasn’t helping at all. His suit is full of water, Musgrave realized. He probably weighs 500 pounds. Musgrave reached back for a knife that was attached to the side of the cabin. He’d slice open the neoprene legs and get the water out of the suit. Then he’d be able to pull the guy in.

The knife was just a couple feet away, but in the moment that Musgrave moved to grab it, Byron slipped again. When Musgrave turned back to the open door, the fisherman was hanging by his elbows from the edge of the basket. Musgrave grabbed him, and pulled as hard as he could. But it was only two or three seconds before Byron let go.

He slipped out of Musgrave’s arms, plunging into the sea forty feet below.

Moments later, Schmitz heard the mechanic’s voice.

“We lost him. We lost him,” Musgrave repeated.

“We lost who?” At first, Schmitz thought that Musgrave said, “We lost them.”

Though Schmitz and Gedemer couldn’t see what was going on back in the cabin, they’d known from Musgrave’s silence when the basket reached the helicopter that something wasn’t going right.

“The survivor,” Musgrave said. “He’s gone.”

Schmitz could see the man’s light blinking in the water below. For an instant, he thought he saw him move his arms in the waves.

“He’s okay! He’s moving,” the pilot said.

But seconds later a heart-wrenching reality set in: “Never mind. He’s facedown.”

A
fter the Jayhawk’s failed attempt to lower their survivor to the
Alaska Warrior,
there was no doubt in Brian McLaughlin’s mind that the next best course of action was to bring their cabin-load of fishermen to the
Munro
. The aircraft commander kept thinking about those blinking lights. They needed to get back to the people they’d left behind. The
Munro
and its crew were reliable, and they were right there. It was a more complicated, more dangerous approach than delivering the survivors to Dutch Harbor, but there were lives at stake. Many lives. As they got closer to the cutter, McLaughlin got Combat on the radio.

“Cutter
Munro,
6007,” McLaughlin said. “We are en route to you with thirteen survivors on board. That’s thirteen POB.”

In the back of the Jayhawk, steam was rolling off the fish
ermen’s bodies, water still draining out of their Gumby suits. Nobody said much. Rescue swimmer O’Brien Starr-Hollow was kneeling on the aircraft floor, trying to move around among the pig-piled fishermen. A couple of guys were clearly worse off than the rest.

One was the man flight mechanic Rob DeBolt had had such a hard time prying out of the basket an hour before. The guy was shivering violently. So were several of the others.

As Starr-Hollow assessed each fisherman, he held his hand against the man’s head or chest, and tried to look him right in the eyes as he spoke. Starr-Hollow had recently read a book by Jane Goodall, the primate researcher who spent decades studying chimpanzees in the African jungle. The book had impressed upon him how powerful touch and eye contact can be for helping people connect and relax.

All Coast Guard rescue swimmers are trained as emergency medical technicians (EMTs). Part of Starr-Hollow’s job was to provide medical care for the survivors—at least until someone more qualified could take over. He knew morale was key to survival. Feeling happier can help someone feel warmer. Starr-Hollow once read that when people lose faith in their ability to survive, their body temperature drops. He knew it was critically important to keep the men awake and alert. On some of the worst-off fishermen, Starr-Hollow used a technique he learned in EMT school, the sternum rub, more or less a medically sanctioned noogie. He made a fist and rubbed hard with his knuckles against the bony part of the central chest. It was painful, but it would keep them awake.

It was about 6:40
A.M
. and still dark when the crew on the
Munro
’s bridge spotted the orange-and-white-striped aircraft on the horizon. At the captain’s “Tallyho!” the ship’s engineers brought the
Munro
down off the turbines and turned her back
into the swells. Now they’d be chugging away on their diesels once again, steaming slowly north, away from the wreck. (Originally yelled by hunters to excite their hounds at the sight of a fox, “Tallyho” is also used by pilots and ground controllers to indicate that another aircraft or target is in sight).

The
Munro
’s landing signal officer was outside the hangar door on the flight deck. Outfitted in a neon orange vest and helmet, the LSO held a fluorescent light wand, the same type used by runway technicians at commercial airports. While holding a hover, helicopter pilots can’t easily see what’s going on beneath them on deck. Instead, they rely on their flight mechanic and the ship’s LSO to keep track of the hoists.

The 60 Jayhawk settled into a hover above the flight deck. It had taken the crew forty minutes to fly from the
Warrior
to the
Munro
. The whole time, Evan Holmes remained huddled inside the rescue basket. He had been expecting the chopper to land on the ship. But now he realized that wasn’t the way it was gonna go.

Evan wasn’t eager to repeat his harrowing ride above the
Warrior
. As flight mechanic DeBolt slid open the aircraft door, Evan looked down toward the stern of the massive ship. At least it doesn’t look like there’s much to hit, he thought as he was lifted out the cabin door and lowered slowly down toward the flight deck. Evan had been parachuting once. This felt similar. The landing was so smooth, he could barely distinguish the moment the basket touched the deck.

B
ACK AT THE RESCUE SITE
, Dolphin aircraft commander TJ Schmitz moved the helo back and to the left so he could see his rescue swimmer, Abe Heller, and the fallen fisherman, who was probably sixty yards away.

Schmitz flashed the helo’s landing light, and Heller looked
up, but there was no easy way to communicate why they were trying to get his attention. The pilot panned his light out to where Byron was floating, but in the heavy swells, Heller didn’t have an easy line of sight across the water. Besides, he was already working on the next survivor.

Schmitz stared down into the waves. The fisherman was still facedown in the ocean.

The pilot was worried about his flight mechanic. He understood that Musgrave wanted to go back to try to get the man they’d lost. It was an emotional response, and an understandable one. But to Schmitz it didn’t make the most sense given the circumstances.

Both he and Greg Gedemer had heard Musgrave grunting and struggling to pull the fisherman into the cabin. Musgrave had seemed to have been at it for at least a minute—an eternity of silence in the middle of a hoist. Musgrave was as strong as an ox, and that’s exactly why Schmitz had chosen him that morning. Another ALPAT flight mechanic, Logan Cole, had been scheduled to fly, but Schmitz wanted Musgrave instead. It was unusual for a pilot to hand-pick a mechanic for a specific case, but Schmitz knew Cole was newly qualified. The aircraft commander wanted the strongest, most experienced man available. In his opinion, that man was Al Musgrave.

If Musgrave couldn’t have gotten that guy into the helo, well, it was hard to imagine anyone could have.

“We have to move on,” Schmitz told his crew. “We have to save the ones we can.” He heard a faint “Yes, sir” from the back.

“Are you ready to continue?” Schmitz asked.

Again, a quiet but clear “Yes, sir.”

“All right.”

“Rescue checklist part two for basket delivery to the survivor,” Gedemer announced.

The crew went through the script once again, and then Musgrave had the basket back out the door and moving toward Heller and the fisherman bobbing next to him in the waves.

The basket hit the water and Heller steadied it as Jim climbed in. Thirty seconds later, the engineer tumbled out onto the slippery metal floor of the chopper. He felt like a fish out of water as he tried to move around in his suit. He was shaking badly.

I wouldn’t have lasted much longer out there, Jim thought as he pulled himself upright inside the cabin. He could see a few other men pushed up in a ball in the back of the helicopter, some of them all but completely covered up with wool blankets. He scanned the cabin of the tiny copter. Where the hell was Byron?

“Where’s the guy that just came up?” he yelled to one of the fishermen next to him.

“There was nobody came up,” the man answered. “You were the only one.”

Musgrave got Jim Madruga situated and sent the basket back down for Abe Heller. For the first time since they’d arrived at the disaster site, Musgrave pulled Heller all the way into the cabin and slid the door shut.

Schmitz laid out the plan: They’d go back to the group of four who had linked arms in the water, take one, and leave Heller on scene with the rest. With four survivors and two crew in the back, the tiny cabin was already packed full. Leaving the swimmer would make space for one more person.

Heller still had his swimming helmet on, so Musgrave relayed the plan to him. Heller nodded a yes, then grabbed Musgrave’s microphone to talk to the pilots up front.

“Leave a raft!” he yelled into the mic.

“We’re not gonna leave you without a friggin’ raft,” Schmitz answered as he brought the helo into a hover over the four men. “There’s no way.”

Once again, Heller was lowered to the water in the basket. Then Musgrave conned Schmitz about forty yards upwind of the survivors. He pulled out the Dolphin’s raft, popped its inflation handle, and kicked it out the open door. The six-man model was the crew’s own emergency craft. If the helo crashed, this raft was their best chance at survival, but there was no hesitation over leaving it behind. The raft landed within fifteen feet of the fishermen below. It hit the water upside down, but, as designed, it self-righted when the canopy’s support tubes inflated.

Schmitz was impressed with Musgrave’s focus. The flight mechanic’s conning had been perfect. In these conditions, it would have been so easy to throw the raft too far downwind and for it to blow away from the survivors instead of straight into them. But it was right there.

Down in the waves, Heller had already reached the chain of survivors. He’d sized up their conditions, and pulled the weakest man out of the line. Julio Morales saw the Coast Guard swimmer coming toward him. He felt the man’s arms circle his chest. The rescuer was wearing a mask and a snorkel; a small light was attached to his helmet. “You’ll be okay. U.S. Coast Guard,” the swimmer said.

Julio couldn’t believe it. This guy must be crazy to voluntarily jump in the water in these conditions, he thought.

Heller grabbed onto Julio and steered him away from the other men. Heller had the Guatemalan man by the arm when all of a sudden the raft was drifting right toward him. The swimmer hadn’t seen it coming.

“Change of plan,” the swimmer yelled to Julio.

It would be too difficult for Heller to hold onto the raft while he simultaneously tried to get Julio into the basket. Instead, he loaded Julio straight into the raft, then swam back toward the
remaining trio. Heller grabbed the next man he reached. He’d be the one in the basket. The lucky one.

A
PPROXIMATELY SEVENTY MILES TO THE NORTH
, the 60 Jayhawk hovered above the
Munro
. As DeBolt waited for Evan Holmes to climb out of the basket, Starr-Hollow readied the next fisherman. Many of the worst-off men were closest to the cabin door. They’d been the last to be rescued. Now they’d be the first to get out.

As soon as Evan hit the deck, two
Munro
crew members grabbed him steady by the shoulders and told him to stay low. Seconds later, another duo grabbed him and pulled him up. Still in his sopping survival suit, Evan was led across the flight deck and along the outside of the hangar to a door that led to a vestibule, where an EMT team supervised by the
Munro
’s corpsman, “Doc” Chuck Weiss, was waiting.

“We’re going to take your suit off and get you out of your wet clothes,” Evan was told.

“Everything?” he asked.

There were some females there, too. Great. First I’m in freezing water for several hours and now I gotta get butt naked in front of guys and girls? Evan thought. But he was so happy, he didn’t really care.

“Just give me something warm,” he said.

The medical crew already had out the trauma shears designed to cut through zippers and other tough material. They quickly stripped off Evan’s survival suit and the wet clothes underneath. He was wrapped in warmed blankets that had just been pulled out of the clothes dryer, then walked a level down to the makeshift triage center on the
Munro
’s mess deck.

As the 60 pilots maintained a stable forty-foot hover, the fishermen were loaded into the basket one by one and then lowered to the ship. Each time the Jayhawk’s basket left the cabin, there were crew members ready on the flight deck. One of them held a metal “grounding wand” with a clip on one end that attached to the ship. As the basket neared the deck, the crewman would reach out with the wand and touch the metal box, effectively grounding the dangerous static charge that builds up in the basket from the helicopter rotors. With the boat pitching, the
Munro
crew members held the basket and hoist line steady as each survivor reached the deck. They worked systematically, taking each hypothermic fisherman from the basket and handing him off to their crewmates like workers on an assembly line.

As soon as they’d been alerted of the emergency, the
Munro
’s crew had started gathering supplies, especially extra blankets and towels. The dense, gray wool blankets are standard-issue bedding on the 378, and they were loaded into the
Munro
’s eight industrial dryers in armfuls. Two decks up in the kitchen, the crew set the ovens to 160 degrees. They rolled up terrycloth towels and lined them up on industrial-size baking sheets until they came out at about 110 degrees, just cool enough not to scald the skin. They’d be held in the victims’ armpits and groins, warming the blood that flows through the axillary and iliac arteries.

When Evan reached the dining room, a
Munro
team was ready with emergency medical treatment. They took his temperature and checked his blood pressure. Now Evan watched from beneath a blanket as each of his coworkers got the same treatment. It was pretty cool, what good care they were getting, Evan thought as he wrapped his numb fingers around a hot drink.

Soon the room was full of wet fishermen being checked on by groups of
Munro
crew. Of the men lowered from the Jayhawk,
just three were so weak that they had to be put on stretchers before they were brought down the narrow stairway to the mess deck. One of them was Kenny Smith.

The twenty-two-year-old from Pasco, Washington, couldn’t stand on his own when the
Munro
crew pulled him out of the rescue basket. He’d tried to get out but felt paralyzed. Inside the vestibule, the medics stripped off his clothes, secured him onto a padded stretcher, and lowered him carefully down to the next level of the ship.

Kenny was a slight guy, but the maneuver was still tricky. The crew brought him into the dining area, laid him on a table, and started taking his vitals. His core temperature was only 90°F—dangerously low.

Should they move him to the sick bay? the EMTs wondered.

“No. You don’t want to jostle the body; it can cause the heart to go into a quiver,” Doc Chuck Weiss told the crew. “We shouldn’t move him again.”