The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (22 page)

Brudnicki can't speak directly to the
Satori,
but he can relay messages via the Falcon that's circling above them. Both ship and plane are also in contact with the First District Command Center in Boston—Di Comcen, as it's referred to in Coast Guard reports. Di Comcen is responsible for coordinating all the Coast Guard vessels and aircraft on the rescue, and developing the safest strategy for taking the people off the boat. Every decision has to be approved by them. Since the
Satori
isn't sinking yet, they decide to have the Falcon fly cover until the
Tamaroa
arrives, and then take the crew off by raft. Air rescue in such conditions can be riskier than actually staying with the boat, so it's used as a last resort. As soon as day breaks, the Falcon will be relieved by an H-3 rescue helicopter, and H-3S will fly cover in shifts until the
Tamaroa
shows up. Helicopters have a limited amount of flying time—generally about four hours—but they can pluck people out of the water if need be. Falcon jets can't do much for people in the water except circle them and watch them drown.

From the incident log, Di Comcen:

2:30 AM
—
slv [sailing vessel] is running out of fuel, recommend we try to keep Falcon o/s [on-scene] until Tamaroa arrives. 5:29 AM
—
Falcon has lost comms [communication] with vessel, vessel is low on battery power and taking on water. Pumps are keeping up but are run by ele [electric].

7:07
AM
—
Falcon ols, vessel has been located. Six hours fuel left. People on board are scared.

The H-3 arrives on scene around 6:30 and spends half an hour just trying to locate the
Satori.
The conditions are so bad that she's vanished from the Falcon's radar, and the H-3 pilot is almost on top of her before spotting her in the foam-streaked seas. The Falcon circles off to the southwest to prepare a life-raft drop while the H-3 takes up a hover directly over the boat. In these conditions the Falcon pilot could never line up on something as small as a sailboat, so the H-3 acts as a stand-in. The Falcon comes back at 140 knots, radar locked onto the helicopter, and at the last moment the H-3 falls away and the jet makes the drop. The pilot comes screaming over the
Satori's
mast and the copilot pushes two life-raft packages out a hatch in the floorboards. The rafts are linked by a long nylon tether, and as they fall they cartwheel apart, splashing down well to either side of the
Satori.
The tether, released at two hundred feet into a hurricane-force wind, drops right into Bylander's hand.

The H-3 hovers overhead while the
Satori
crew haul in the packages, but both rafts have exploded on impact. There's nothing at either end of the line. The
Tamaroa
is still five hours away and the storm has retrograded to within a couple of hundred miles of the coast; over the next twenty-four hours it will pass directly over the
Satori.
A daylight rescue in these conditions is difficult, and a nighttime rescue is out of the question. If the
Satori
crew is not taken off in the next few hours, there's a good chance they won't be taken off at all. Late that morning the second H-3 arrives and the pilot, Lieutenant Klosson, explains the situation to Ray Leonard. Leonard radios back that he's not leaving the boat.

It's unclear whether Leonard is serious or just trying to save face. Either way, the Coast Guard is having none of it. Two helicopters, two Falcon jets, a medium-range cutter, and a hundred air- and seamen have already been committed to the rescue; the
Satori
crew are coming off now.
"Owner refuses to leave and says he's sailed through hurricanes before,"
the Comcen incident log records at 12:24 that afternoon.
"Tamaroa wants manifestly unsafe voyage so that o/o [owner-operator] can be forced off."

A "manifestly unsafe voyage" means that the vessel has been deemed an unacceptable risk to her crew or others, and the Coast Guard has the legal authority to order everyone off. Commander Brudnicki gets on the radio with District One and requests a manifestly unsafe designation for the
Satori,
and at 12:47 it is granted. The
Tamaroa
is just a couple of miles away now, within VHF range of the
Satori,
and Brudnicki raises Leonard on the radio and tells him he has no choice in the matter. Everyone is leaving the boat. At 12:57 in the afternoon, thirteen hours after weighing anchor, the
Tamaroa
plunges into view.

There's a lot of hardware circling the
Satori.
There's the Falcon, the H-3, the
Tamaroa,
and the freighter
Gold Bond Conveyor,
which has been cutting circles around the
Satori
since the first mayday call. Hardware is not the problem, though; it's time. Dark is only three hours away, and the departing H-3 pilot doesn't think the
Satori
will survive another night. She'll run out of fuel, start getting knocked down, and eventually break apart. The crew will be cast into the sea, and the helicopter pilot will refuse to drop his rescue swimmer because he can't be sure of getting him back. It would be up to the
Tamaroa
to maneuver alongside the swimmers and pull them on board, and in these seas it would be almost impossible. It's now or never.

The only way to take them off, Brudnicki decides, is to shuttle them back to the
Tamaroa
in one of the little Avons. The Avons are twenty-one-foot inflatable rafts with rigid hulls and outboard engines; one of them could make a run to the
Satori,
drop off survival suits, and then come back again to pick up the three crew. If anyone wound up in the water, at least they'd be insulated and afloat. It's not a particularly complicated maneuver, but no one has done it in conditions like this before. No one has even
seen
conditions like this before. At 1:23 PM the
Tamaroa
crew gathers at the port davits, three men climb aboard the Avon, and they lower away.

It goes badly from the start. What passes for a lull between waves is in fact a crest-to-trough change of thirty or forty feet. Chief bosun Thomas Amidon lowers the Avon halfway down, gets lifted up by the next wave, can't keep up with the trough and freefalls to the bottom of the cable. The lifting eye gets ripped out of its mount and Amidon almost pitches overboard. He struggles back into position, finishes lowering the boat, and makes way from the
Tamaroa.

The seas are twice the size of the Avon raft. With excruciating slowness it fights its way to the
Satori,
comes up bow-to-stern, and a crew member flings the three survival suits on deck. Stimpson grabs them and hands them out, but Amidon doesn't back out in time. The sailboat rides up a sea, comes down on the Avon, and punctures one of her air bladders. Things start to happen very fast now: the Avon's bow collapses, a wave swamps her to the gunwales, the engine dies, and she falls away astern. Amidon tries desperately to get the engine going again and finally manages to, but they're up to their waists in water and the raft is crippled. There's no way they can even get themselves back onto the
Tamaroa,
much less save the crew of the
Satori.
Six people, not just three, now need to be rescued.

The H-3 crew watches all this incredulously. They're in a two o'clock hover with their jump door open, just over the tops of the waves. They can see the raft dragging heavily through the seas, and the
Tamaroa
heaving through ninety-degree rolls. Pilot Claude Hessel finally gets on the radio and tells Brudnicki and Amidon that he may have another way of doing this. He can't hoist the
Satori
crew directly off their deck, he says, because the mast is flailing too wildly and might entangle the hoist. That would drag the H-3 right down on top of the boat. But he could drop his rescue swimmer, who could take the people off the boat one at a time and bring them up on the hoist. It's the best chance they've got, and Brudnicki knows it. He consults with District One and then gives the okay.

The rescue swimmer on Hessel's helicopter is Dave Moore, a three-year veteran who has never been on a major rescue. ("The good cases don't come along too often—usually someone beats you to them," he says. "If a sailboat gets in trouble far out we usually get a rescue, but otherwise it's just a lot of little stuff.") Moore is handsome in a baby-faced sort of way—square-jawed, blue-eyed, and a big open smile. He has a dense, compact body that is more seallike than athletic. His profession of rescue swimmer came about when a tanker went down off New York in the mid-1980s. A Coast Guard helicopter was hovering overhead, but it was winter and the tanker crew were too hypothermic to get into the lift basket. They all drowned. Congress decided they wanted something done, and the Coast Guard adopted the Navy rescue program. Moore is twenty-five years old, born the year Karen Stimpson graduated from high school.

Moore is already wearing a neoprene wetsuit. He puts on socks and hood, straps on swim fins, pulls a mask and snorkel down over his head, and then struggles into his neoprene gloves. He buckles on a life vest and then signals to flight engineer Vriesman that he's ready. Vriesman, who has one arm extended, gatelike, across the jump door, steps aside and allows Moore to crouch by the edge. That means that they're at "ten and ten"—a ten foot hover at ten knots. Moore, who's no longer plugged into the intercom, signals final corrections to Vriesman with his hands, who relays them to the pilot. This is it; Moore has trained three years for this moment. An hour ago he was in the lunch line back on base. Now he's about to drop into the maelstrom.

Hessel holds a low hover with the boat at his two o'clock. Moore can see the crew clustered together on deck and the
Satori
making slow, plunging headway into the seas. Vriesman is seated next to Moore at the hoist controls, and avionicsman Ayres is behind the copilot with the radio and search gear. Both wear flightsuits and crash helmets and are plugged into the internal communication system in the wall. The time is 2:07 PM. Moore picks a spot between waves, takes a deep breath, and jumps.

It's a ten-foot fall and he hits feetfirst, hands at his sides. He comes up, clears his snorkel, settles his mask, and then strikes out for the
Satori.
The water is lukewarm—they're in the Gulf Stream—and the seas are so big they give him the impression he's swimming uphill and downhill rather than over individual waves. Occasionally the wind blows a crest off, and he has to dive under the cascade of whitewater before setting out again. The
Satori
appears and disappears behind the swells and the H-3 thunders overhead, rotors blasting a lily pad of flattened water into the sea. Vriesman watches anxiously through binoculars from the jump door, trying to gauge the difficulty of getting Moore back into the helicopter. Ultimately, as flight engineer, it's his decision to deploy the swimmer, his job to get everyone safely back into the aircraft. If he has any doubts, Moore doesn't jump.

Moore swims hard for several minutes and finally looks up at Vriesman, shaking his head. The boat's under power and there's no way he's going to catch her, not in these seas. Vriesman sends the basket down and Moore climbs back in. Just as he's about to ride up, the wave hits.

It's huge and cresting, fifty or sixty feet. It avalanches over Moore and buries both him and the lift basket. Vriesman counts to ten before Moore finally pops up through the foam, still inside the basket. It's no longer attached to the hoist cable, though; it's been wrenched off the hook and is just floating free. Moore has such tunnel vision that he doesn't realize the basket has come off; he just sits there, waiting to be hoisted. Finally he understands that he's not going anywhere, and swims the basket over to the cable and clips it on. He climbs inside, and Vriesman hauls him up.

This time they're going to do things differently. Hessel banks the helicopter to within fifty feet of the
Satori
and shows a chalkboard that says, "Channel 16." Bylander disappears below, and when Hessel has her on the VHF, he tells her they're going to do an in-the-water pickup. They're to get into their survival suits, tie the tiller down, and then jump off the boat. Once they're in the water they are to stay in a group and wait for Moore to swim over to them. He'll put them into the hoist basket and send them up one at a time.

Bylander climbs back up on deck and gives the instructions to the rest of the crew. Moore, looking through a pair of binoculars, watches them pull on their suits and try to will themselves over the gunwale. First, one of them puts a leg over the rail, then another does, and finally all three of them splash into the water. It takes four or five minutes for them to work up the nerve. Leonard has a bag in one hand, and as he goes over he loses his grip and leaves it on deck. It's full of his personal belongings. He claws his way down the length of the hull and finally punches himself in the head when he realizes he's lost it for good. Moore takes this in, wondering if Leonard is going to be a problem in the water.

Moore sheds his hood and gloves because the waters so warm and pulls his mask back down over his face. This is it; if they can't do it now, they can't do it at all. Hessel puts the
Satori
at his six o'clock by lining them up in a little rearview mirror and comes down into a low hover. It's delicate flying. He finally gives Moore the go-ahead, and Moore breathes in deep and pushes off. "They dropped Moore and he just skimmed over the top of the water, flying towards us," says Stimpson. "When he gets there he says, 'Hi, I'm Dave Moore your rescue swimmer, how are you?' And Sue says, 'Fine, how are you?' It was very cordial. Then he asks who's going first, and Sue says, 'I will.' And he grabbed her by the back of the survival suit and skimmed back across the water."

Moore loads Bylander into the rescue basket, and twenty seconds later she's in the helicopter. Jump to recovery takes five minutes (avionicsman Ayres is writing everything down in the hoist log). The next recovery, Stimpson's, takes two minutes, and Leonard's takes three. Leonard is so despondent that he's deadweight in the water, Moore has to wrestle him into the basket and push his legs in after him. Moore's the last one up, stepping back into the aircraft at 2:29. They've been on-scene barely two hours.*