“Where are we? I have to write it down. We have to turn around.”
He did both, jotting down his compass coordinates in his logbook and reversing the Anna Mary’s direction back along the same compass course that had brought it here—north now, due north back the way they had come. Then he clicked on the radio.
Channel 16 VHF is the very high-frequency channel used for maritime and shipping purposes and for international distress calls. Anthony’s call was logged in at 6:22 that morning. His voice is thick, trembling. He sounds catatonic.
“US Coast Guard, US Coast Guard. Anna Mary standing by Channel 16. Over.”
“Anna Mary, this is Coast Guard on 16. Go ahead.”
That was Sean Davis, an operations specialist on duty that morning in the command center for Sector Long Island Sound, housed on the second floor of a long, low, red-brick building at the Coast Guard station in New Haven, Connecticut, on the eastern side of New Haven harbor. A team of four watchstanders is on duty around the clock in twelve-hour shifts at every sector command center, and Davis’s team had just relieved the night shift and were starting their day. In fact, Davis had just put together his breakfast of oatmeal, a hard-boiled egg, and a cup of coffee and had brought it all back to his seat in the communications suite. He sat down and waited to hear from the mariner calling in, the captain of a vessel called the Anna Mary.
But the captain—Anthony—was hesitant. He could not find the words, didn’t know how to string together what had happened. “Anna Mary. I just woke up,” he told Davis, who took his first sip of hot coffee. Anthony paused, uncertain how to put it. “I lost a crew member overboard.” Davis locked the coffee in his mouth and stood up. Another blank space from Anthony. “Uhhhh, I’m missing my crew member, John Aldridge.” He paused again. Stumbled, sighed. “I don’t know what to say. I’m in shock.”
Sean Davis felt a knot in his gut, swallowed, and took a deep breath. “Roger, Captain,” Davis responded calmly to Anthony. “What’s your position right now?”
Breakfast was over. Davis and everyone else in the command center went to work.
The US Coast Guard traces its history back to the US Lighthouse Service, established by the first Congress in 1789 and placed within the purview of the US Treasury Department. A year later the secretary of the department, none other than Alexander Hamilton, received authorization to create a maritime service of ten cutters to enforce customs laws. Over the next century and more, new powers were carved out for this maritime agency—vessel inspection and life saving among them. New agencies were formed to execute these powers, and the agencies were shifted from one cabinet department to another while their assignments were variously merged, augmented, or split off.
In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill officially ordering the creation of the Coast Guard and designating it “a military service and a branch of the armed forces at all times,” but the revisions to the service’s assigned missions and the shifts of its management from one cabinet department to another continued through World War II and beyond. In fact, as recently as 2003 the Coast Guard was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, and its list of eleven missions was fixed in law.
The service’s official creation may also have triggered the now-standard nickname for members of the Coast Guard—“Coasties”—and search-and-rescue, SAR, constitutes one of the oldest of the missions Coasties carry out. The Coast Guard’s authority for this mission is formalized in what is called Emergency Support Function #9 of the Federal Response System, and its aim, as the Coast Guard describes the mission, is, in the face of a natural or manmade disaster to “prevent loss of life in every situation where our actions and performance could possibly be brought to bear.” That covers a lot of territory, for the Coast Guard is responsible for the nation’s Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, including Alaska and Hawaii, for its Great Lakes and major rivers, and for the islands of its eastern and western territories and possessions.* To organize this broad responsibility, the service is organized into nine districts, numbered as they were long ago rather than sequentially, with the Atlantic Area comprising five districts and the Pacific Area four. District 1 covers the waters from the top of Maine to a chunk of northern New Jersey and, like all districts, is divided into sector commands. From an organizational standpoint John Aldridge fell overboard in Sector Long Island Sound of District 1 of the Coast Guard’s scope of responsibility, an area of ocean extending from Shelter Island to Block Island, Gardiners Bay, and Block Island Sound, plus the fifty nautical miles south of Montauk Point and west along the south shore of Long Island.
To execute the search-and-rescue mission—in fact, all its missions—the Coast Guard operates a fleet of assets that includes cutters, defined as vessels sixty-five feet long or bigger that can accommodate a live-in crew and can go pretty much anywhere; boats, which are the smaller vessels that operate near shore and on inland waterways; and both fixed-wing and rotary aircraft. The cutters, they say, are the heart of the service; the boats are the soul of the service; and surely where search and rescue are concerned, the aircraft are the eyes of the service.
But the boats and planes have to start looking somewhere, and for that, the Coast Guard’s prized tool is SAROPS, the Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. SAROPS is a Monte Carlo–based software system—that is, it relies on repeated random samplings to generate probabilities. The system shows graphically how, where, and in what direction a lost object—a vessel or, as in this case, a person—will most probably be drifting on the surface of the water, and it “corrects” the graphic over time to show how changing conditions affect the drift. Data inputs about winds, currents, swells, water temperature, visibility, plus anything known about the lost object—an individual’s height, weight, clothing, physical fitness—simulate the drift as thousands of multicolored particles on the screen; the denser the gathering of particles, the more probable it is that that is a place to search. As the data change over time and as more and more kinds of information are relayed into the system from the actual scene of the search, SAROPS corrects the picture on the screen so searchers can adjust the pattern of their search, if needed, or modify the search area.
The watchstander team that had just come on duty in the New Haven command center the morning of July 24, 2013, like all watchstander teams throughout the service, comprised four individuals representing distinct areas of functional expertise: a situation unit controller, an operations unit controller, a communications unit controller—that was Sean Davis—and the command duty officer in overall charge of the watch. In fact, on that day there was a fifth watchstander present. Operations Specialist Jason Rodocker had just been reassigned from Baltimore. This was only his second day in New Haven, and he was still figuring out who was who in the command center and where the coffee machine was. He was, in the parlance of the service, “breaking in” and had not yet been assigned a function or given a role. That would change and change fast.
The command center is a large room, windowless, and guarded by stringent security measures. The lighting is typically kept dim so the images on the monitors show up better, and there are a lot of monitors in the command center. On the wall half a dozen television monitors are tuned to various weather and news stations, while the two long, curved banks of desks hold maybe a dozen computer monitors each. In other words, everything and everybody in this large, open-space pen is geared toward the windowless wall and all the monitors.
Back behind this space is the glass-walled communications suite, bristling with microphones, radios, and more monitors, and that is where Sean Davis, having set down his coffee, was taking in information and spewing it back out to the rest of the watch floor with the speed and agility of a simultaneous translator at the United Nations.
The operations controller for the watch had already alerted the Coast Guard station in Montauk to activate a search and rescue unit—SRU—and get it underway. The situation unit controller had identified two cutters in or near the
area, the Sailfish steaming up from New York and the Tiger Shark from the New England area, which could be deployed to join the search. Commander Jonathan Theel, the search mission coordinator for the sector, still in his car on the way to the station but in touch with the command center via his cell phone, had briefed the district headquarters in Boston and requested a helicopter to aid in the search.
For Sean Davis, the issue was the multitude of voices to be juggled, but the one that was of pressing concern right now was the voice of Anthony Sosinski in his left ear. Think about what you’re going to say to him, Davis told himself as he heard the fear in Sosinski’s voice, and say what you have to say as calmly as possible. Remember: you’re not in distress. The guy in the water is in distress, and the guy on the radio is scared. The calmer you are, the more he’ll understand you’re in control of the situation and can help.
Davis had asked for position coordinates, and Anthony had replied twice because his first reply had been stepped on by other voices cutting in on the frequency. “Roger, Captain,” Davis said now to Anthony, calmly and in a voice that he hoped sounded businesslike and in control. “How many crew are on board with you?”
Anthony answered with a narrative—how he took the boat out of the harbor, then passed the wheel to John while he and Mike “lay down.” How Johnny was supposed to wake him at 11:30 to take the next watch and how, instead, Johnny “fell over somewhere.” Then he added, “I’m freaking out.”
Sean Davis in person is as calming a presence as his voice would lead you to believe. Well-defined eyebrows and a firm mouth add an air of gravitas to his looks, but the overall impression is both stalwart and sympathetic. Yet as Davis listened to the tale Anthony told and to the terror in his voice, he felt the goosebumps rise across his body. He could not yet determine the magnitude of the situation coming at him, but he knew that situation was not going to be easy. When he heard Anthony say, “I have no clue whatsoever of where he fell overboard or how many hours ago he fell overboard,” Davis knew—everyone within hearing in the command center knew—that they were going to have to conduct an extensive search over a huge area. “From the moment the initial report came in,” Davis says, “everything was in the works”—meaning that all the assets of the US Coast Guard were poised to look for this man—and although no one was willing to say as much, with very minimal chance of a happy ending.
Davis pressed Sosinski for details: What are John’s height and weight? What time did he relieve you? Where is the Anna Mary now?
Headed back north, said Anthony, adding, “I’m beside myself. I don’t know what to do.”
At 6:30 a.m., eight minutes after the first report that Johnny was missing, Davis issued the universal maritime alert for urgent attention. “Pan pan, pan pan, pan pan.”* All stations: “United States Coast Guard Sector Long Island Sound, United States Coast Guard Sector Long Island Sound. At zero-six twenty-two local time, the Coast Guard received a report of a person in the water south of Montauk Point, New York. All vessels in the vicinity are requested to keep a sharp lookout, assist if possible, and report all sightings to United States Coast Guard. This is United States Coast Guard Sector Long Island Sound—out.”
Anthony asked for advice: “What should I do?” he wanted to know. Mike was up on the roof of the boat, holding on to the mast and staring at the water, searching. Davis concurred that that was a good idea and asked Anthony to keep him apprised of the weather and visibility. “Can you send an aircraft?” Anthony pleaded. Davis assured him he was “working on that.”
At the Coast Guard station in Montauk Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Jason Walter, in charge of the station, got the word from the sector command center in New Haven and ordered the first boat to get going. It was a forty-seven-foot motor life boat, the search-and-rescue and lifesaving workhorse of the service—self-righting, built to withstand hurricane force winds and heavy seas, capable of a speed of more than twenty-five knots and of ranging as far as two hundred miles offshore. CG47279, to give the Montauk 47 its official name, fully supplied and crewed and under the command of Boatswain’s Mate Josh Garsik, launched out of the station at 6:35 a.m. with the mission to find and save PIW—person in water—Johnny Aldridge, following the north-to-south course the Anna Mary had taken the previous night. Just about an hour later Walter himself and a crew of three others were headed out on a small response boat, one of the two other boats available at the station. A twenty-year veteran of the service and, in appearance, a military officer out of Central Casting—tall, with shoulders broad enough to carry full responsibility and with a winning smile when needed—Jason Walter was more than prepared to serve as on-scene SRU commander when the search area was reached. The third boat, another forty-seven-foot motor life boat, was in reserve, and a crew was readied, all primed to go out again later in the day, if needed, when the first 47 had reached its maximum allowable hours for fuel, supplies, and crew sustainability.
Three boats constituted an anomaly for Montauk Station because it has only enough staff to man one of its three boats at any one time. But July 24 was a Wednesday, and Wednesday is switch-out day—officially, duty relief day—when the two duty sections, called Port and Starboard, each consisting of some ten people, cross each other’s paths as one section relieves the other. It meant that at that moment on that day there were at least twenty willing and able Coast Guard service members eager to be assigned to this SAR case. Walter could order all three boats of this one-boat station into action, manning each with four crew members and still leaving sufficient staff to man the home front.
But with the station commander out on the search, the home front at Montauk now became the responsibility of Boatswain’s Mate Dennis Heard. He arrived on duty at 7:00 a.m., was filled in on the situation, and found himself in charge of the station and responsible for managing the SAR case as well as for all operational and personnel issues that might arise for that case or any other issue at the station. Like Jason Rodocker in New Haven, Heard was something of a newbie at Montauk; he had arrived from Virginia Beach only a couple of weeks before and was still getting his bearings, “trying to figure out where the mess deck was,” he says with a grin—“mess deck” being Coast Guard lingo for cafeteria. Unlike Rodocker, however, who would spend his day huddled over a computer generating emotion-free data, Heard was in the thick of it. This was Montauk, after all, home to both Aldridge and Sosinski and headquarters of the commercial fishing fraternity of which they were a part. With only a skeleton crew left on station, with no additional boats available to handle any other issues that might arise, and with a community that would soon surely stir itself into worried watchfulness, Heard, a veteran of numerous SAR cases, was about to experience a baptism by fire of a magnitude he could never have anticipated. For the moment, he took up residence in the glass-walled communications center in the windowless interior of the station’s main building.
Meanwhile, in the New Haven command center’s communications suite, Sean Davis continued to try to extract from a still-shaken Anthony Sosinski all he could to determine where Aldridge had fallen over. Anthony again recounts his story, as if telling it a second time will help him understand his own situation: “I’m being totally straight up with you here,” he tells Davis. “I went to bed four to five miles off Montauk, 8:30 or 9:00, and he”—Johnny—“went on watch. My other crew member went to bed too, so John was the only one awake. And you know he fell over somewhere, and now I’m sixty miles offshore.”
“What was he wearing?” Davis asks.
“Honestly,” says Anthony, and you can hear the sob in his voice, “I don’t know at this time.”
“Is he a good swimmer?” asks Davis.
“Yes. Yes, he is,” Sosinski replies. “He is in exceptionally good shape. He’s very resourceful also.”
But at just about the time he said that, Aldridge himself was floating, not swimming. He was trying to survey the horizon, when he could see it, because that thin line was the only other thing in his world
right now besides a vast, churning body of water. If he could see the horizon, he might be able to think up some way to put to use whatever survival resources he had.
Chapter 5
Daylight
Approximately 6:30 a.m.
Here comes the sun, and I am not feeling the sweet vibes the song sings about. In fact, I am feeling more vulnerable than I did when I was covered in darkness. But it is daylight, and something is telling me that it’s time to go, time to do something.
Find a buoy. That’s a pretty straightforward but almost impossible task. For one thing, the sun’s glare makes it almost impossible for me to see in any direction except north. Mostly, however, it’s the waves that are keeping me from seeing anything.
The waves, the waves. I remind myself it isn’t the water that’s moving—it’s energy, and that is what I will be going up against when I move. Right now I don’t want to fight that energy. I just need to rise and fall to see what I can when I can. My chin is just about on the surface of the water, and as the waves lift me up, I get only a couple of seconds at the crest when I can see above the surface—my only chance for a sighting of the horizon. Then the waves take me down again and in the trough, I see only water.
For a long, long time I see nothing. I’m just bobbing, being carried, stretching my neck each time I rise. Nothing. Meanwhile, like any foreign body in the water, I have become a living ecosystem—the host to numerous guests. Sea lice, crustaceans, shrimp are all over my limp body. The storm petrels are dive-bombing me again. The taste of seawater is constant—I would kill for cool, fresh water to get the taste out of my mouth. I really want to move. I want to be moving. But should I? Is it safer, smarter, a better shot at survival to just drift, just wait? There’s nothing to see. My neck has to strain for even a quick glimpse of the horizon, but I have yet to sight a buoy. I would love to find something—anything—to float on.
A Speck in the Sea Page 7