If I do swim when I see something to swim to, how will I do it? I think about that: How should I propel myself? I can’t let go of my boots, which means that one arm will have to continue to hold onto them, leaving me only one arm to swim with—at a time, that is: I’ll have to switch off from time to time. And most of the forward push will have to come from my kick—hard frog-kicking to move through these waves.
Then I catch, for an instant, a glimpse of Pete Spong’s buoy. Pete is a friend, a colleague, a lobster fisherman out of Point Judith, Rhode Island. I know his gear almost as well as I know my own. And there it is, in my sight: the red float familiar, unmistakable, and beckoning.
I’m going. It’s time. Past time: I figure it has been light for a while already—certainly an hour, maybe more. Time is not on my side.
I resupply the boots with air, one at a time, then hold them both close to my chest with my left arm, one in each armpit. I lie down a bit on the water, kick at the same time that I pull with my right arm, and I am on the move. It is hard work, made harder by the fact that I have to keep trying to get a visual of what I’m aiming for even as I labor to make headway. I push all that out of my mind: Hard? So what? You swim or you die.
Slow going. I swim a bit, then need to rest, switch hands, swim again, rest again. But I get a kind of rhythm: ten, maybe fifteen minutes of hard-core swimming, then hold up, relax. I’m working my way there, to Pete’s buoy. I keep going, keep going. Half an hour of swimming. An hour maybe. One-armed swimming is not easy.
All of a sudden there is a fin almost three feet long right next to me, and my heart shoots out of my body. I hadn’t expected to see sharks in daylight. Sharks at night, yes, but in daylight they head for deeper water. I feel this fish coming right up against me until it shoots upward and I am looking into the prehistoric face of an ocean sunfish. Weighing, at a minimum, five hundred pounds, the animal has a little round mouth and huge eyes and is said to be the heaviest bony fish in the ocean. I have seen ocean sunfish many times. I have watched them hurl their enormous round bodies out of the water in a leaping motion. They prey on jellyfish and are preyed on by sharks, but right now this one is interested in exploring me, and he has virtually fastened himself to my side to do so. I have to kick him a couple of times to make him go away, but he does, and I keep heading for the buoy.
I am definitely getting closer, but the work of swimming seems to be getting harder. I begin to ask myself if this is worth it, if this is the buoy I should be aiming for.
Maybe thirty yards away now—so close—and something has happened. Maybe the tide is picking up. Something! The sea has just become ripping here. I’m being swept off my hard-won course, away from the buoy, and clearly, in trying to get to it, I will lose so much energy that I will exhaust myself completely. I’ve been aiming for an east-end buoy—there’s no flag on the highflyer!—but there is too much tide. I decide to give up. I realize I’ve wasted an hour of hard labor. But I need to cut my losses now and preserve what strength I have left to head for Pete’s west-end buoy.
Okay. An hour of hard labor has eliminated one possibility. Time to reassess.
In fact, I have learned something important. I can see from here how the buoy is trailing in the current, which keeps pushing it west. The current is pushing me west as well. I hadn’t even thought about that when I started swimming, but now it’s so obvious. If I am going to get to the west-end buoy, I will actually need to swim northeast. I will need to get up ahead of the buoy so that I, pushed by the current, can fall down onto it.
That’s what I’ve just learned: either I make use of the current or it will prevent me from getting where I’m going altogether.
So I try to rest my body and my brain too, try to calm my breathing, try to slow down the adrenaline. Soon I will start to look to the west for the buoy, and when I see it, I will swim to it. But not directly.
Meanwhile taking time to rest gives room for the terror and grief to come back into my head. I have got to quiet them down, and the only way I can do that is to reach for normalcy—something trivial, meaningless, even stupid. Right now the trivial, the meaningless, and the stupid are soothing, and I long for them. I grab onto a mental picture of the vacuum cleaner on the porch that I borrowed from my friend Pauly. What was it—a Eureka? a Hoover? a Bissell? Was it an upright? Was it a dirt devil? Was the bag pretty full when I borrowed it? Let me just concentrate on that, on the vacuum cleaner. It is comforting to focus on something so ordinary. It alleviates the fear, lifts the misery to remember vacuum cleaners and what they look like and how they work and the way they sweep up dirt and keep my apartment neat and clean. Vacuum cleaners are so normal and so far away from all this.
I hear a low-pitched shuddering sound overhead and somewhere in the distance. I look to the horizon, and I see it way up there: a tiny dot. A helicopter. I’m sure that’s a helicopter. It means Anthony is awake and on it. They’re looking for me.
I feel—something. Less alone, I think. Not so terrifyingly alone.
Chapter 6
In the Command Center
7:28 a.m.
Anthony Sosinski had gotten hold of himself. The man who had acknowledged to Sean Davis that he was “freaking out” and was “beside” himself now seemed composed and in control. Perhaps the steady stream of questions Davis had been asking, requiring precisely detailed answers, is what calmed him. Whatever it was, Sosinski was back in command of his boat and was focused on his present purpose: helping the US Coast Guard find Johnny.
The situation, as Anthony and the planners at New Haven understood it at seven that morning, was that Aldridge was last seen at about nine o’clock the previous evening, a time when the Anna Mary was approximately five nautical miles south of Montauk on a course of 180 magnetic and traveling at approximately six and a half knots. In landlubber terms the boat was going due south at a speed of about seven and a half miles an hour.
Because John was supposed to wake Anthony at 11:30 and did not, the thinking was that he had fallen into the water at some point between the hours of 9:00 and 11:30; otherwise, he would have awakened Anthony, right? So somewhere in that two-and-a-half-hour stretch is when he went overboard. Call that the starting point—the northern edge or top limit that might define where to search. The other limit, the end point at the southernmost edge, would be the point at which the Anna Mary had stopped and reversed course at around six this morning. Put these two facts together and you conclude that Johnny had fallen in at a spot somewhere between five nautical miles and sixty-plus nautical miles offshore—that is, somewhere in the area the Anna Mary traversed in the hours between nine the previous evening and six this morning.
As probable locations for a search go, that’s a big area—in excess of 780 square miles—more than half the size of Rhode Island. If you’re going to search an area of that size effectively, which was precisely the issue before the search mission participants in the New Haven command center that morning, you confront two basic questions: What kind of pattern do you draw across the area, and how do you best deploy the available assets in support of the search—assets consisting of both the search response units, the SRUs, with their crews and staff, and the resources available for deployment? And then, of course, all of that needs to be put together effectively in a coordinated and detailed search plan that SAROPS could continually update and correct.
Mission coordinator Jonathan Theel was frustrated from the outset. True, the appropriate first steps had been taken: the pan pan distress call had been broadcast and liaison had been established with Montauk Station and with Air Station Cape Cod. Assets from both were on their way to the probable search location. But a detailed, coordinated search plan had not yet been fully developed, and even though, as Theel himself says, “searching is an art as well as a science,” for the man in overall command of the search, as he was, the slow pace at which SAROPS was being put to work was exasperating. Still, Theel well knew the difficulties the planning operation confronted—especial
ly in this case, where there was minimal certainty about where John Aldridge had gone overboard or how long ago and therefore how to define the probable search area.
The first step for the planning team was to designate a search pattern. The Coast Guard is masterful at creating and assigning the right pattern out of a library of patterns devised to deal with a range of situations: a parallel pattern when the lost object could be anywhere in a large area, a creeping-line pattern when the lost object is likely to be in one end of the search area rather than the other, a sector-search pattern that looks like the spokes of a wheel for when the target is really difficult to see, a barrier-search when the current is strong, or a host of other patterns. But when you really don’t have a lot of information to go on, when all you really know is the course the object was traveling when it got lost, then you order a trackline-search pattern, which is exactly what the Coast Guard did now, officially initiating what is called a trackline-search-and-return pattern, TSR.
They began by drawing a virtual box around the course the Anna Mary had been traveling. At the midpoint of the top line of the box, they established the latitude and longitude of where the Anna Mary had been at nine o’clock the night before, and at the midpoint of the bottom line of the box, they noted the coordinates for the point when Anthony turned around and reversed course at six in the morning. They determined that the search pattern would follow up and down the line between those two points, looking to both sides.
At 7:16 a.m. the order was duly relayed to Station Montauk’s forty-seven-foot motor lifeboat, already underway, to start searching south at 180 magnetic until it reached twenty nautical miles offshore. In essence, the lifeboat would start where the Anna Mary had started and then head in the direction it had taken to Aldridge’s and Sosinski’s first line of traps, with crew members looking to the left and to the right—to east and to west.
At the same time the Anna Mary was doing the same thing in reverse, running a trackline back to where it had started, with Mike Migliaccio up on top looking to left and right, east and west, and Anthony at the railing with the radio microphone in his hand doing the same.
But where should the MH-60 helicopter out of Air Station Cape Cod start to search? In the middle—between the 47 steaming south and the Anna Mary steaming north? And what about the other assets being readied or getting underway—the cutters identified as available, the second boat—the small response boat—out of Montauk Station, and a fixed-wing aircraft as well? SAROPS is still at work churning out a search plan specific to this event, so in the meantime how do the Coast Guard planners make best use of the assets to find this guy? Is there a way to figure out if he fell over closer to the top of the trackline, the coordinates at the five-nautical mile mark, or closer to the bottom of the trackline, at the sixty-plus nautical mile mark? And do they run the risk, with assets converging, that when everything between five miles and sixty miles is a priority, nothing is a priority?
These were some of the questions and issues that Jonathan Theel as search mission coordinator and the rest of the planning team wrestled with that morning, even as they were bent on both developing the needed information and devising the right plan for the search.
Theel zeroed in on that two-and-a-half-hour window between 9:00 and 11:30 p.m., between the last time anybody saw John and the time he was supposed to wake Anthony. That seemed critical to Theel, and he decided to run a quick weighting exercise through SAROPS. It convinced him to deploy 60 percent of the assets to the top of the trackline, closer to 9:00 p.m. and the five-mile mark, and 40 percent to the bottom of the trackline, where the Anna Mary would have been after 11:30. That weighting exercise would now be built out as part of developing the detailed search plans.
So at 7:28 that morning the MH-60 helicopter was ordered to start searching at a point five to ten nautical miles offshore, and it was probably just arriving there when John Aldridge spotted it as a dot on the far horizon.
Similar to the famed Army Blackhawk helicopter that gets in all the movies, the MH-60 helicopter is, for several reasons, particularly well suited to search-and-rescue operations. For one thing, it is big. The MH-60 carries two pilots plus two lookouts, one on each side, so there are more eyeballs on the water—exclusively on the water. It is loud too. The MH-60 can be heard by a survivor bobbing on the waves, and bobbing on the waves is precisely what John Aldridge was doing that very morning. And it can fly close to the water as well, which affords better visibility to both searchers and survivors.
On arrival at its starting point the MH-60 was further ordered to drop a datum, a self-locating data marking buoy, which could track actual set and drift in the area—that is, the direction in which the current was flowing and the speed at which it was moving, two factors of significance in trying to determine where a lost object might be.
Those factors were very much on the mind of John Aldridge, the lost object, who was reconsidering their effect on his ability to get where he wanted to go—conceivably at the exact moment he spotted that dot in the sky that was no doubt the MH-60.
The helicopter wasn’t alone in the air. Air Station Cape Cod also sent out a fixed-wing aircraft, the HC-144 Ocean Sentry. This is a medium-range surveillance aircraft, able therefore to cover a lot of distance and sweep over a lot of territory, and it holds a profusion of advanced sensing and communications capabilities. The downside is that when the tail of the 144 is up, visibility out the windows is minimal; the tail needs to be lowered for the 144 to serve as an effective visual platform. But with the 144 and the multi-eyed MH-60 helicopter out there, John Aldridge’s chances of being seen and rescued were certainly improved.*
Altogether, by 8:30 that morning two aircraft, a forty-seven-foot motor lifeboat, and a twenty-five-foot response boat were all out looking for John Aldridge on the trackline-search pattern plotted in New Haven, and the two cutters, the Tiger Shark and the Sailfish, were being prepared to join them.
By this time Mark Averill, a veteran of the service now operating in a civilian capacity and serving today as command duty officer, CDO, had determined to make use of the technology-proficient Jason Rodocker to operate the SAROPS system, freeing Pete Winters, another civilian, to liaise over the communications lines with Sosinski as well as with personnel on other fishing vessels now coming online.
The Coast Guard’s use of retired veterans returning in civilian capacities is one of the service’s more interesting and astute features. The civilians may work as much as eighty hours over a two-week period, attend retraining to maintain or gain proficiency in various skills, and bring to their assignments both experience and a certain maturity. They also “provide continuity,” says Mark Averill, imbuing the immediacy of a day like July 24, 2013, with institutional memory—a profound but also intuitive knowledge of how the service works and what it can do. Averill’s shuffling of Rodocker and Winters embodies the kind of value a civilian can offer: Rodocker, who had grown up in the era of computing and instant Internet access, was a proven expert at wielding SAROPS’s multiple inputs and capabilities; he had honed his skills during his term in Baltimore, where the natural abundance of rivers and streams makes for what Rodocker calls “multiple search areas,” giving him plenty of practice in “cases with multiple scenarios in one drift”—something, he says, “I know how to do.” Winters was admittedly less practiced in SAROPS subtleties, but he is a commercial fisherman as well as a veteran of the Coast Guard, a man familiar with the fishing grounds off Montauk, and it was thought that because he and Anthony spoke the same fisherman’s language, he might be able to learn more and keep Anthony focused. That proved to be exactly right.
Anthony had not left his post. He continued to serve as both the in-charge first source for information and as the primary advocate asking for every asset the Coast Guard could muster, plus help from every ship, fishing vessel, yacht, or dinghy he could connect with in the high-frequency radio world. He did this even as he was wearing out his own eyes staring at the sea while standin
g precariously on the railing of the Anna Mary—shirtless, shoeless, sweating from head to toe, his very feet sweating, as he remembers it, tied to the radio via a long line.
He was also, in equal parts, terrified and sick at heart. His cocaptain, his business partner, his pal from age seven, his brother from another mother was somewhere out there in the great ocean, alone. As to whether Johnny was dead or alive, he just didn’t let himself go there.
Instead, he kept his mind churning. Everything he laid his eyes on, every communication with any of the growing crowd of fishermen rallying to search for Johnny became a potential clue, another bit of intelligence for the Coast Guard search planners, another possible building block of rescue. He heard from a scallop-boat captain out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, who “thought” the Anna Mary had gone around his stern at about 2:00 a.m. in thirty-two fathoms of water—two hundred feet—at the Loran position of 43 640. If accurate—if it was the Anna Mary and not one of the several other fishing vessels in the area at that time—it could have meant Johnny was alive and onboard well later than 9:00 p.m. and farther offshore than originally thought: even with autopilot, it usually requires someone on watch to dodge around a sudden obstacle on the autopilot track. Anthony duly reported that sighting to the Coast Guard. He also noted that Johnny’s fishing skins were still on the boat—the waterproof garments that are a fisherman’s work clothes. That told him that Johnny wouldn’t have been dealing with bait, because if he had, he would have “dressed” for the job in the skins. He reported that to the Coast Guard as well. Other things he came upon—the bottle of eye drops Johnny was supposed to take for his glaucoma—sent him into a new tailspin of grief. At one point he found himself yelling at Johnny’s driver’s license, left out on the wheelhouse dashboard. “Where the hell are you?!” he screamed at the photo.
A Speck in the Sea Page 8