A Speck in the Sea

by John Aldridge

  Fast. Forsberg wanted to get there. He remembered from way back when Anthony’s father used to work weekends for his father, and Anthony would come to Montauk as well, and the two of them would fish. Then Johnny started coming to Montauk too, and they became a trio—a crew of three boys fishing together whenever they could. So this was a friendship that went all the way back to childhood and all the way forward to right now.

  Take a sixty-five foot, fully equipped commercial fishing vessel like Forsberg’s or a fifty-foot sport-fishing yacht like Stavola’s forty miles out to sea and run it “hour after hour,” and you’re burning fuel like it’s going out of style—at a cost no one would want to think about. Neither Forsberg nor Stavola nor anyone else ever did think about it. The hell with cost. This was not a day for considering anything but Johnny Aldridge lost at sea, the fear in Anthony Sosinski’s voice, the phone call the Aldridge family had received, and another family—the Montauk family—taking care of its own.

  Steven Forsberg knew Johnny Aldridge well. He knew Aldridge was strong and in great shape. He knew the water was warm. He knew there was hope. He also had been on “many, many” search trips, and none of them had ever ended well. “You don’t hear a lot of good news when somebody goes missing in the ocean,” Forsberg says. But he also knew he wasn’t going home until something was found.

  Phil Baigent had been the one who notified Forsberg. A landlubber originally from Syracuse, Baigent first saw the ocean when he was nine and the family moved to Stony Brook. That’s also when he got hooked on fishing. Nothing stopped him after that—not even when his father didn’t talk to him for five years. “You can’t make a fisherman,” Phil says. “You’re just born one.”

  That morning the born fisherman hooked up with Al Schaffer, the lobsterman who had been a mentor and partner of Johnny, and they headed out together in Schaffer’s boat, aware that they were part of a growing armada heading out to look for Johnny. It was odd, Baigent reflected as they left the harbor, to see this closed, self-anointed, self-appointed, exclusive fraternity of fishermen—normally a “bunch of goofballs,” in his own phrase—suddenly turn deadly serious with not a derisive bit of sarcasm in sight. He wondered to himself whether Johnny had slipped and gone off the back of the boat or if he had hit his head and then gone in. Are we looking for John or for a body? Baigent wondered to himself.

  There were things that cheered him: the weather was warm, the water was warm, John was a bull. But the search area was massive, and there was the memorial back on the Point filled with the names of powerful, capable, smart fishermen who hadn’t made it. Baigent desperately did not want to see John Aldridge’s name on the Lost At Sea Memorial, but he couldn’t get away from the feeling that the chances were not good. It’s been a tough winter, Baigent thought, what with the loss of Chubby Gray and a bunch of scary incidents. We need something good to happen. We deserve it.

  Scallop fisherman Mike Skarimbas knows Johnny Aldridge as his closest friend. Skarimbas and his crew were well offshore and hard at work that morning when, at “maybe 7:30 or 8:00,” he heard Anthony’s voice over the radio and a few disjointed words—“overboard,” “missing”—and he knew his friend was in the water. “Right away,” in his words, Skarimbas started steaming his vessel, the New Species, toward the Anna Mary’s gear, a location well known to him. Crew members Mario Negro and Sarah Broadwell climbed onto the roof and stayed there, eyes peeled.

  Mike knew “without a doubt—a hundred percent—that Johnny was alive.” The reason was simple. “Because I know him,” says Skarimbas. The only question in his mind was whether they would find Johnny in time.

  Skarimbas stationed himself in the wheelhouse. He was on a mission, and he was not going to move until the mission was accomplished. “All I could think of,” he says, “was coming in and seeing Johnny’s mother and father and telling them…” The sentence is never finished. Skarimbas breaks down—as he concedes, just as he broke down constantly that day.

  “It was a horror for me,” he says. “It was the worst day of my life. This is my best friend. I was an emotional wreck all day, staring at two computers and charts in the wheelhouse, thinking about drift and trying to figure out where he might be—where he could be.” Up on the roof of the New Species Negro and Broadwell scanned the sea, every bit of exposed skin becoming more and more sunburned with every passing hour. They never said a word to one another, Broadwell admits. Both knew that the later the hour, the narrower the chance for good news, and neither of them was ready to say so out loud. “I kept imagining myself in the position Johnny was in,” Broadwell says of her time scanning the sea from her high perch, “thinking about him alive and suffering out there. But after seven hours you had to figure we weren’t going to find him.”

  Nancy Atlas had taken her kids somewhere or other and thinks it was sometime around 11:00 a.m. when she got the text from a friend: Someone’s fallen overboard from the Anna Mary. The news jolted her. She is close with both Anna Mary captains, but she herself describes Anthony as her “surrogate brother,” the guy you count on—always.

  Nancy had a show at five o’clock that day. That was typical in the summer: open at five, close at sunset. She had to spend the day setting up the show—getting all the equipment in place and ready. She was also pregnant, so she wanted to rest from time to time. But the news about Johnny—and her fear for him—drove everything else out. Outwardly she made a point of staying optimistic, even if it felt a little like whistling as you pass a graveyard. She took to social media to call for “keeping everybody in our prayers” and tried hard to show only what she calls “positive energy.” Everyone did the same without being told, for everybody knew without saying the words what the outcome could be. “We live in Montauk,” says Atlas. “We know what happens.”

  There is, says Atlas, a kind of seasonal arc to the life of those who live in Montauk, an arc that visitors don’t experience but that is second nature to the community of folks who make Montauk their home. In summer, she says, “everyone is disconnected.” That is the working season, the revenue-generating season, the time of feeding the extravaganza, when “fishermen are fishing, waitresses are serving, singers are singing. In summer your head is down and you are in work mode.” It is a whole different ballgame from October or March, when the tourists are gone, the traffic is gone, the summer people are gone, and “everyone is connected.”

  But on that July day, at the height of “work mode,” at the peak of the time when heads are down, “everything stopped suddenly,” says Atlas. “The summer thing evaporated, and the communal web descended.”

  “Communal web” is the kind of phrase Nancy Atlas comes up with all the time, which is probably why she is a songwriter and musician. But that day the communal web seemed palpable, muting even the tourists settling in for lobster and crab lunches, slowing the normally frantic pace of buying and selling, of arriving and leaving. Summer’s head-down mode had turned wintry, and while the Montauk community seemed suddenly connected in a winter way, there was a chill over the place.

  Chapter 9

  To the West-End Buoy

  Approximately 10:00 a.m.

  All night I had been clinging to this idea of finding a buoy. Now I had totally exhausted myself trying to get to one, only to realize that the buoy I am after is out of my reach. What now? What do I do? The battle starts up in my head, and it is almost as exhausting as the swim. Do I keep fighting to get to this unreachable goal? Or do I find another way? What other way? What freaking other way is there? And what about the energy wasted—just wasted—trying to get to this unreachable buoy. The very idea of the waste—of energy, time, everything—freaks me out. You screwed up, I tell myself. How are you going to get out of it? Or is this just going to be the end of your life?

  But these are the thoughts that can kill, and I have to send them packing. What is strange is that I know how to do this. I’ve learned that I have the power to swipe these kinds of thoughts off the screen of my brain. It’s that
or die. Let the thoughts in, and they will overtake me and I will be headed down the hole to the end of my life. And that is impossible; I cannot let that happen.

  I close my eyes for a second. I picture the thoughts that can take me to my death, and I shake them out of my head. I just do.

  When I open my eyes, there it is. There is a buoy.

  What I glimpse first is a flutter of orange. Orange is the color of the flag on Pete’s west-end gear. Then I ride the crest of another swell, look again lower down, and see the red polyball. Red buoy, orange flag: that confirms it. This is Pete Spong’s west-end buoy. But it is very, very far away. I have no real idea of the distance, but I tell myself it is three or four hundred yards away. What is that? How far is that? On land it is three or four football fields. That’s a walk around the block on dry land. That’s what? Like a quarter of a mile? half a mile? Not even. It is nothing. Think about getting there, I tell myself. Think about that instead of about dying.

  But getting there is hard work. And it is painfully slow. Ride up on the crest, see the buoy, down into the trough, see nothing but ocean. Swim, swim, rest. Swim, swim, rest. Switch hands, then swim again. Keep going. Endure.

  I am ingesting a lot of water. The sea pours into my mouth when I breathe, and I know that at some point too much of it could swamp the flap over my windpipe and shut my airway. But if I close my mouth, the water just goes up my nose. That is just as bad, and the salt stings. Plug your nose, I think. Plug it. I consider stopping, cutting up one of my socks, using the pieces to plug my nose. But I don’t want to stop. I want to get there.

  Then I think of another use for the socks. I realize I need more pull with the hand I am using to scoop the water backward in my one-armed half-crawl half-sidestroke. I grab a sock off my foot and put the wet fabric over my hand like a mitten. This gives me webbing so I can catch more water when I pull.

  At the next crest I look up, and there’s Pete. Himself. His boat, the Brooke C, is up ahead. I can see him in the distance going along the line of his gear. He’s on the deck railing, looking down, looking at the water, maybe checking his gear, maybe looking for me. I stop swimming and start screaming, yelling, waving my gloved hand in the air. Nothing. He can’t see me; he can’t hear me. The waves are obscuring his sight lines as well as mine, even though he is not far from me, not far at all. I am up and down, up and down, eyes focused, when I can see anything at all, on getting to the west-end buoy. And in a matter of seconds he is gone. I freak out. Nothing, nothing, nothing good is happening.

  Then I say to myself, All right, try to stay positive. Keep going. You have to keep going.

  I swim. Think about getting there, I tell myself. I feel a twinge of pain in my leg—a spasm. The first hint of a charley horse. Forget about that, I tell myself. Nothing is going to stop me. No physical pain is going to dictate the outcome of this swim. No way. I give in to pain, and I die. It’s that simple.

  I put the pain away, stash it right next to the doubts about survival I have shaken out of the garbage bin of my brain. I know how to do that too, how to put away pain or discomfort. All fishermen do. We have to know. You stand in smelly fish slime amid tangled miles of rope on a rocking-and-rolling boat for fifteen hours at a stretch, wearing big, sweaty rubber gloves and hauling metal traps up from the ocean floor, emptying them, measuring and banding the catch, then resetting the traps with bait and lowering them again: that’s the work of the job. There’s no alternative, so you don’t even think about pain or discomfort. You do this work when it’s cold and clammy and sleeting so hard you can barely see what you’re doing, and you do it under a broiling sun when you’re dripping rivers of sweat so hard you can barely see what you’re doing. And on the Anna Mary, when we’ve finished with one trawl and are heading for the next, we’re trolling for tuna or mahi-mahi, which means a whole different set of equipment to set up and monitor, plus keeping pressure on multiple lines at once. And of course we also have to operate the boat, watch the weather, maintain our cooling tanks. So you’re tired, you’re sore, something aches, something stings, it’s too hot, it’s too cold—thank you for sharing, but this is the job. Get back to work.

  Same with construction. Same work ethic. Heat, rain, flying hammers, falling planks, murderous power tools, screaming clients—all of it and more. This is the job we do, and there is no alternative but to get it done.

  Now my job is to be in the water, swimming with one arm and switching from flutter kick to frog kick and back again, and there is Pete’s west-end buoy up ahead, and that is all that counts. Only the need to get to the west-end buoy counts. Which means that both physically and mentally I have to stay inside that need to keep swimming. Neither my body nor my brain can be anywhere else. This is the job. There is no other job. So I keep going.

  But the buoy is still far away, and it is such slow going. I come up on a crest, and there’s the Anna Mary. She is close. How did I miss her this close? She is traveling north on the same trackline we came south along, and there is Mike up on the roof, looking for me. Again I scream and wave, and again I am neither heard nor seen. Yet oddly it brings my mood up a bit to see my boat, and I can see the dot of that helicopter overhead as well. There is definitely a search on; they are working a pattern searching for me. Stay positive, I tell myself again and again. Stay positive. They’re looking for me. I’m not so lost as all that, not so isolated as before.

  Still, the certainty that they are searching for me makes my swim ever more urgent. Searching isn’t finding—it’s only looking. If I am to be rescued, I need to be visible, and to be visible, I need to get to the buoy. I keep going. Swim, swim, rest. Swim, swim, rest. I am getting closer. Closer. Maybe two hours after I started, I arrive.

  I get a hand on the bright red buoy, then grasp the rope tethering it to the ocean floor. I can stop propelling myself. For the first time since I fell into the water—how long ago? six hours? seven hours? more?—I am holding onto something fixed. For the first time something other than my own effort is keeping me steady.

  Chapter 10

  Command and Control

  10:00 a.m.

  They say that twenty-three boats headed out from Montauk that day—a volunteer armada comprising commercial and sport vessels of various sizes and shapes, all bent on a single objective. Yet at the time, for mission coordinator Jonathan Theel in the command center in New Haven, the whole idea of the volunteers chomping at the bit to get into action presented something of a quandary.

  Years of both training and experience in SAR management had taught Theel that coordinating a search-and-rescue mission consisted of at least two tasks: one was coordinating the search and rescue; the other was managing the event. Managing the event meant many things, all of them important, none of them directly integral to the task of planning a search and directing assets to execute it.

  Managing the event meant, for example, staying in contact with the family, which Theel was trying to do—or have someone do—as close to once an hour as possible.* It meant dealing with the community, which, fortunately for Theel, was today a job for Dennis Heard at Montauk Station. Public or press relations are always an issue, but again, in this case the issue affected Montauk Station more than the New Haven command center. And then there were the Good Samaritan volunteers, the people who offer every variety of assistance when someone is in trouble or in need of aid.

  Volunteers act out of good will, not out of self-interest. They tend to be unreserved in the generosity with which they expend their energy, their intelligence, their own resources. But when you are managing a SAR, it is also essential to keep in mind that these volunteers are not under your control, they do not answer to you, and yet you may be assuming liability for anything and everything they do.

  That is why over the years Theel believed he had learned two truths about making use of volunteer assistance: one truth holds that you make use of volunteers at your peril. The equal but opposite truth holds that you fail to make use of volunteers at your peril. The
fishing vessels coming out en masse to search for John Aldridge could certainly add value to a search. Their captains and crews knew the territory far better than the Coast Guard officers in their lifeboats and response boats—good seamen all, but not intimately familiar with the fishing grounds off Long Island, waters where, as the Coast Guard knew, there are eddies and swirls that computer models simply cannot and do not cover. The volunteers also knew one another and could communicate quickly across their fishermen’s network. And they knew John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski.

  Theel was particularly aware that telling a fisherman he or she cannot do something is a difficult proposition. He also admits that in their shoes he would be doing exactly what all of Montauk’s fishing vessel and charter boat captains were doing. The fraternity of “all of us that live on the sea,” Theel says, “accepts absolutely the unwritten rule that you help someone in distress. Period.”

  But he also saw how difficult the arrival of twenty-three volunteer fishing vessels could be when it came to coordinating an effort, and he worried especially about the potential impact on the SAROPS planning process of inputting data from twenty-three separate navigational positions. What he finally settled on seemed the perfect way to make use of the volunteers’ knowledge and their multiple additional eyeballs while keeping them safe, helping free the Coast Guard to do what it does best, and not blowing up the computer.

  He put Anthony Sosinski in charge of the volunteer fleet. Anthony had been communicating with the fishing vessels from the outset, he was a colleague and friend of the captains of these vessels, and, once again, he and they spoke a common language. The plan was for Anthony to assign each of the volunteer fishing vessels its own search site in the greater grid of Aldridge’s probable location. He would task each participating vessel to run a slot due north and south, plotting each slot at a distance of a half mile from the next vessel’s slot. In that way the fishing boats would build a fence that would bound a substantial portion of the search area and cover the waters within the fence from end to end and from side to side. And they would do all of this in their own language—speaking in Loran terms and in Long Island Sound fishing vernacular.