They did exactly that—twenty-three Montauk commercial fishing and/or charter vessels under the command of Anthony Sosinski. In addition to the other benefits these actions produced, Anthony would later claim that managing the volunteer fleet is what kept him sane through the day.
Shirtless, wearing only his shorts, he stationed himself against the starboard railing of the Anna Mary, a vantage from which he could scan the ocean even as he operated the radio microphone, stretched on its cord from the radio base in the wheelhouse. He would regularly stick his head back into the wheelhouse to check coordinates on the Loran, also positioned in the wheelhouse a mere five feet away, as he spoke into the mic and alternately held it to his ear to hear.
Coordinating the fleet essentially meant juggling communications channels—and knowing the relevant ocean real estate like the back of your hand. Sosinski’s first move had been to broadcast on Channel 16 to all vessels involved in the civilian search to switch to Channel 1—it was the channel Montauk fishermen tended to use to communicate with one another when they were at sea, and it seemed the appropriate place. He continued to use Channel 16 to connect to the Coast Guard command center, while Channel 22 was his line to the Coast Guard helicopter, the eye in the sky in the search for Johnny. He was operating the radio in the Scan position, so he would frequently be talking to one vessel on Channel 1 when another would hail him—“Hey, Anthony, the Coast Guard wants to talk to you on Sixteen”—and he would switch over, then switch back to 1 to update the volunteer vessels, then over to 22 to get the position of the MH-60 copter, and so it went.
He assigned slots in the grid based on where the volunteer vessel was when it called in its longitude and latitude and on his own assessment of where Johnny might have drifted to at this point. In a sense he was moving the fleet with the drift. For example, when he heard from a friend on the fifty-eight-foot Bookie, which was tile fishing fifty miles to his southeast, he assigned that vessel to the easternmost slot in the grid because it would be arriving at the slot from the east. He also made educated guesses: “Steam three miles east,” he might order a boat, “then look north and south,” just trying to anticipate where the drift might have taken his partner and friend of a lifetime while hoping—but not knowing—that he was safe on a buoy somewhere in this great big ocean.
That was Anthony’s post, and he never left it.
Neither did the very parched Mike Migliaccio leave his post, except for an occasional jump down to the deck to grab another bottle of water. Mike “lived on the roof” of the boat, in Anthony’s phrase, “smoking Marlboro Reds like they were free.” The two men had known one another since Mike’s brother, a chef by trade, had died in a fire in an apartment Anthony had once lived in. He and Anthony met when Mike came to Montauk to see where his brother had died. In time Migliaccio, a skilled marine mechanic, decided to make Montauk his home and to go back to sea with the fishing fleet. That day the Charles Bronson lookalike had only his hat for protection against the sun as he stood, wearing the blue jeans and T-shirt that were his standard uniform, beside the mast among the huge lights and crisscrossing ropes. A pair of binoculars was locked onto his eyes; by day’s end the glasses had stenciled two large white patches on a face otherwise sunburned to the point of lobster redness.
This was the first “overboard incident” Mike had ever been associated with, and they were looking for a friend. If anybody can make it, Johnny will, he told himself. But as the hours clicked on, holding that thought grew more and more difficult, and Mike himself grew increasingly anxious.
At four hours he started thinking about sharks. At six hours he began to worry about hypothermia. Still, adrenaline and affection and worry kept him fastened to his post. Regularly he shouted encouragement from beyond the grave down to Anthony: “My brother tells me it will be all right. Keep looking.” Keeping on looking was what he did nonstop. “I checked every wave for 360 degrees around me, over and over,” Migliaccio says. “I tried to follow where the tide was going and how the wind was blowing. I searched all over. I saw a lot of boats”—the volunteer armada filling the slots of the grid—“but it just wasn’t happening.”
Meanwhile the mission team in New Haven turned its attention to consideration of the two standard options for extending the Aldridge search after dark—either pull assets back and restart the search “hard” in the morning, or search all night. They committed the mission to search all night if needed, certain that the assets currently involved in the search plus additional resources in reserve were more than sufficient. Those additional reserves included the cutters Tiger Shark and Sailfish, due to arrive at the search zone later, which Theel would assign to take over the command and control of the fleet overnight.*
But it wasn’t nighttime yet. The sun was still bright, there was plenty of daylight left, and the volunteer fleet was very much out there, each vessel following the slot in the ocean Anthony had assigned, back and forth, up and down in a part of the grid where they would not be duplicating any other boat’s search—lots more eyeballs trained on the sea looking for Johnny Aldridge.
What is it like to keep staring at the sea, looking for a person in the water? Boatswain’s Mate Rich Standridge, a Coastie who was not involved in the Aldridge SAR, says that “from an operator’s standpoint, I can tell you it is so hard to see anything. I always thought before I came into the service: It’s bright orange or red or yellow on a blue ocean. It ought to be easy. But it really is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” A lot of volunteer crew members spent a lot of time in the crow’s nests of a lot of boats that day, “getting very sunburned,” as veteran fisherman Chuck Weimer observed, as they searched for that needle.
Steve Forsberg thinks his was about the eleventh boat to get his assignment. Steven Jr. was driving the boat; Carl and Forsberg took the highest point on the wheelhouse. He told his younger son, “Look for anything,” but even as he said it, he knew how fruitless an exercise that was likely to be. Scanning the moving ocean for someone’s head was like looking for a particular grain among all the grains of sand on the beach.
Cathy Patterson and her sister-in-law, Jillian, arrived at Station Montauk at the end of Star Island Road at around 10:30. Tommy’s partner, Rob Howard, their “escort” from the deputy sheriff’s office, rang the bell at the gate and announced who they were, and they were buzzed in. Dennis Heard, the acting officer in charge, was alerted to their presence and came forward to greet them.
The main building of the Montauk Station is big and rather stately. White with a red-tiled roof, it is two stories high under the ample roof, while the roof itself holds garret rooms and a lookout tower at its peak. Spacious though the building appears, it consists mostly of offices, conference rooms, a cafeteria and similar utilities, and operational spaces where USCG functions are carried out. No particular provision has been made for visitors like Cathy and Jillian. Heard was gracious and sympathetic and ushered the women into the building’s communications suite, where Cathy remembers seeing half a dozen people studiously monitoring an array of large computer screens. Heard opened a large file cabinet and pulled a navigational chart out of the drawer. “Here is where the Anna Mary is now,” he said, pointing with his finger. He showed her the coordinates where they thought Johnny might have gone overboard and outlined the probable search area.
Cathy remembers thinking something was “off” when they showed her the coordinates for the top of the search area—an instinct telling her that her brother would have been farther out, closer to his fishing area. But the Coast Guard had the experts, had all this equipment, had all these search capabilities Dennis Heard was now explaining to her—patrol boats, response boats, helicopters, jets, cutters, SAROPS. The service’s competence was right there in the name, SAROPS: Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System—the latest and best tool for search and rescue the Coast Guard had, which pretty much made it the latest and best tool for search and rescue anywhere in the world. SAROPS could ingest more and more data stream
ing in from the boats out there and from the planes overhead, plus data from anywhere in the world about tides and currents and winds, and the system would simulate various scenarios, measure probabilities, spit out fresh coordinates and new plans. Surely they knew best.
Heard needed to get back to work, and he summoned two of the storekeepers to stay with Cathy and Jillian. Coast Guard storekeepers are nonoperational staff who handle supply, storage, logistics, and office functions. Two of the storekeepers at Montauk Station at the time were women, and Heard thought their company—if Cathy and Jillian needed company—would be a good idea. The storekeepers showed Cathy and Jillian the mess deck and the porch, and it was there, outside, where Cathy and Jillian settled in to wait and watch, their eyes trained straight out to sea.
The station began to fill with people. Teresa, the woman Johnny was dating at the time, showed up, as did other friends. And local law enforcement officials began descending on the station. The Suffolk County sheriff’s office was already there, having provided the escort, but it belonged there for another reason as well. As befits a coastal county, the office has its own marine patrol section and is part of what is called the East End Marine Task Force, which comprises eighteen policing agencies from the five East End towns and their multiple villages and hamlets as well as from the State Park Police and the state Department of Environmental Conservation. The alert for Johnny had activated just about all of them, and the heads of the various departments were now converging on the station. This was right, proper, and essential: with two of Montauk Station’s vessels out on the search and a third ready to relieve one of them, any other marine emergency would have to be met by vessels from the fleet represented by the Task Force.
As Dennis Heard was finding out, however, a lot of the local law enforcement officials had a lot of questions. Some of the questions were requests for information updates, which Dennis answered as best he could, and some were somewhat insistent questions about what the Coast Guard was doing. Heard tried to answer everyone patiently—“I knew they wanted to help out,” he says—but he feared that repeating the same story time and again to different individuals and assuring local officials, who “wanted to launch every boat around,” that it wasn’t yet time to do so was taking him away from his primary responsibility. Please, he wanted to say, we may indeed need your boats in due course, but it is not the right move at this time, so please just step back and let us do our jobs…
Tommy Patterson arrived at about noon. His parents had come to the house and picked up their grandson Jake, and Tommy had put on his uniform and gone on duty. He took the sheriff’s car and drove, as assigned, to Montauk Coast Guard Station. He joined Cathy and Jillian and other friends all doing the same thing—waiting.
Text messages flew into Cathy’s phone. The gist of all of them was the same: Hang in there. She was not about to do anything else.
She remembered when Chubby Gray had been lost the previous December. That was an eternity ago, yet right now the loss felt fresh and opened a deep, dark, cold hole in her heart. Chubby had been “one of the boys,” a friend of Johnny and Anthony, a young guy taking his cue from the veterans like her brother and his partner. What made the loss even worse were all the question marks: What had happened? What could have made that boat, a twin of the Anna Mary, and the two experienced seamen aboard her simply disappear? Cathy remembered how shaken Johnny was at the time, and how he said to her: “I just want you to know that if something like that ever happens to me, I will do everything I can to survive and come back to you.” Whatever the outcome, she would know that he had fought every minute with all his strength to stay alive. She was counting on that now.
She needed to count on something as she stayed in touch with the family back in Oakdale. Her father was in the process of convincing himself that his oldest son was dead. Or maybe he had already done so. Either way, she feared he was coming unglued. Clinging to Johnny’s promise that he would not stop trying, she would not believe her brother was gone, refused even to admit the idea into her head. “I never thought he was dead,” she remembers emphatically, even if only because such a thing was unthinkable. But all around her in the station, it seemed, she could see in people’s faces the probability that Johnny was gone. “What are the odds?” Tommy had asked a group of Coasties staring at a chart. They gave no answer, just turned their heads away. After that, Cathy remembers, “I didn’t want to look at Tommy. He had the look of someone thinking Johnny was gone,” and she couldn’t bear to see it.
Heard estimates there were more than forty “outside” people in the station. They moved mostly between the mess deck and the front porch, and he bounced from one to the other, offering information updates. He could see what they were going through, and he was conscious of trying to keep his own emotions in check. Just let them know what we absolutely know, he said to himself, even if it’s not much and even though it’s the same thing I told them an hour ago.
With a staff of six, he was also monitoring the staging of the other marine patrols, those that would cover for the offshore Coast Guard vessels if needed. He relayed the permission from the New Haven command center for the small response boat captained by Jason Walter to go out as far as twenty miles offshore—an exception allowed because of the life-and-death situation and because the water was calm enough. He was in regular communication with the command center and was tuned in to the communications among the boats of the growing volunteer fleet. In fact, when New Haven experienced a communications glitch, Montauk Station had to fill them in on where the volunteer fleet was. There were instructions on what Dennis should tell the family—and what he should not tell the family—and when a team of specialists trained in dealing with next of kin might be assembled and deployed.
As if that weren’t enough, he had been told that there was a retirement party being held that morning up at the lighthouse for an E-10, a master chief petty officer—the senior enlisted rank in the Coast Guard—and the station should expect a visit. Fortunately the E-10 showed up early in the day and, as a veteran of many operations, understood exactly what the staff were up against and graciously took his leave. Only much later would Heard appreciate the irony of being asked to host a retiree on such a day.
Dennis Heard is an easygoing, mild-mannered man with a calming presence. But behind that, as he bounced from task to task, from need to need, from one constituency to the other, he admits that having the family on site was “stressful.” He wanted to be sure they were getting the information they needed; he also wanted to be sure they weren’t hearing things that weren’t helpful. And he was grateful for the storekeepers, who had mastered a level of ease in talking to family members that he could only envy.
Machinery Technician Second Class Brian Giunta felt a different kind of stress from the presence of the Aldridge family members. Although relieved that he did not have to deal directly with the sister of the missing man as Dennis Heard did, the fact that family members were right there at the station intensified the burden of responsibility he was there to undertake. Giunta was assigned that day to serve as engineer on the second forty-seven-foot lifeboat, the one due to go out after the first one returned from the search. He was in waiting mode that morning—in readiness—and for him the assignment was personal. He knew of the two lobstermen; he remembered Sosinski—Little Anthony, as he called him—as the guy who rode a unicycle in the local Saint Patrick’s Day parade, a natural clown. And to him, “Johnny’s family being here brought a whole other element” to his assignment.
In his years of search-and-rescue work Giunta, in his own words, “pulled a lot of bodies out of the water.” When his crew was assembled the morning of July 24, 2013, primed to relieve the 47 on its return from the search, “we looked at each other, and we knew we all had the worst-case scenario in mind.”
“It’s inevitable,” Giunta goes on. “You’re dealing with the North Atlantic Ocean—the sea is in control at all times.” But the reality of family members gathered there, of
Aldridge’s sister standing on the porch looking out to sea, “hit home,” Giunta says. He realized with dramatic immediacy that he—and his crew and their training and the forty-seven-foot patrol boat they were assigned to—were, in the eyes of the family, a lifeline, their sole hope of getting Johnny Aldridge back home alive. That realization added to the weight of responsibility he knew was on them all, but it also made Giunta feel ever more acutely that he was ready to take on the responsibility.
Cathy felt heartened when she was told that a fleet of local fishing vessels had gone out from Montauk to aid in the search, all coordinated into an organized grid by Anthony. Dennis Heard called the mobilization an “exceptional” response and said the local fleet was freeing the Coast Guard to concentrate its own resources. Cathy felt good hearing that, and the place was bustling with activity—Coasties coming and going, phones buzzing and chirping, computer screens alive with shifting graphics.
It was just a few minutes before 1:00 p.m. when Cathy became aware of “something” happening. She felt a shift in the vibe, something different about the way the department heads comported themselves and looked at one another. In normal circumstances Cathy Patterson’s mind is diamond-sharp; in the present circumstances her sensors were on overdrive, and what she was sensing caused her stomach to drop. What was going on? Something had happened, but what? Were they slowing down the search? Giving up? Why had things at the station gone off track? Things had to get back on track. The “business mode” that is so natural to Cathy kicked in. Raising her voice and effectively calling everyone in the station to order, Cathy Patterson made a speech.
A Speck in the Sea Page 13