by Adam Johnson
The team in New Haven based its initial calculations on Sosinski’s report that Aldridge was supposed to wake him up at 11:30 p.m. That suggested to them that Aldridge fell overboard between 9:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., which would put him somewhere between five and twenty miles south of the Long Island coast. Rodocker input those assumptions, and Sarops came back with an “Alpha Drift"—its first scatter plot of search particles—that curved in a thick parabola from Montauk Point southward, bulging out toward the east, with the highest-probability locations, the reddest squares on the map, clustered about fifteen miles offshore.
The next step for Sarops was to develop search patterns for each boat and aircraft, dividing up the search area into squares and rectangles and assigning each vessel a zone to search and a pattern to use. A little before 8 a.m., New Haven started issuing patterns to the first three assets on the scene: the plane, a helicopter and a forty-seven-foot patrol boat from Montauk. Sarops can assign all kinds of patterns, depending on the conditions—a track line, a creeping line, an expanding square—but in this case, each search crew was assigned what’s called a parallel search: a rectangular S-shaped pattern, with long search tracks proceeding roughly north and south and a small jog to the west between each track.
The helicopter was a Sikorsky Jayhawk piloted by two young lieutenants from Air Station Cape Cod named Mike Deal and Ray Jamros. Flying a Jayhawk in the Coast Guard, like many jobs these days, involves looking at a lot of screens: seven in total, spread out in front of Deal and Jamros in the cockpit, showing live maps, radar images and search patterns. When the parallel pattern came in from New Haven, the coordinates fed directly into the helicopter’s navigation system, meaning that the pilots were able to simply turn on the autopilot and let the helicopter fly the search pattern on its own. That allowed Deal and Jamros to turn their attention away from the screens and toward the water below them. They were joined in their search by two crew members who sat in the back of the helicopter: a rescue swimmer named Bob Hovey and a flight mechanic named Ethan Hill. Deal and Jamros scanned the ocean through their cockpit windows; Hill sat perched in the wide-open door on the right side of the helicopter, where he had the clearest view of the water below. Hovey spent most of his time staring at yet another screen, this one displaying the output of an infrared radar camera mounted on the bottom of the helicopter.
The Coast Guard search was off to an excellent start. It was a clear day with good visibility, and they had plenty of assets in place. The only problem, of course, was that everyone involved was searching in entirely the wrong place. Aldridge did not fall in the water at 10:30 p.m.; he fell in at 3:30 a.m. Almost thirty miles south of where the Jayhawk crew was carefully searching for him, Aldridge was clinging to his boots in the cold water.
Back in New Haven, Pete Winters was having second thoughts about the Alpha Drift. He borrowed the microphone from Sean Davis and radioed the Anna Mary directly. “Talk to me, Captain,” he said to Sosinski. “Fisherman to fisherman. Help me reduce this search area. We need to narrow it down so we can find John.”
Throughout his long career with the Coast Guard, Winters worked on the side as a commercial fisherman on the North Fork of Long Island, like his grandfather and his uncle before him. This gave him an advantage when a search-and-rescue operation involved commercial fishermen, especially Long Island fishermen: He spoke their language.
Sosinski had also been having second thoughts about the search area. After his initial conversation with Davis, he inspected the boat more carefully, and he found a few important clues. One hatch cover was upside down on the deck, which every mariner knows is bad luck—an upside-down hatch cover means your boat is going to wind up upside down, too. Aldridge must have left it propped up against the side of the boat when he opened the hatch—and he wouldn’t have left it there for long. The pumps were on, sluicing cool ocean water through the lobster tanks, which meant that Aldridge had been preparing them for the day’s catch. And in the warm summer months, Aldridge and Sosinski would usually wait to start filling the tanks until their boat reached the forty-fathom curve, the line on maritime charts that marks where the ocean’s depth hits forty fathoms, or 240 feet, which is the point at which the water temperature tends to drop. The forty-fathom curve is only about fifteen miles north of the Anna Mary’s first trawl. Then Sosinski found the broken handle on the ice chest, and he realized exactly how Aldridge had fallen overboard. It was still difficult for Sosinski to reconcile this new information with the fact that Aldridge hadn’t woken him up at 11:30 p.m., as scheduled, but he knew that Aldridge liked to push himself, and it didn’t seem entirely uncharacteristic that his friend might have just decided to stay up all night, alone, before working an eighteen-hour day pulling in traps.
Together Sosinski and Winters came up with a new theory: Aldridge had gone overboard somewhere between the forty-fathom curve, about twenty-five miles offshore, and the Anna Mary’s first trawl, about forty miles offshore. At 8:30 a.m., Winters passed this new information to Rodocker, who punched it into Sarops. When the new map emerged, most of the dark-red search particles had migrated south of the forty-fathom curve, and Sarops quickly developed a second, more southerly, set of search patterns.
Theel, the search-mission commander in New Haven, then turned his attention to a more difficult duty: informing Aldridge’s parents. He called John Aldridge Sr., who called his wife to the phone, and they sat together, listening to Theel deliver the news of their son’s disappearance. Mrs. Aldridge was hopeful, but Mr. Aldridge felt certain his son was already dead. If he hadn’t been killed by the propellers when he fell overboard, he had surely drowned by now. Pretty soon, he thought, Theel would be calling back to say that the helicopters had found John’s lifeless body floating in the waves, or that the Coast Guard had decided to suspend the search.
The news about Aldridge was also spreading through Montauk’s fishing community. Much of the town’s commercial fleet was out on the water that morning. Some fishermen heard Sosinski’s anguished first call for help. Others heard Sean Davis’s pan-pan broadcast. And then word traveled from boat to boat, back to the dock and then all over Montauk. The mood in town was grim. Everyone knew the odds: a man overboard, that far off the coast, would very likely never be found alive.
Most of the fishermen who heard the news had the same immediate response, wherever they were: They wanted to help with the search. Richard Etzel, the captain of a Montauk charter boat, had taken a group of customers out at dawn that morning to fish for striped bass. When he heard the news over the radio, he took his customers back in, fueled up and headed south. At the Montauk Marine Basin, a mechanic borrowed a customer’s center-console boat—without actually mentioning it to the customer—and took off toward the fishing grounds. Jimmy Buffett, the singer, who has a summer house in Montauk, had that morning hired Paul Stern, one of the best big-tuna fishermen on the East Coast, to take him out in Buffett’s boat, the Last Mango. When Stern heard about Aldridge, he asked Buffett if they could join the search. Buffett agreed, and the Last Mango headed south as well.
In total, twenty-one commercial boats volunteered to look for Aldridge. And as they set out, one by one, they flipped their radios over to channel sixteen and alerted the Coast Guard that they were joining the search. Usually, when good Samaritans volunteer to take part in a search-and-rescue mission, the Coast Guard politely declines. It’s too complicated; the civilians don’t know the search patterns; and their searches aren’t always reliable. In this case, though, the search area was so vast that the Coast Guard needed all the help it could get. And these were highly motivated volunteers who knew the area well. Theel didn’t want to turn down that kind of help. Still, Sean Davis couldn’t possibly coordinate twenty-one new search patterns on top of all the Coast Guard craft he was already directing. So Winters hit on an idea: They would put Anthony Sosinski in charge of the volunteer fishing fleet.
Sosinski said yes to the assignment, of course—he would have done anything to
find Aldridge—but organizing twenty-one fishing boats into a search party would be a daunting task for anyone, and Sosinski was distraught and disoriented, standing alone in the cramped wheelhouse of the Anna Mary in his bare feet and shorts. In contrast to the high-tech work stations in New Haven, Sosinski’s only work surface was a chest-high countertop by the boat’s front window that was always piled high with unopened mail, newspaper clippings, notebooks, tide charts and rolls of paper towel and electrical tape. Sosinski dug through the mess until he found a pen, then got on the radio and asked the volunteer searchers to give him their latitude and longitude.
To outsiders, Sosinski looked more like a surfer than a fisherman: long, sun-bleached blond hair that he was constantly pushing back from his eyes, untamed facial hair and a face tanned and creased by years in the sun. On his days off, he would usually smoke some marijuana to calm himself; when he was in charge of the boat’s satellite radio, he inevitably chose the ’70s station. He was short and muscular, always humming with energy, talkative, jittery—all of which made for a sharp contrast with most Montauk fishermen, who tended to be laconic and reserved. But Sosinski had been on the dock since he was a teenager, and he had earned a certain kind of respect—or at least affection—among the Montauk fishing fleet.
When Sosinski was growing up in Oakdale, his father worked as a tractor-trailer driver during the week, delivering lumber up and down Long Island. But most Friday nights, his father would drive to Montauk for the weekend, where he’d work a second job as a deckhand for the Viking fleet, Montauk’s biggest charter company, helping out on half-day party-boat charters. When Sosinski turned twelve, he started tagging along on his father’s weekend trips, and in high school, Sosinski spent each summer living on a houseboat moored at the Montauk dock, working full time for Viking. As soon as he finished high school, Sosinski moved to Montauk and started commercial fishing. He married at twenty, and by the time he was twenty-four, he had two daughters and a job on a long-line tilefish boat, going out for ten days at a time.
Then Sosinski returned from a fishing trip to find that his wife had left town with their children. No note, no forwarding address. For 14 months he searched for his family, until he finally found them in Laguna, Calif. After a long legal battle, Sosinski won custody of both of his daughters and brought them back to Montauk, where he raised them as a single father, doing everything from attending P.T.A. meetings to cooking dinner to making sure they both got into college. While the girls were young, he worked close to shore on a small lobster boat so that he could be home every night.
Aldridge and Sosinski first fished together as boys, riding their bikes to a spot they found under Sunrise Highway and pedaling home with their bicycle baskets filled with trout. Once Aldridge joined Sosinski in Montauk, they fished for years on separate boats, but when a beat-up lobster boat called the Anna Mary came up for sale, they decided to pool their money and buy it together. It took more than a year of repair work in the boatyard to make the Anna Mary seaworthy, and the men were in their late thirties by the time they finally got it out on the water. But it felt to both of them like the opportunity they had been waiting for—no boss, working together, setting their own hours, charting their own course.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Montauk’s commercial fisheries had been contracting, a casualty, depending on whom you asked, of rampant overfishing or excessive government regulation. Every year, there were fewer commercial boats going out. But Sosinski and Aldridge made it work. They found a buyer for their lobsters in Sayville who would ship them on the ferries to Fire Island. They sold their crabs to Chinese markets in Queens. They weren’t getting rich—maintaining lobster traps and a boat is an expensive undertaking—but they were doing all right. And they were still fishing side by side, more than 30 years after they first dropped their hooks in the water.
Now, quite literally, Sosinski had lost his best friend. All day, as he stared out at the vast rolling ocean, he felt helpless and guilty. If only he’d woken up a few hours earlier, he told himself, Aldridge would have taken his shift in the bunk, and right now they’d be pulling in lobster traps together. He tried to focus all his energy on directing the commercial boats in north-south tracking lines, trying to keep all their locations straight. But none of it felt like enough. Aldridge had left his driver’s license in the wheelhouse, propped up next to the radio, and every once in a while, during the search, Sosinski would pick it up and hold it in his hand. He’d stare at it and say out loud: Where are you, John?
The sun rose on John Aldridge at about 5:30 on the morning of July 24. He was cold, thirsty and tired—he’d been awake for twenty-four hours—but he was still alive and afloat. Now that it was light, he gave himself a new assignment: find a buoy. To most people, the Atlantic Ocean forty miles south of Montauk is just a big, undifferentiated expanse of waves, but Aldridge knew roughly where he fell overboard—a few miles south of the forty-fathom curve. And he knew that several lobster fishermen had trawls nearby—he knew them by name, in fact. Each lobster trawl is a string of thirty to fifty traps, spaced 150 feet apart at the bottom of the ocean, and at the end of each string, a rope extends up from the last trap to the surface, where it is tied to a big round vinyl buoy. If Aldridge could make his way to a buoy, he figured, he would be more visible to the searchers, and it would be easier to stay afloat.
But where to find one? For the first couple of hours of daylight, Aldridge just drifted and looked. Every ten seconds or so, a swell would carry him up a few feet, and when he got to the top of the wave, he’d scan the horizon for a buoy. Finally, at the peak of one wave, he spotted a buoy a couple of hundred yards away and began swimming toward it. He took a sock off one foot and stretched it over his right hand, to give himself more pull. But it was slow going with the boots under his arms, and the current was against him. Each time he looked up, the buoy was a little farther away.
Aldridge realized he was exhausting himself, and he decided to cut his losses. He was able to see that the buoy he had been swimming toward had a flag on top of it, which lobster fishermen attach to the west end of their strings. Lobster traps are always laid out along an east-west line, so Aldridge figured that a mile or so to the east of the unreachable buoy, he would find the other end of that string of traps, and with it, another buoy. He started swimming east—with the current this time instead of against it—stopping briefly at the top of each swell to see if he could catch sight of the eastern buoy. It was painful work. His legs were cramping. He couldn’t feel his fingers. The sun, rising higher in front of him, was blinding. But finally, after more than an hour, he spotted a buoy, and using the current, he was able to angle himself directly into it. He grabbed the rope and held on.
After a minute or two of relief, Aldridge discovered that the buoy wasn’t quite the deliverance he was hoping for. Lobster buoys can be big—two feet or more in diameter—so it was impossible to get his arms around it or ride on top of it in any way. His only option was to grab on to the black vinyl eye at the bottom of the buoy that the rope was threaded through. The problem was, since the buoy was tethered to the traps at the bottom of the ocean, it didn’t rise, entirely, with the waves. Each time a swell rose, much of the buoy would submerge. Which meant that Aldridge would be dunked underwater as well.
By noon, Aldridge had been in the water for almost nine hours. He was starting to shiver uncontrollably. Sea shrimp and sea lice were fastening themselves to his T-shirt and shorts, claiming him as part of the sea. Storm petrels swarmed around occasionally, squawking and diving.
Aldridge could see the plane and the helicopters running their patterns, but everyone searching for him seemed to be at least a mile to the east. Clinging to the buoy, he realized that the Coast Guard thought he was still drifting. Even if they’d figured out more or less where he fell in, their search patterns hadn’t taken into account the possibility that he snagged a buoy. Aldridge knew if he wanted to have a chance of being found, he had to get himself farther east.
He took out his buck knife and started chopping away at the rope that held the buoy in place. When he got it free, he tied it around his wrist and began swimming east again, holding the buoy in front of him.
As he went, he felt the energy drain from his body. His kicks and strokes were weakening. The sun rose higher, and the skin on his face and neck began to blister and burn. Then, at the top of one swell, impossibly, he spotted the Anna Mary, less than a quarter-mile in front of him. Mike Migliaccio was standing on the roof, and Aldridge hollered with all the strength he could muster. He tried to throw the buoy up in the air to attract attention, but the boat was too far away. For the second time that day, Aldridge watched as the Anna Mary receded into the distance without him, and he began to contemplate the reality he’d kept at bay in his mind for all these hours, that no matter what he did, he might not be rescued after all.
He willed himself to keep kicking until eventually—he doesn’t know how much time went by—he reached another buoy. He recognized that it belonged to his friend Pete Spong, a Rhode Island fisherman who owned a lobster boat called the Brooke C. He untied the rope from his wrist and tied it to the anchor rope underneath the new buoy. Now he had two buoys connected by a few feet of rope. He swung his leg over the rope and straddled it, facing east. The thick rope rubbed back and forth on his crotch and his legs as the waves rose and fell, chafing them raw, but at least he wasn’t being pulled underwater anymore. He repositioned the boots under his arms, and he waited, knowing that this was as far as he could go, that he couldn’t survive another swim. If he was still in the water at sundown, he decided, he would tie himself to the Brooke C’s buoy. That way, at least someone would find his body, and his parents would have something to bury.
Up in the Jayhawk helicopter, Deal and Jamros and Hovey and Hill had been staring at the water since about 7 a.m., and by early afternoon, they were growing discouraged. They had a few false alarms during the day—sea turtles and mylar balloons—and with each possible sighting, they followed the same protocol: the person who saw the object would call out: “Mark. Mark. Mark.” One pilot would hit a button in the cockpit that would mark the location, and they would swing the helicopter back around to check it out. Each time, nothing.