It goes badly from the start. What passes for a lull between waves is in fact a crest-to-trough change of thirty or forty feet. Chief bosun Thomas Amidon lowers the Avon halfway down, gets lifted up by the next wave, can’t keep up with the trough and freefalls to the bottom of the cable. The lifting eye gets ripped out of its mount and Amidon almost pitches overboard. He struggles back into position, finishes lowering the boat, and makes way from the Tamaroa.
The seas are twice the size of the Avon raft. With excruciating slowness it fights its way to the Satori, comes up bow-to-stern, and a crew member flings the three survival suits on deck. Stimpson grabs them and hands them out, but Amidon doesn’t back out in time. The sailboat rides up a sea, comes down on the Avon, and punctures one of her air bladders. Things start to happen very fast now: the Avon’s bow collapses, a wave swamps her to the gunwales, the engine dies, and she falls away astern. Amidon tries desperately to get the engine going again and finally manages to, but they’re up to their waists in water and the raft is crippled. There’s no way they can even get themselves back onto the Tamaroa, much less save the crew of the Satori. Six people, not just three, now need to be rescued.
The H-3 crew watches all this incredulously. They’re in a two o’clock hover with their jump door open, just over the tops of the waves. They can see the raft dragging heavily through the seas, and the Tamaroa heaving through ninety-degree rolls. Pilot Claude Hessel finally gets on the radio and tells Brudnicki and Amidon that he may have another way of doing this. He can’t hoist the Satori crew directly off their deck, he says, because the mast is flailing too wildly and might entangle the hoist. That would drag the H-3 right down on top of the boat. But he could drop his rescue swimmer, who could take the people off the boat one at a time and bring them up on the hoist. It’s the best chance they’ve got, and Brudnicki knows it. He consults with District One and then gives the okay.
The rescue swimmer on Hessel’s helicopter is Dave Moore, a three-year veteran who has never been on a major rescue. (“The good cases don’t come along too often—usually someone beats you to them,” he says. “If a sailboat gets in trouble far out we usually get a rescue, but otherwise it’s just a lot of little stuff.”) Moore is handsome in a baby-faced sort of way—square-jawed, blue-eyed, and a big open smile. He has a dense, compact body that is more seallike than athletic. His profession of rescue swimmer came about when a tanker went down off New York in the mid-1980s. A Coast Guard helicopter was hovering overhead, but it was winter and the tanker crew were too hypothermic to get into the lift basket. They all drowned. Congress decided they wanted something done, and the Coast Guard adopted the Navy rescue program. Moore is twenty-five years old, born the year Karen Stimpson graduated from high school.
Moore is already wearing a neoprene wetsuit. He puts on socks and hood, straps on swim fins, pulls a mask and snorkel down over his head, and then struggles into his neoprene gloves. He buckles on a life vest and then signals to flight engineer Vriesman that he’s ready. Vriesman, who has one arm extended, gatelike, across the jump door, steps aside and allows Moore to crouch by the edge. That means that they’re at “ten and ten”—a ten foot hover at ten knots. Moore, who’s no longer plugged into the intercom, signals final corrections to Vriesman with his hands, who relays them to the pilot. This is it; Moore has trained three years for this moment. An hour ago he was in the lunch line back on base. Now he’s about to drop into the maelstrom.
Hessel holds a low hover with the boat at his two o’clock. Moore can see the crew clustered together on deck and the Satori making slow, plunging headway into the seas. Vriesman is seated next to Moore at the hoist controls, and avionicsman Ayres is behind the copilot with the radio and search gear. Both wear flightsuits and crash helmets and are plugged into the internal communication system in the wall. The time is 2:07 PM. Moore picks a spot between waves, takes a deep breath, and jumps.
It’s a ten-foot fall and he hits feetfirst, hands at his sides. He comes up, clears his snorkel, settles his mask, and then strikes out for the Satori. The water is lukewarm—they’re in the Gulf Stream—and the seas are so big they give him the impression he’s swimming uphill and downhill rather than over individual waves. Occasionally the wind blows a crest off, and he has to dive under the cascade of whitewater before setting out again. The Satori appears and disappears behind the swells and the H-3 thunders overhead, rotors blasting a lily pad of flattened water into the sea. Vriesman watches anxiously through binoculars from the jump door, trying to gauge the difficulty of getting Moore back into the helicopter. Ultimately, as flight engineer, it’s his decision to deploy the swimmer, his job to get everyone safely back into the aircraft. If he has any doubts, Moore doesn’t jump.
Moore swims hard for several minutes and finally looks up at Vriesman, shaking his head. The boat’s under power and there’s no way he’s going to catch her, not in these seas. Vriesman sends the basket down and Moore climbs back in. Just as he’s about to ride up, the wave hits.
It’s huge and cresting, fifty or sixty feet. It avalanches over Moore and buries both him and the lift basket. Vriesman counts to ten before Moore finally pops up through the foam, still inside the basket. It’s no longer attached to the hoist cable, though; it’s been wrenched off the hook and is just floating free. Moore has such tunnel vision that he doesn’t realize the basket has come off; he just sits there, waiting to be hoisted. Finally he understands that he’s not going anywhere, and swims the basket over to the cable and clips it on. He climbs inside, and Vriesman hauls him up.
This time they’re going to do things differently. Hessel banks the helicopter to within fifty feet of the Satori and shows a chalkboard that says, “Channel 16.” Bylander disappears below, and when Hessel has her on the VHF, he tells her they’re going to do an in-the-water pickup. They’re to get into their survival suits, tie the tiller down, and then jump off the boat. Once they’re in the water they are to stay in a group and wait for Moore to swim over to them. He’ll put them into the hoist basket and send them up one at a time.
Bylander climbs back up on deck and gives the instructions to the rest of the crew. Moore, looking through a pair of binoculars, watches them pull on their suits and try to will themselves over the gunwale. First, one of them puts a leg over the rail, then another does, and finally all three of them splash into the water. It takes four or five minutes for them to work up the nerve. Leonard has a bag in one hand, and as he goes over he loses his grip and leaves it on deck. It’s full of his personal belongings. He claws his way down the length of the hull and finally punches himself in the head when he realizes he’s lost it for good. Moore takes this in, wondering if Leonard is going to be a problem in the water.
Moore sheds his hood and gloves because the waters so warm and pulls his mask back down over his face. This is it; if they can’t do it now, they can’t do it at all. Hessel puts the Satori at his six o’clock by lining them up in a little rearview mirror and comes down into a low hover. It’s delicate flying. He finally gives Moore the go-ahead, and Moore breathes in deep and pushes off. “They dropped Moore and he just skimmed over the top of the water, flying towards us,” says Stimpson. “When he gets there he says, ‘Hi, I’m Dave Moore your rescue swimmer, how are you?’ And Sue says, ‘Fine, how are you?’ It was very cordial. Then he asks who’s going first, and Sue says, ‘I will.’ And he grabbed her by the back of the survival suit and skimmed back across the water.”
Moore loads Bylander into the rescue basket, and twenty seconds later she’s in the helicopter. Jump to recovery takes five minutes (avionicsman Ayres is writing everything down in the hoist log). The next recovery, Stimpson’s, takes two minutes, and Leonard’s takes three. Leonard is so despondent that he’s deadweight in the water, Moore has to wrestle him into the basket and push his legs in after him. Moore’s the last one up, stepping back into the aircraft at 2:29. They’ve been on-scene barely two hours.[1]
Moore starts stripping off his gear, and he’s got
his wetsuit halfway off when he realizes the helicopter isn’t going anywhere. It’s hovering off the Tamaroa’s port quarter. He puts his flight helmet on and hears the Tamaroa talking to Hessel, telling him to stand by because their Avon crew still needs to be recovered. Oh, Jesus, he thinks. Moore pulls his gear back on and takes up his position at the jump door. Hessel has decided on another in-the-water rescue, and Moore watches the three Coast Guardsmen grab hands and reluctantly abandon ship. Even from a distance they look nervous. Hessel comes in low and puts them at his six o’clock again, barely able to find such a small target in his rearview mirror. Moore gets the nod and jumps for the third time; he’s got the drill down now and the entire rescue takes ten minutes. Each Coast Guardsman that makes it into the aircraft gives Stimpson a thumbs-up. Moore comes up last—“via bare hook,” as the report reads—and Vriesman pulls him in through the door. The H-3 banks, drops her nose, and starts for home.
“When I got up into the helicopter I remember everyone looking in my and Sue’s faces to make sure we were okay,” says Stimpson. “I remember the intensity, it really struck me. These guys were so pumped up, but they were also human—real humanity. They’d take us by the shoulders and look us in the eyes and say, ‘I’m so glad you’re alive, we were with you last night, we prayed for you. We were worried about you.’ When you’re on the rescuing side you’re very aware of life and death, and when you’re on the rescued side, you just have a sort of numb awareness. At some point I stopped seeing the risk clearly, and it just became an amalgam of experience and observation.”
Stimpson has been awake for forty-eight hours now, much of it above deck. She’s starting to get delirious. She slumps into a web seat in the back of the helicopter and looks out at the ocean that almost swallowed her up. “I saw the most amazing things; I saw Egypt and I knew it was Egypt,” she says. “And I saw these clay animals, they were over green pastures like the Garden of Eden. I could see these clay animals and also gorgeous live animals munching on grass. And I kept seeing cities that I recognized as being from the Middle East.”
While Stimpson drifts in and out of hallucinations, the H-3 pounds home through a seventy-knot headwind. It takes an hour and forty minutes to get back to base. Three miles off Martha’s Vineyard the crew look down and see another Coast Guard helicopter settling onto a desolate scrap of land called Noman’s Island. A Florida longliner named the Michelle Lane had run aground with a load of swordfish, and her crew had spent the night under an overturned life raft on the beach. An H-3 was dispatched from Air Station Cape Cod to take them off, and Hessel happens to fly by as they’re landing.
Hessel touches down at 4:40 at Air Station Cape Cod, and the other H-3 comes in a few minutes later. (While landing at Noman’s, as it turned out, the rotor wash flipped the raft over and knocked one of the fishermen unconscious. He was taken off in a Stokes litter.) It’s almost dark; rain flashes down diagonally through the airfield floodlights and scrub pine stretches away darkly for miles in every direction. The six survivors are ushered past the television cameras and led into changing rooms upstairs. Stimpson and Bylander pull off their survival suits, and Bylander curls up on a couch while Stimpson goes back downstairs. The simple fact of being alive has her so wired she can hardly sit still. The Coast Guardsmen are gathered with the reporters in a small television room, and Stimpson wanders in and finds Leonard sitting miserably on the floor, back to the wall. He’s not saying a word.
He didn’t want to leave the boat, Stimpson explains to a local reporter. It was his home, and everything he owned was on it.
Dave Coolidge, the Falcon pilot that flew the previous night, walks up to Stimpson and shakes her hand. Camera bulbs flash. Boy, are we glad to see you two, he says. It was a long night, I was afraid you weren’t going to make it. Stimpson says graciously, When we heard you on the radio we said, Yes, we’re going to make it. We’re not just going to perish out here without anyone knowing.
The reporters gradually drift off, and Leonard retires to an upstairs room. Stimpson stays and answers questions for the rescue crew, who are very interested in the relationship between Leonard and the two women. His reactions weren’t quite what we expected, one of the Guardsmen admits. Stimpson explains that she and Bylander don’t know Leonard very well, they met him through their boss.
Sue and I had been working several months without a break, she says. This trip was going to be our vacation.
While they’re talking, the phone rings. One of the Falcon pilots goes to answer it. What time was that? the pilot says, and everyone in the room stops talking. How many were they? What location?
Without a word the Coast Guardsmen get up and leave, and a minute later Stimpson hears toilets flushing. When they come back, one of them asks the Falcon pilot where they went down.
South of Montauk, he says.
The Guardsmen zip up their flight suits and file out the door. A rescue helicopter has just ditched fifty miles offshore and now five National Guardsmen are in the water, swimming.
INTO THE ABYSS
The Lord bowed the heavens and came down, thick darkness under his feet. The channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare.
—SAMUEL 22
“I DIDN’T know there was a problem, I just knew the Andrea Gail was supposed to be in any day,” says Chris Cotter, Bobby’s Shatford’s girlfriend. “I went to bed and just before dawn I had this dream. I’m on the boat and it’s real grey and ugly out and it’s rollin’ and rockin’ and I’m screaming, BOBBY! BOBBY! There’s no answer so I walk around the boat and go down into the fishhole and start digging. There’s all this slime and weeds and slimy shit and I’m hysterical and crazy and screaming for Bobby and finally I get down and there’s one of his arms. I find that and grab him and I know he’s gone. And then the wake-up comes.”
It’s the morning of October 30th; there’s been no word from the Andrea Gail in over thirty-six hours. The storm is so tightly packed that few people in Gloucester—only a few hundred miles from the storm’s center—have any idea what’s out there. Chris lies in bed for a while, trying to shake off the dream, and finally gets up and shuffles into the kitchen. Her apartment looks out across Ipswich Bay, and Christine can see the water, itself cold and grey as granite, piling up against the granite shores of Cape Ann. The air is warm but an ill wind is backing around the compass, and Chris sits down at her kitchen table to watch it come. No one has said anything about a storm, there was nothing about it on the news. Chris smokes one cigarette after another, watching the weather come in off the sea, and she’s still there when Susan Brown knocks on the door.
Susan is Bob Brown’s wife. She issues the paychecks for the Seagale Corporation, as Brown’s company is called, and the week before she’d given Christine the wrong check by mistake. She’d given her Murph’s check, which was larger than Bobby Shatford’s, and now she’s come back to rectify the mistake. Chris invites her in and immediately senses that something is wrong. Susan seems uncomfortable, glancing around and refusing to look Chris in the eye.
Listen, Chris, Susan says finally, I’ve got some bad news. I’m not sure how to say this. We don’t seem to be able to raise the Andrea Gail.
Chris sits there, stunned. She’s still in the dream—still in the dark slimy stink of the fishhole—and the news just confirms what she already knows: He’s dead. Bobby Shatford is dead.
Susan tells her they’re still trying to get through and that the boat probably just lost her antennas, but Chris knows better; in her gut she knows it’s wrong. As soon as Susan leaves, Chris calls Mary Anne Shatford, Bobby’s sister. Mary Anne tells her it’s true, they can’t raise Bobbys boat, and Chris drives down to the Nest and rushes in through the big heavy door. It’s only ten in the morning but already people are standing around with beers in their hands, red-eyed and shocked. Ethel is there, and Bobby’s other sister, Susan, and his brother, Brian, and Preston, and dozens of fishermen. Nothing’s sure yet—the boat could still be
afloat, or the crew could be in a life raft or drunk in some Newfoundland bar—but people are quietly assuming the worst.
Chris starts drinking immediately. “People didn’t want to give me the details because I was totally out of my mind,” she says. “Everybody was drunk ’cause that’s what we do, but the crisis made it even worse, just drinkin’ and drinkin’ and cryin’ and drinkin’, we just couldn’t conceive that they were gone. It was in the paper and on the television and this is my love, my friend, my man, my drinking partner, and it just couldn’t be. I had pictures of what happened, images: Bobby and Sully and Murph just bug-eyed, knowing this is the final moment, looking at each other and this jug of booze goin’ around real fast because they’re tryin’ to numb themselves out, and then Bobby goes flyin’ and Sully goes under. But what was the final moment? What was the final, final thing?”
The only person not at the Crow’s Nest is Bob Brown. As owner of the boat he may well not feel welcome there, but he’s also got work to do—he’s got a boat to find. There’s a single sideband in his upstairs bedroom, and he’s been calling on 2182 since early yesterday for both his boats. Neither Billy Tyne nor Linda Greenlaw will come in. Oh boy, he thinks. At nine-thirty, after trying a few more times, Brown drives twenty miles south along Route 128 through the grey rocky uplands of the North Shore. He parks at the Bang’s Grant Inn in Danvers and walks into the conference room for the beginning of a two-day New England Fisheries Management Council meeting. The wind is moving heavily through the treetops now, piling dead leaves up against a chainlink fence and spitting rain down from a steel sky. It’s not a storm yet, but it’s getting there.
The Perfect Storm Page 17