Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

T

  he surf station is really where you’ll find the heart of the Coast Guard,” thirty-one-year-old Marine-turned-Coastie Jim Summers tells me, recounting some of the more adventuresome rescues that have gone on here.

  In lieu of high drama I get to join Jim, Aaron Harris, Scott Mackey, Daniel Stanley, and a reluctant Sierra for a patrol around the bay in one of the 47s.

  We head out around the Golden Gate Bridge. Its cement pier bunkers are home to dozens of lounging cormorants.

  “We had a drunk sailboater run into the bridge the other day,” Aaron notes. A year later it will be an 901-foot container ship hitting the Bay Bridge.

  There are dozens of windsurfers and kite-surfers slicing through the bay by the Presidio. “When the wind dies they get pulled out through the Gate,” Jim explains. “One day we had fourteen on the boat at one time with all their gear. We looked like some kind of kite sale.”

  A small wooden trawler passes by on its way to fish. We watch some sailboats heel over in the winds as a massive Evergreen container ship heads out to sea. We pass an old Liberty ship and submarine permanently docked by the maritime museum. The waterfront is an aquatic ballet, alive with boats and gulls and diving pelicans going after herring. We check out Pier 39 and the sea lions hauled up on the old marina floats barking contentedly as the tourists watch them from dockside and wave to us. Sierra has her front paws up on the console, looking interested.

  “Hey, Sierra. You want your own seal? You want your own pet?” Jim asks.

  “You love her,” Daniel teases.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, you don’t hate her.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Coming up,” Aaron warns as he turns out of the inlet, gunning the boat to over twenty knots, taking us out past Alcatraz.

  “Hang on, dog. Here we go.”

  When we get back to the station we find that the operations center by the front door has become very focused. Sector has received a vessel assist request. The crew is working their radar screens and navigation charts.

  “Call Sector, see if we’re required to launch.”

  “Sector says they have them.”

  “Dude, Sector has its head up its ass as usual.”

  “There’s a sailboat off Montara,” the watch officer explains. “All we have is it’s a 35-footer. No information except it’s nasty out there. Eleven-foot seas at Point Montara, 16.1 at the [sea] buoy.”

  Jim gets on a cell phone while Aaron begins working the landline.

  “Guy is requesting [a commercial] vessel assist, not the Coast Guard, but they’ll probably decline. We’ll know in the next five minutes,” he reports.

  “The harbormaster at Half Moon Bay says there’s a big groundswell, north winds ten to fifteen knots, but if they can sail it into the harbor they could go out and get him,” the watch stander notes after another radio check.

  Sector is back on the frequency. “…guy said it would be about twenty-one hundred dollars to come out and tow him.” A few minutes pass. “He’s accepted the $2,100 offer. Sector will monitor.”

  “Why wouldn’t he just ask for your help for free?” I wonder.

  “Maybe they’re sketchy,” Aaron speculates. “Maybe they have something on board and don’t want us out there.”

  “I’m glad not to do it.” Jim smiles as their workaday tension fades, quick as a passing squall. “It would be a long haul, three hours to get there and a ten-hour tow. We’d also have to rig a drogue [small trailing sea anchor] so he wouldn’t sail down on us.”

  Aaron, who is working to become a surfman, sports a tattoo of a tall ship with the name of his twenty-month-old daughter, Bernice Jean, scripted below it. The Coast Guard has banned tattoos covering more than 25 percent of your exposed skin, as well as any between your wrists and fingertips, on your neck, or on your face. So Aaron plans to do a tat of an octopus on his back with one tentacle reaching over his shoulder and another around his belly.

  S

  ix months later, I’ve moved back to the Bay Area and begun hanging out at Station Golden Gate. Sierra, the station mascot, has grown tall and lanky and more water-friendly, as a Lab should be. I also get to meet Wallace’s owner, Petty Officer First Class Jessica Shafer. Jessica is only the second of three women to qualify as a surfman (to date). She’s also just recovered a mentally disturbed bridge jumper who survived the 220-foot drop, the first survivor in three years.

  I get under way with Surfman Jason Gale, who’s training up a new coxswain, practicing side tows with two 47s just off Horseshoe Cove below the fog-shrouded bridge.

  He tells me about his favorite SAR case, which reminds me of Bernie Webber and his famous radio protocol.

  “It was during the millennium fireworks on the bay [December 31, 1999]. There were three barges loaded with fireworks and tens of thousands of people lining the San Francisco waterfront and also just tons of sailboats all rafted up and Coast Guard boats fifty feet apart maintaining this thousand-yard safety perimeter around the barges. I’m in this RIB with three guys, and the fireworks go off, and halfway through the show all you can see is smoke and ash and burning stuff raining down, and I see there’s a small boat getting too close to the security zone. I realize everyone, including our guys, is looking up at the fireworks, and I look again and see that boat disappear into the smoke. So I call the patrol commander, and he says, ‘Roger,’ and calls the boat over in that area, and they say they didn’t see anything. I figure no one in their right mind is going to go into that smoke unless they drifted in there, like if their engine failed, but the commander’s not interested, he tells me to mind my own helm. So I call the 41-footer that’s closest by, and he [the commander] comes back on the radio, only now he’s annoyed. ‘I told you to leave it alone.’ Only my crew is like, ‘We got to go get those people.’ So my engineer reaches over and starts hitting the security button on the radio that turns the transmission to static unless you have a descrambler at the other end. Now the patrol commander is saying, ‘I have you broken and unreadable,’ and I answer, ‘Roger, I’m responding,’ like I got the go-ahead.

  “So we head over to where we saw this boat go in, and there’s even more smoke and burning debris. We just have this crappy little radar and can’t see or hear anything, but on the radar we see three big blips, which are the barges, and a little blip. So I ask the crew if they’re OK with it, and we pull our float coats over our heads and head into this thick acrid smoke. Soon we start hearing screaming, and we come alongside this small motorboat maybe fifteen feet long. We see this woman with her life vest smoking, and there’s smoke coming off the boat seats and sides, and she’s got two children under this beach towel she’s thrown over them, and they’re screaming and it’s smoldering, and there’s a guy leaning over, trying to crank the outboard, and his vest is smoking and he’s cursing. So we throw a bowline and a towing line on them for a side tow, and I gunned it out of there.

  “We couldn’t see a thing, so I went where I thought it would be safe, and later realized we went right between two of the barges but missed their cables, and while we’d started on the Alcatraz side somehow we came out on the San Francisco waterfront.

  “I realize the fireworks have stopped, and the only sound is these two screaming girls who are maybe five to ten years old. It turns out the patrol commander has stopped the show and explained to people what’s happening. As we emerge from out of the smoke, the girls stop screaming and peek out from under their blanket, and here are these thousands of strangers staring back at us and this moment of silence and then this huge uproar as everyone starts cheering and clapping, the whole crowd. It was goose-bump city, I tell you. Then all these other Coast Guard boats converge on us and take them [the rescued family] away.

  “Of course, I didn’t get an award for that. I just got chewed out. The patrol commander started screaming, ‘Your ass is mine!’ and my crew’s saying, ‘Don’t give him your name,’ which is ridiculous because he could read our boat number. He t
ried to bring charges against me, but my captain said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ so I didn’t.”

  T

  he winter of ’07–’08 sees California battered by a series of gnarly Pacific storms. On December 4, “Black Tuesday,” well-known big-wave surfer Peter Davi drowns at Ghost Trees, a famous surf spot in Monterey, and two crab fishermen are lost when their boat breaks up in thirty-foot waves at Pillar Point by Half Moon Bay. By the time one of the station surfboats gets on scene, all they can find is chunks of wood and a floating survival suit.

  In January 2008, Northern California is hit by a larger winter storm. I call the station from back east but am told Chief Morgan’s out on one of the boats. By the time I get home two days later, the nearby Richmond Bridge has reopened after a semi truck flipped, the downed trees are being removed, the floods have receded, and power has been restored to 2.5 million people. There’d been twenty-five- to thirty-foot seas outside the Gate, Chief Morgan tells me. “We were in Richardson Bay with anchor-out boats drifting around and grounding in seventy-knot winds. We got a woman off one boat. Another boat took out a dock. Two sank. Three or four went aground.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Don’t worry. There’ll be more storms this winter,” he promises.

  A month later, another powerful storm front is heading toward the bay. I get to the station on Saturday, but the storm has stalled offshore. I return Sunday, but they’ve called off surf training because the seas are now over twenty-five feet at Ocean Beach and bigger to the south with wind gusts at sixty knots, well above their training limits. Kevin is back in Richardson Bay, where another sailboat is dragging anchor and a cabin cruiser has sunk at its mooring. I listen as the com center coordinates between his 47 and a 25-foot Marin sheriff’s boat (“Rescue One”) that has a shallower draft and can get in closer to where the sailboat has gone aground by Blackie’s Pasture in Tiburon. They try hailing it just to make sure no one is aboard.

  Then a call comes in that a surfer’s in trouble off Pacifica (south of San Francisco). The SAR alarm goes off, and a crew including Aaron Harris, Surfman Jessica Shafer, and Surfman Greg Babst, a big slab of a guy with a shaved head, scrambles around the cove road to the boathouse, zipping up drysuits and strapping down helmets. They won’t let me ride along with the waves at thirty feet. So, a little aggrieved and disappointed, I watch them take off from the seawall and then return to the station to follow the action on the com center radios. Kevin’s 47 returns to the pier and immediately takes off again to pair up with the first boat that’s gotten under way.

  They head offshore rather than try to cut across by Ocean Beach and get crunched in its giant shorebreak. Going around the San Francisco peninsula that way means it will take them about an hour to get on scene. Meanwhile a helicopter from Air Station San Francisco has taken off and is heading south as coordinates are being read to everyone on the radio. A couple of Coasties have pulled out a navigational chart in the com center and are now using a metal compass to figure out where the surfer might be located.

  The radio reports the fire department and police have a visual on the subject trapped in the surf.

  Shafer and Babst get on the radio and, over the sound of breaking waves, complain the coordinates they were just given are north of the Golden Gate (Pacifica is south). “Be advised there are two swells out here both breaking,” they warn Kevin’s boat.

  “We’ll be there in a few minutes,” he responds.

  A radio update on the surfer says he’s a little south of Rockaway Beach by the big rocks.

  “Roger, we’ll be on scene in four minutes,” the helicopter responds.

  Meanwhile the two 47s are climbing thirty-foot groundswells with twelve-foot cross-waves making for a giant washing-machine effect.

  A few minutes later, the Dolphin pilot is back on the radio.

  “He’s paddle surfing. He’s doing fine. We’re gonna make another pass, but he’s in there with a purpose for surfing.”

  “Can you confirm that?” the sector SAR controller wants to know.

  “Surfer just gave us the universal A-OK sign. He’s doing fine,” the pilot responds.

  “Coast Guard helicopter, abort.”

  “47 hanging out by buoy two till we get stand-down from Sector,” Greg Babst radios.

  “3-4, you may stand down from the case,” Sector responds.

  The two surfboats head back in.

  A short time later, their crews are walking down the hallway soaking wet and buzzing with adrenaline.

  “How was it?” I ask Greg grudgingly.

  “Shitty! It’s OK when someone’s actually in trouble, but it bugs me when we get into it like that and it turns out to be nothing.

  “In twenty-five- to thirty-foot steep seas like that, it’s all about throttle management,” he goes on to explain as we sit down in the galley. “You’re constantly thrusting and backing off till you’re squatting on the wave. You get into the wave and let it break underneath you. You don’t let the engine bog down climbing up it, and you don’t surf down it either. It’s a controlled drop, but that’s the easy part. It’s when it’s chasing you from behind that’s harder. You look at the shoulder of the wave and ride over the saddles [shoulders] and try to never take a break[ing wave].”

  “You took some breaks, though.”

  “We took some waves breaking over us.”

  “A couple broke on us,” Jessica points out.

  One of the crew, Jerry Eaton, is a rangy sixty-two-year-old member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, one of the few volunteers qualified to crew on a 47-foot surfboat. “They’ve sort of adopted me like a mascot,” he explains. “They’ve got Sierra, Wallace, and me.”

  The boat crews hold a briefing in the training room, where they’re joined by the dogs.

  “With these two swell patterns, this is already nastier than Black Tuesday,” Kevin points out, going up to the whiteboard to write out a GYR risk assessment. He’s changed into his standard khaki shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops. The others are still wearing their comfy black liner suits that go underneath their red Mustangs.

  They agree on a 3 for Crew Selection as he writes down the numbers. A 7 for Planning, a 3 for Supervision. Crew Fitness they give a 5 because people are getting tired three days into it. Environment is a 10, Mission Complexity a 9, Equipment a 2. It adds up to 39, or high amber. Generally you don’t want to go over a 25, or green, a low-risk evolution.

  “It’s definite SAR degradation. We’ll need waivers to get under way,” Kevin says. “Pipe all hands.”

  The rest of the station crew joins them. “The weather out there is exceeding the limits of the 47, so we’ll not be the first resource sent out if something happens,” he tells them. “They’ll send the helos or the cutters. Still, I want everyone to chill, take it easy, and rest up in case we are called out again.”

  “Luckily none of the fishermen, none of the commercial guys are going out in this,” Aaron notes.

  “Surfers are the only real idiots who’ll go out in this kind of shit,” Greg claims.

  “And us,” Kevin points out.

  “Yeah, and us.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Aviators

  “There’s a fine line between a Distinguished Flying Cross and a court-martial.”

  —HH-60 PILOT DAN MOLTHEN, RECALLING HOW HIS CREW SQUEEZED

  A RECORD-BREAKING TWENTY-SIX SURVIVORS FROM A SINKING SHIP

  INTO THEIR HELICOPTER

  So Others May Live

  —MOTTO OF THE COAST GUARD RESCUE SWIMMERS

  Bob Watson is a compact guy with silver-blond hair and eyes the color of newly mined mercury. Now retired from the Coast Guard, he’s a legend among fellow swimmers.

  Over breakfast in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, I ask him about his most memorable rescue. Not surprisingly, he recalls one in which he almost died.

  “We got the call about 8:00 P.M. A young boy was hanging by his arms in a waterfall a thousand feet up Horsetail Falls [in
Whittier, Alaska]. I grabbed a body bag ’cause we were forty minutes away and I’m thinking, ‘Who can hang on for forty-five minutes?’

  “We start brainstorming on the way out—we had these old Navy harnesses that pull around your chest, and I grabbed a litter and hung that on the side of me with the cable attached to it. We get up around thirteen hundred feet and see him there. He’s facedown in this wash by the falls. Turns out the kid is also epileptic and has no meds.

  “Ethan Curry was the flight mechanic. He lowered me down and kind of swung me on the cable, swung me out in an arc till I was able to grab on to some alder branches that were growing out from the side of the mountain. With the basket hooked onto me, I began working my way over to the kid. He’s [sprawled] facedown hanging next to Horsetail Falls in gravel and steep scree [broken rock], and the helicopter’s hovering as I get closer. I’m grabbing onto branches ’cause it’s straight up and down. Then there’s this washed-out area between him and me. So I figure I’ll kick out on the cable and swing over, and as I’m getting ready to jump, the basket disconnects and sails off into space with the cable. An alder branch must have unclipped the safety hook. So now I’m hanging on to this mountain on an eighty-degree angle. I’m telling the kid, ‘It’s OK, we’re going to get you out of here,’ like this is all part of how we do things.

  “Soon the helicopter is dropping the litter from above, but they’re in front of us and can’t see the litter, so they’re kind of fishing blind. [After a while] I see the basket is bouncing around on the kid’s thighs and legs, so I say ‘Get in the basket,’ and he turned and spun around and grabbed it. He got his upper body into it as it pulled out into space, and I see where he then flips into the basket. Though they couldn’t see us, the helo knew he’d gotten in the basket but didn’t want to bring him up till I was also recovered, because a basket can take two people. I remember his eyes were just locked on mine. He didn’t want to look down.