Deadliest Sea (22 page)

The 60 Jayhawk had been hovering over the
Warrior
for less than five minutes when, with the consensus of his crew, McLaughlin made the second tough call of the night: Lowering the fishermen to the
Warrior
was just too dangerous.

They would have to offload the men to the cutter
Munro
instead.

A
s the giant
Munro
lurched through the waves, the tiny 65 Dolphin helicopter clung to the flight deck on the ship’s stern. The helo resembled an unwieldy piece of furniture cinched to the roof of a car on a potholed road. It was perfectly secure—but still looked precarious.

Pilots TJ Schmitz and Greg Gedemer zipped up their orange dry suits and pulled on their visored helmets. Bracing against 35-knot winds, they ran from the hangar out to the aircraft. The flight deck netting whipped violently in the wind as the men walked around the helicopter, making sure the aircraft hadn’t built up too much excess ice. Then the pilots climbed into the cockpit and started her up as rescue swimmer Abe Heller and flight mechanic Al Musgrave buckled up in back.

“The limit light is on,” Gedemer told Schmitz. “It’s flashing on and off.”

An indicator on the helo’s instrument panel warned that the conditions outside the aircraft were out of limits for takeoff.

“Yeah, that’s because the blades are flopping all over the place,” Schmitz said.

The wind across the
Munro
’s flight deck was so strong that the helicopter’s computers had determined the aircraft was already at limits. They’d have to do a high-wind start.

The
Munro
had turned to secure the best launch course. In the engine room, the ship’s engineers had stopped the vessel’s high-speed turbines and were back on the diesel engines. They slowed the ship to about 10 knots and pointed the bow straight into the swells. Once the pilots were in the helicopter and hooked up to the ICS, they could communicate with Erin Lopez and the crew in Combat, who were in direct communication with the engine room. Up on the bridge, Captain Craig Lloyd was also looped in.

When their landing signal officer (LSO) gave the okay, four tie-down crew ran out onto the flight deck, hunched down against the powerful blow of the 65’s rotors, and uncinched the wide canvas straps that held the helicopter tight to the deck. Bundled up in bulky, insulated blue jumpsuits, matching helmets, and vest-style PFDs, the tie-down crew was easy to distinguish from the aircrew. The
Munro
’s officers had taken to calling them the “blueberries.” The captain and crew could watch the action on a series of black-and-white video screens on the bridge. The sequence looked like a well-choreographed dance, the 65 helicopter the prima ballerina among a troupe of little scurrying mice.

Everyone knew that the conditions were right on the edge of limits. Or, more accurately, every few minutes, there was a minute or so that was in limits. If this had been a training exercise, it’d have been canceled. But in life-or-death situations, the
call is up to the commanding officer, and Captain Lloyd trusted his pilots. From the moment Schmitz arrived in Combat and heard the details of the case, he’d felt confident they would be able to launch. Now Schmitz was in the right seat with Gedemer at his left. He studied the incoming swells through his night vision goggles. They were close to twenty-footers, but rolling in at a pretty steady pace.

Schmitz had already briefed the crew on the takeoff conditions: “This is the deal,” he told them. “We’re going to overtorque the airframe when we take off. As long as we don’t pull more than eleven point eight, we can continue on in the mission.”

Coast Guard regulations lay out stricter operating standards at night than for daytime flights. In the dark, anything over 4-degree pitch, 5-degree roll is considered out of limits. But when a mission involves an opportunity to save a life, the men are authorized to go beyond those limits—even at the risk of damaging the aircraft. “Warranted effort,” the regulations call it.

Back in Combat, Schmitz had briefed Captain Lloyd on his plan. He would load on 1,750 pounds of fuel, several hundred pounds more than normal. Though the 65 has a powerful engine, its gearbox is relatively weak, which means that the weight of a full load of fuel makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the helo to maintain a stable hover—a more power-consuming maneuver than forward flight. In any case, they’d most likely burn off a good quarter of their fuel load just to reach the scene of the sinking. Schmitz told Captain Lloyd that he was expecting to overtorque, or stress, the main rotorhead on takeoff, but wouldn’t push it so far that he’d sacrifice the ability to keep flying. “In other words, I’m gonna break it, but I’m not gonna break it so bad I have to land right away,” the pilot had told the captain.

Now Schmitz watched the waves. A set of big swells was rolling in perpendicular to the cutter’s bow. Under normal conditions, a pilot would launch at a lull between waves, waiting for the calmest moment to lift from the deck. Not tonight.

“6566, ready to take off,” the crew heard up on the bridge.

Schmitz waited until the next wave pitched the bow into the air, and just as it began the sharp fall that would buck up the stern, Schmitz pulled the 9,000-pound bird off the deck, using the momentum of the lurching ship to catapult the helo into the air.

Gedemer called out the torque as Schmitz slid the aircraft to the ship’s left side. The helo’s official torque limit at takeoff is 10.3; Gedemer’s highest number was 9.9. They were golden—they hadn’t overtorqued after all.

Schmitz’s unconventional maneuver had worked.

It was just a couple minutes before 6:00
A.M
. as the crew marked the
Munro
’s position and set off toward the last known coordinates of the
Alaska Ranger
.

J
IM
M
ADRUGA HAD TO PEE—BAD
. He’d been in the water for what seemed to him like three or four hours. What else could he do? When he finally let go, the warm stream felt so good. He was cold, but, except for the urine inside his Gumby suit, dry.

His suit fit, the seals had held, and he felt alert. He was clearly doing better than the fisherman who had been floating with him for the past couple hours. The guy was out of his mind with fear. Jim had tried to calm him down, but hadn’t been able to help much. Every time they heard an aircraft overhead, the guy started screaming.

“Save your strength,” Jim told the younger man. “They’ll be coming for us, but they have to get the other people first.”

Jim was the
Ranger
’s second assistant engineer. He was fifty-nine years old, and like many other men of his generation, he was a former San Diego tuna fishermen who had made a second fishing career for himself up north. He’d headed straight to the wheelhouse after being woken up that morning. His chief, Dan Cook, was up there and had already concluded that the ship wasn’t salvageable.

“Abandon ship” was all Dan had said to him.

Jim and Dan went way back. They’d both started fishing in Alaska more than a decade before. For a few years, both men worked for Trident, one of the biggest fishing companies in Alaska. One year, they’d sailed one of Trident’s old ships to India to be scrapped. It was a skeleton crew on an adventure, and Jim and Dan got to know each other well. When they reached India, they drove the boat right up onto the beach at full steam. The carcasses of other ships littered the sandy expanse, and they watched as the Indian scrap crew went at it. They looked so poor, those skinny little guys wear only sandals and skirts to crawl around on a heap of rusty metal like that.

A few years later, both men found themselves working for the same company again. Dan’s brother Ed had been with FCA for a few years, as had David Silveira, a cousin of Jim’s from San Diego. That’s the way it worked in fishing—the same guys again and again over the years.

A handful of men had been in the wheelhouse when the last call was made to the Coast Guard, and then everyone got out. By that time, the water was almost to the wheelhouse door. Jim hadn’t seen where everyone else entered the water. He was alone with Dan. The chief engineer had been in poor health. They were both nudging sixty-years-old, but to Jim, Dan seemed like he could be a decade older.

Dan wanted to wait until the very last moment to get off
the ship. Jim figured his friend was thinking that if they waited longer, they wouldn’t be in the water as long before help arrived. He wanted to stay to make sure Dan got off safely.

The two men waited until there was literally no choice. Then they jumped off the boat together.

“Dan, try to stay with me!” Jim yelled. The wind seemed to be blowing 50 knots and the waves were at least twenty feet, and breaking. Jim watched helplessly as Dan was pushed away by the waves.

After a few minutes, Jim drifted up next to some fishing net and buoys—debris from the ship’s deck. He grabbed on. He’d been floating there for about half an hour before he saw Byron, one of the new kids, a Hispanic guy who’d been on the boat just a few days. Jim hadn’t talked to him too much, but he’d sat next to him at lunch a few days before. He remembered Byron’s name. Jim also remembered that this was his first time on a fishing boat.

The engineer grabbed the younger man and pulled him into the net. They hadn’t been in the water that long, but already the kid seemed to be going into shock. “What’s the matter, Byron?” Jim asked.

“I’m so cold,” Byron cried. “I’m so cold.”

Jim pulled Byron closer and put his arm around him. He tried to keep him talking to get his mind off things. The younger man spoke a little about his family, a wife and two young daughters back in California. But mostly he just kept mumbling about how cold he was, and about all the water that had filled his Gumby suit.

Jim just held on to him, and they stayed with the net. It gave them a little buoyancy, and Jim figured it might be easier to see from the air.

“Help me! Help me!” In the distance, Jim thought he heard Dan Cook yelling. At least an hour had passed since they’d aban
doned ship and Jim could barely make out his friend’s screams over the wind. He scanned the waves. For a moment, he thought he saw Dan floating on his back about fifty feet away. But there was no way he could get to him. Before long, Dan had drifted out of sight again.

Eventually, Jim saw what looked like a Coast Guard plane overhead. Byron must have seen it too because he began to yell.

“Just save your breath, man,” Jim told him. “They can’t hear you.”

Jim’s strobe light was out. It had worked on the ship, but after he’d been in the water for a while, he noticed it had gone dark. Byron’s was working fine, though, so Jim knew they were visible.

Was there a boat in the distance? Jim could see a bright light right on the horizon. At first it seemed to be getting closer, but then it stopped. Maybe they’re getting people out of the water, Jim thought.

A while later he saw a helicopter in the distance.

Again Byron started yelling, but Jim pleaded with him.

“They know we’re here,” he said. “They will come eventually.”

A
IRCRAFT COMMANDER
TJ S
CHMITZ
pulled the 65 Dolphin up to about five hundred feet and started south toward the last known coordinates of the
Alaska Ranger
. Even with the tailwind, the seventy-mile journey would take them about forty-five minutes. They’d heard some chatter over the radio from the Coast Guard rescuers already on scene. It sounded like the larger aircraft was at capacity, and had left quite a few people behind in the water.

Schmitz started talking strategy. He was expecting the worst. By the time they got there, some of these people would have al
ready been in the water for close to three hours. He knew from experience that, even in survival suits, many people couldn’t make it in cold water for more than two.

Do we pick up people who might be dead? Schmitz thought. Or do we pick up people who seem most responsive? He posed the question to the rest of the crew. In Schmitz’s opinion, the best course would be to focus on the most responsive people first.

“Even though they’re not responsive, they may not be dead,” rescue swimmer Abe Heller noted from the back of the helo.

“Yeah, but we only have so much room,” Schmitz said. “Depending on how many people are in the water, you know, who do you go for first?”

When the 65 Dolphin was about fifteen miles north of the site, Gedemer spotted the larger 60 Jayhawk helicopter to their west.

He picked up the radio: “6007, this is rescue 6566.”

Brian McLaughlin told the Dolphin’s crew that there were two rafts holding survivors—and that at least a dozen or more people were still in the water.

“The survivors are getting less and less responsive,” McLaughlin reported.

Based on the inflection in McLaughlin’s voice, Schmitz anticipated a grim scene. He knew their tiny helicopter couldn’t possibly get even half of the people out there in one load.

“Okay, we’re going to need to do this as fast as we can,” Schmitz told the rest of the men.

Schmitz had spent his previous four-year tour in the Great Lakes, where he had plenty of experience with hypothermic victims. The rescue crews had often used a procedure called the “hypothermic double lift.” In the later stages of hypothermia, a person’s blood collects near the heart and vital organs. If the
victim is suddenly lifted upright from the water, there’s a risk that this blood will rush from the torso into the legs, causing heart failure. Because of that risk, professional rescuers are taught to keep hypothermic victims in a horizontal position. Coast Guard helicopter rescuers are trained to use a double-harness system. The regular quick strop is fastened around the victim’s knees, while a second strop—a larger, older model, sometimes called the “horse collar”—is secured under their armpits, then tightened around their chest. Ideally, the hypothermic victim will be raised with knees and chest at about the same level, like a bride being carried over the threshold.

The crews had been trained that the two-strop method was the best for someone with hypothermia, but they knew that it was an inconvenient lift. It was time-consuming to get a victim settled securely into the two-strap setup, even in calm conditions when the survivor was alert and cooperative. With severely hypothermic survivors? In high seas? In the dark? It might eat up fifteen to twenty minutes per person.