The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

THE WORLD OF THE LIVING

ALBERT JOHNSTON, fifty miles south of the Tail on the Mary T, gets hit a few hours after the Andrea Gail but just as hard. The first sign of the storm is a massive amount of static over the VHF, and then the wind comes: thirty, forty, fifty knots, and finally it tears the anemometer off buoy #44138. The buoy is about fifty miles northwest of Johnston’s position and pegs fifty-six knots before flatlining at the bottom of the chart. Wind speeds above the interference of the wave crests are probably half again as high. The center of the low slides past Johnston late on the 18th and continues curving back around toward the coast throughout the next day. That motion spares Johnston the worst of the storm. It also, as far as he’s concerned, spares him his life.

Johnston jogs into the wind and seas until night falls and then turns around and goes with it. He doesn’t want to take the chance of running into a rogue wave in the dark and blowing his windows out. Throughout the early hours of October 29th, he surfs downwind on the backs of the huge seas, following a finger of cold Labrador Current, and when dawn breaks he turns around and fights his way northward again. He wants to gain enough sea room so that he won’t hit the Gulf Stream when he runs south again the following night. On the second day the crew fight their way onto the deck to check the fish-hold and lazarette hatches and tighten the anchor fastenings. The sun has come out, glancing dully off the green ocean, and the wind screams out of the east, setting the cables to moaning and sending long streaks of foam scudding through the air. Radio waves become so bogged down in the saturated air that the radar stops working; at one point an unidentified Japanese sword boat appears out of nowhere, searchlight prying into the gloom, and passes within a few hundred yards of the Mary T. On the steeper seas she can’t get her bow up in time and plunges straight through the wall of water. Nothing but her wheelhouse shows and then slowly, unstoppably, her bow rises back up. The two vessels pass by each other without a word or a sign, unable to communicate, unable to help each other, navigating their own courses through hell.

Except for that one expedition on deck to check the fish-hold, the crew keep to their bunks and Johnston stays bolted to the wheelhouse floor, wrestling the helm and jotting down notes in the ship log. His entries are terse, bullet descriptions of the unending chaos outside. “NE 80-100 winds came on as we passed through west side of eye,” he records on the 29th. “Seas 20–30 feet. Dangerous Storm to move E 15 kts become station drift SW & merge with Grace.” Johnston is one of the most meteorologically inclined captains of the sword fleet, and he’s been keeping a weather eye on Hurricane Grace, which has been quietly slipping up the coast. At eight AM on the 29th, Grace collides with the cold front, as predicted, and goes reeling back out to sea. She’s moving extremely fast and packing eighty-knot winds and thirty-foot seas. She’s a player now, an important—if dying—element in the atmospheric machinery assembling itself south of Sable. Grace crosses the 40th parallel that afternoon, and at eight PM on October 29th, Hurricane Grace runs into the Sable Island storm.

The effect is instantaneous. Tropical air is a sort of meteorological accelerant that can blow another storm system through the roof, and within hours of encountering Hurricane Grace, the pressure gradient around the storm forms the equivalent of a cliff. Weather charts plot barometric pressure the way topographical maps plot elevation, and in both cases, the closer together the lines are, the steeper the change. Weather charts of the Grand Banks for the early hours of October 30th show isobaric lines converging in one black mass on the north side of the storm. A storm with tightly packed isobaric lines is said to have a steep pressure gradient, and the wind will rush downhill, as it were, with particular violence. In the case of the storm off Sable Island, the wind starts rushing into the low at speeds up to a hundred miles an hour. As a NOAA disaster report put it blandly a year later, “The dangerous storm previously forecast was now fact.”

The only good thing about such winter gales, as far as coastal residents are concerned, is that they tend to travel west-to-east offshore. That means their forward movement is subtracted from their windspeed: A seventy-knot wind from a storm moving away at twenty knots effectively becomes a fifty-knot wind. The opposite is also true—forward movement is added to windspeed—but that almost never happens on the East Coast. The atmospheric movement is all west-to-east in the midlatitudes, and it’s nearly impossible for a weather system to overcome that. Storms may wobble northeast or southeast for a while, but they never really buck the jet stream. It takes a freakish alignment of variables to permit that to happen, a third cog in the huge machinations of the sky.

Generally speaking, it takes a hurricane.

By October 30th, the Sable Island storm is firmly imbedded between the remnants of Hurricane Grace and the Canadian high. Like all large bodies, hurricanes have a hard time slowing down, and her counterclockwise circulation continues long after her internal structures have fallen apart. The Canadian high, in the meantime, is still spinning clockwise with dense, cold air. These two systems function like huge gears that catch the storm between their teeth and extrude it westward. This is called a retrograde; it’s an act of meteorological defiance that might happen in a major storm only every hundred years or so. As early as October 27th, NOAA’s Cray computers in Maryland were saying that the storm would retrograde back toward the coast; two days later Bob Case was in his office watching exactly that happen on GOES satellite imagery. Meteorologists see perfection in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.

As a result of this horrible alignment, the bulk of the sword fleet—way out by the Flemish Cap—is spared the brunt of the storm, while everyone closer to shore gets pummeled. The 105-foot Mr. Simon, a hundred miles west of Albert Johnston, gets her aft door blown in, her wheelhouse flooded, and her anchor fastenings torn off. The anchor starts slamming around on deck and a crewman has to go out and cut it free. The Laurie Dawn 8 loses her antennas and then takes a wave down her breather pipes that stuffs one of her engines. Farther south down the coast the situation is even worse. A bulk carrier named the Eagle finds herself in serious trouble off the Carolinas, along with a freighter named the Star Baltic, and both struggle into port badly damaged. The ninety-foot schooner Anne Khristine, built 123 years ago, sinks off the coast of Delaware and her crew has to be saved by Coast Guard helicopters. The bulk carrier Zarah, just fifty miles south of the Andrea Gail, takes ninety-foot seas over her decks that shear off the steel bolts holding her portholes down. Thirty tons of water flood the crew mess, continue into the officers’ mess, explode a steel bulkhead, tear through two more walls, flood the crew’s sleeping quarters, course down a companionway, and kill the ship’s engine. The Zarah is 550 feet long.

And the sailing vessel Satori, alone at the mouth of the Great South Channel, is starting to lose the battle to stay afloat. Karen Stimpson crouches miserably by the navigation table and listens to the Tuesday morning NOAA forecast: ONE OF THE WORST STORMS SINCE THE BLIZZARD OF ’78, ALREADY THREE DOZEN BOATS BEACHED OR SUNK AT NAUSET BEACH. SHIP REPORTS OF 63 FOOT SEAS, WHICH IS PROBABLY HIGH BUT A SIGN OF PROBLEMS UPCOMING. HEAVY SURF ADVISORY BEING ISSUED DESPITE TEMPORARY LULL IN THE WIND FIELD.

Instead of abating, as Leonard insisted, the storm just keeps getting worse; the seas are thirty feet and the winds are approaching hurricane force. The boat rolls helplessly on her beam-ends every time a wave catches her on the side. “We were taking such a hammering—real neck-snapping violence,” says Stimpson. “Things were flying, every wave was knocking us across the cabin. It was only a matter of time before the boat started to break up.” Bylander refuses to go on deck, and Leonard curls up on his bunk, sullen and silent, sneaking gulps off a whiskey bottle. Stimpson puts on every piece of clothing she has, climbs the narrow companionway, and clips herself onto the lifeline.

No matter what she does—lashing the tiller, running downwind, showing less jib—she can’t control the boat. Several times she’s snapped to the end of her tether by boarding seas. Stimpson knows that if they don’t keep their bow to the weather they’ll roll, so she decides they have no choice but to run the engine. She goes belowdeck to ask Leonard how much fuel they have, but he gives a different answer each time she asks. That’s a bad sign for both the fuel level and Leonard’s state of mind. But fuel isn’t their only problem, Leonard points out; there’s also the propeller itself. In such chaotic seas the prop keeps lifting out of the water and revving too high; eventually the bearings will burn out.

While Leonard is explaining the subtleties of prop cavitation, the first knockdown occurs. A wave catches the Satori

broadsides and puts her mast in the water; the entire crew crashes against the far wall. Canned food rockets across the galley and water starts pouring into the cabin. At first Stimpson thinks the hull has opened up—a death sentence—but the water has just burst through the main hatch. Debris and splintered glass litter the cabin, and the nav table is drenched. The single sideband is dead, and the VHF looks doubtful.

Most of Stimpson’s experience is with wooden boats; in rough weather they tend to spring their caulking and sink. Fiberglass is a lot stronger but it, too, has limits. Stimpson just doesn’t know what those limits are. There seems to be no way to keep the boat pointed into the seas, no way to minimize the beating they’re taking. Even if the VHF can transmit a mayday—and it’s impossible to know that for sure—it only has a range of several miles. They’re fifty miles out at sea. Between waves, between slammings, Stimpson shouts, I think we should prepare a survival bag! In case we have to abandon ship!

Bylander, grateful for something to do, sorts through the wreckage on the floor and stuffs tins of food, bottled water, clothes, and a wire cheese sheer into a sea bag. Sue, we don’t need the sheer, we can bite the cheese! Stimpson says, but Bylander just shakes her head. I’ve read about this and it’s the little niceties that make the difference! Ray, where are the boat cushions? While preparing their emergency bag, they get knocked over a second time. This one is even more violent than the first, and the boat is a long time in coming back up. Stimpson and Leonard pick themselves off the floor, bruised and dazed, and Bylander sticks her head out the hatch to check for damage on deck. My God, Karen! she screams. The life raft’s gone!

“I was in a corner and I covered myself with soft things,” says Stimpson, “and with a flashlight I took about ten minutes and wrote some goodbyes and stuck it in a Ziplock bag and put it in my clothing. That was the lowest point. We had no contact with anyone, it was the dark of the night—which brings its own kind of terror—and I had a sense that things were going to get worse. But it’s a strange thing. There was no sentiment there, no time for fear. To me, fear is two AM, walking down a city street and someone’s following me—that to me is a terror beyond words. What was happening was not a terror beyond words. It was a grim sense of reality, a scrambling to figure out what to do next, a determination to stay alive and keep other people alive, and an awareness of the dark noisy slamming of the boat. But it wasn’t a terror beyond words. I just had an overwhelming sense of knowing we weren’t going to make it.”

Stimpson doesn’t know it, but Bylander tapes her passport to her stomach so her body can be identified. Both women, at this point, are prepared to die. After Stimpson finishes writing her goodbyes, she tells Leonard that it’s time to issue a mayday. Mayday comes from the French venez m’aider—come help me!—and essentially means that those on board have given up all hope. It’s up to someone else to save them. Leonard is motionless on his berth. Okay, he says. Stimpson forces her way out to the cockpit and Bylander sits down at the nav table to see if she can coax the VHF back to life.

At 11:15 PM, October 29th, a freighter off Long Island picks up a woman’s terrified voice on the VHF: This is the Satori, the Satori, 39:49 north and 69:52 west, we are three people, this is a mayday. If anyone can hear us, please pass our position on to the Coast Guard. Repeat, this is a mayday, if anyone can hear us, pass our position on to the Coast Guard…

The freighter, the Gold Bond Conveyor, relays the message to Coast Guard operations in Boston, which in turn contacts the Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa in Provincetown Harbor. The Tamaroa has just come off Georges Bank, where she was conducting spot checks on the fishing fleet, and now she’s waiting out the weather inside Cape Cod’s huge flexed arm. A small Falcon jet scrambles from Air Station Cape Cod and the Tamaroa, 1,600 tons and 205 feet, weighs anchor at midnight and heads down the throat of the storm.

The crew of the Satori have no way of knowing whether the radio is working, they just have to keep repeating the mayday and hope for the best. And even if the radio is working, they still have to be within two or three miles of another vessel for the signal to be heard. That’s a lot to ask for on a night like this. Bylander, wedged behind the nav table, broadcasts their name and position intermittently for half an hour without any response at all; they’re alone out there, as far as she can tell. She keeps trying—what else is there to do?—and Stimpson goes back on deck to try to keep the Satori pointed into the seas. She’s not there long when she hears the sound of an airplane fading in and out through the roar of the storm. She looks around frantically in the darkness, and a minute later a Falcon jet, flying low under the cloud cover, shrieks overhead and raises Bylander on the VHF. “Sue was so excited she was giddy,” Stimpson says, “but I wasn’t. I remember not feeling elated or relieved so much as like, instantly, I’d rejoined the world of the living.”

The Falcon pilot circles just below cloud level and discusses what to do next over the VHF with Bylander. The Tamaroa won’t be there for another twelve hours, and they’ve got to keep the boat afloat until then, even if that means burning out the engine. They can’t afford to risk any more knockdowns. Bylander, against Leonard’s wishes, finally toggles the starter switch, and to her amazement it turns over. With the storm jib up and the prop turning away they can now get a few degrees to the weather. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to keep from getting broached by the seas.

Throughout the night the Falcon pilot flies over them, reassuring Bylander that they’re going to come out of this alive. Stimpson stays at the helm and Leonard lies on his bunk contemplating the impending loss of his boat. When the Tamaroa arrives he’ll have to abandon ship, which is an almost unthinkable act for a captain. The Satori is his home, his life, and if he allows himself to be taken off by the Coast Guard he’ll probably never see her again. Not intact, anyway. At some point that night, lying on his bunk waiting for dawn, Ray Leonard decides he won’t get off the boat. The women can leave if they want to, but he’ll see the vessel into port.

Throughout that night the Tamaroa slugs her way through the storm. She’s a bulldog of a vessel, built to salvage crippled battleships in World War Two, and she can “tow anything afloat,” according to her literature. The sea state is so high, though, that the most she can make is three or four knots—roughly walking pace. On the larger swells she plunges into the crest, stalls, and launches out the far side, spray streaming off her bridge and greenwater sheeting out her scuppers. She crosses Cape Cod Bay, threads the canal, leaves the Elizabeth Islands to port, and finally turns the corner around Martha’s Vineyard. Commander Lawrence Brudnicki, chief officer on board, estimates that they’ll arrive on-scene late the next afternoon; the Satori crew has to stay afloat until then. They have no life raft or survival suits on board, and the nearest helicopter base is an hour away. If the Satori goes down, the crew is dead.

Brudnicki can’t speak directly to the Satori, but he can relay messages via the Falcon that’s circling above them. Both ship and plane are also in contact with the First District Command Center in Boston—Di Comcen, as it’s referred to in Coast Guard reports. Di Comcen is responsible for coordinating all the Coast Guard vessels and aircraft on the rescue, and developing the safest strategy for taking the people off the boat. Every decision has to be approved by them. Since the Satori isn’t sinking yet, they decide to have the Falcon fly cover until the Tamaroa arrives, and then take the crew off by raft. Air rescue in such conditions can be riskier than actually staying with the boat, so it’s used as a last resort. As soon as day breaks, the Falcon will be relieved by an H-3 rescue helicopter, and H-3S will fly cover in shifts until the Tamaroa shows up. Helicopters have a limited amount of flying time—generally about four hours—but they can pluck people out of the water if need be. Falcon jets can’t do much for people in the water except circle them and watch them drown.

From the incident log, Di Comcen:

The H-3 arrives on scene around 6:30 and spends half an hour just trying to locate the Satori. The conditions are so bad that she’s vanished from the Falcon’s radar, and the H-3 pilot is almost on top of her before spotting her in the foam-streaked seas. The Falcon circles off to the southwest to prepare a life-raft drop while the H-3 takes up a hover directly over the boat. In these conditions the Falcon pilot could never line up on something as small as a sailboat, so the H-3 acts as a stand-in. The Falcon comes back at 140 knots, radar locked onto the helicopter, and at the last moment the H-3 falls away and the jet makes the drop. The pilot comes screaming over the Satori’s mast and the copilot pushes two life-raft packages out a hatch in the floorboards. The rafts are linked by a long nylon tether, and as they fall they cartwheel apart, splashing down well to either side of the Satori. The tether, released at two hundred feet into a hurricane-force wind, drops right into Bylander’s hand.

The H-3 hovers overhead while the Satori crew haul in the packages, but both rafts have exploded on impact. There’s nothing at either end of the line. The Tamaroa is still five hours away and the storm has retrograded to within a couple of hundred miles of the coast; over the next twenty-four hours it will pass directly over the Satori. A daylight rescue in these conditions is difficult, and a nighttime rescue is out of the question. If the Satori crew is not taken off in the next few hours, there’s a good chance they won’t be taken off at all. Late that morning the second H-3 arrives and the pilot, Lieutenant Klosson, explains the situation to Ray Leonard. Leonard radios back that he’s not leaving the boat.

It’s unclear whether Leonard is serious or just trying to save face. Either way, the Coast Guard is having none of it. Two helicopters, two Falcon jets, a medium-range cutter, and a hundred air- and seamen have already been committed to the rescue; the Satori crew are coming off now. “Owner refuses to leave and says he’s sailed through hurricanes before,” the Comcen incident log records at 12:24 that afternoon. “Tamaroa wants manifestly unsafe voyage so that o/o [owner-operator] can be forced off.”

A “manifestly unsafe voyage” means that the vessel has been deemed an unacceptable risk to her crew or others, and the Coast Guard has the legal authority to order everyone off. Commander Brudnicki gets on the radio with District One and requests a manifestly unsafe designation for the Satori, and at 12:47 it is granted. The Tamaroa is just a couple of miles away now, within VHF range of the Satori, and Brudnicki raises Leonard on the radio and tells him he has no choice in the matter. Everyone is leaving the boat. At 12:57 in the afternoon, thirteen hours after weighing anchor, the Tamaroa plunges into view.

There’s a lot of hardware circling the Satori. There’s the Falcon, the H-3, the Tamaroa, and the freighter Gold Bond Conveyor, which has been cutting circles around the Satori since the first mayday call. Hardware is not the problem, though; it’s time. Dark is only three hours away, and the departing H-3 pilot doesn’t think the Satori will survive another night. She’ll run out of fuel, start getting knocked down, and eventually break apart. The crew will be cast into the sea, and the helicopter pilot will refuse to drop his rescue swimmer because he can’t be sure of getting him back. It would be up to the Tamaroa to maneuver alongside the swimmers and pull them on board, and in these seas it would be almost impossible. It’s now or never.

The only way to take them off, Brudnicki decides, is to shuttle them back to the Tamaroa in one of the little Avons. The Avons are twenty-one-foot inflatable rafts with rigid hulls and outboard engines; one of them could make a run to the Satori, drop off survival suits, and then come back again to pick up the three crew. If anyone wound up in the water, at least they’d be insulated and afloat. It’s not a particularly complicated maneuver, but no one has done it in conditions like this before. No one has even seen conditions like this before. At 1:23 PM the Tamaroa crew gathers at the port davits, three men climb aboard the Avon, and they lower away.

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.