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:
2:30 AM—slv [sailing vessel] is running out of fuel, recommend we try to keep Falcon o/s [on-scene] until Tamaroa arrives. 5:29 AM—Falcon has lost comms [communication] with vessel, vessel is low on battery power and taking on water. Pumps are keeping up but are run by ele [electric].
7:07 AM—Falcon ols, vessel has been located. Six hours fuel left. People on board are scared.
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
