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
