Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (27 page)

This time Randy was within a few feet of the survivor when a breaking wave and a wind gust pushed the helicopter upward, causing the swimmer to be jerked beyond reach of the drifting mariner. Randy gave Lufkin a thumbs-down to indicate the need for more slack in the cable to combat the unexpected gusts.

On the third attempt the rescue swimmer finally reached the survivor. Randy could see that it was a man, still conscious but quite pale and exhausted-looking.

Randy removed his snorkel and shouted, “Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay,” croaked the man.

“Is there anyone else in the water nearby?”

“Don’t think so.”

Haba was relieved to see that the man was not only coherent but calm. Far too often swimmers have to subdue panicked survivors who, instead of following the rescuer’s direction, claw or fight them.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do!” shouted Randy, holding on to the survivor’s arm. Before he could explain, a breaking sea avalanched on the two men like a pile driver, pushing them downward, into a swirling vortex.

Lufkin held his breath, searching for the men in the foam. It was next to impossible to hover in the same place with the varying wind gusts. Over his headset he spoke to the pilots: “Left, ten. Okay, now forward fifteen.”

The neon rescue helmet appeared directly below Lufkin. It was one of the best sights he’d ever seen.

Below, Randy took a gulp of air and started to put the strop around the survivor, worried that in the dark another wave would separate him from the man. Randy cinched the strop up tight and hollered, “We’re going up together! Keep your arms down on the sling. I don’t want you falling out!”

Randy looked up toward the helo thundering overhead and signaled that they were ready to be retrieved. Lufkin started retracting cable, and soon the two men left the waves and were greeted by the howling wind, blowing them aft of the helo and spinning them.

Using his gloved hand, Michael, lying on his belly, held the cable as steady as he could. His big fear was that the cable could swing so far aft it would become jammed behind the open door. He kept retracting cable, and soon the men were at the door. Leaning out of the aircraft, Michael grabbed the harness on Randy and used all his strength to pull the two men safely inside.

In the back of his mind Lufkin wondered why the two men felt like the weight of three. Looking at the survivor’s immersion suit, he had his answer. Water had collected in the feet and legs of the suit.
That thing must have a hundred pounds of water in it,
Lufkin thought. Then he moved to the door, continued updating the pilots as he had been all along, and with a sigh of relief finally said, “Swimmer and survivor safely in the cabin. Door is now closed.”

The survivor was John Svendsen.

•  •  •  

The C-130 flown by Mike Myers and Wes McIntosh was almost back to Raleigh when over the radio Sector informed them that the first survivor had successfully been hoisted. Roars of applause and cheering erupted on the plane. “It was utter elation,” recalled Myers. “Our hearts had remained with the crew of the
Bounty
, and it was beyond nerve-racking to not know if they went down with the ship. But when we heard that helicopter crew had just arrived and already plucked one out of the sea, that gave us hope for the rest of them.”

Once Wes and Mike had safely landed and refueled the plane, they entered the airport’s flight-planning room. Someone asked, “Were you the guys out there with the
Bounty
?” Mike and Wes were taken aback; they were used to flying in anonymity, with no one outside the coast guard knowing what they did. Mike answered, “Yes, that was us. But how did you know?” The person pointed up at a television set. On it was a photo of
Bounty
, and a reporter was saying how the ship had sunk in the hurricane. Both C-130 pilots knew this case was turning out to be unlike any other, and they stayed glued to the television set, waiting to see if there was more news of survivors, prepared to fly again if needed.

•  •  •  

The faint light of dawn filtered through the rain and clouds, and Steve Cerveny guided the helicopter into a wide turn, heading toward
Bounty
. On the way they saw another couple of lone strobe lights and hovered over them with the searchlight, determining the survival suits were empty. When they arrived at the ship, Jane thought,
This is surreal, it’s like we’ve flown back in time.
Randy Haba had a similar reaction; he had seen many foundering vessels, but never a tall ship with three enormous masts. He hoped he would not have to be lowered to the ship, noting the tangled rigging fanning out from the vessel.

A blinking strobe light in one of the masts caught the attention of the aircrew, and Steve lowered the helo to forty feet for a better look. Within seconds it was clear that the strobe was on an empty survival suit, and the aircrew continued scanning the ship and the surrounding wreckage for survivors. As they fanned out into ever-wider circles, they saw another empty survival suit but no people.

Five minutes later Jane radioed the C-130, “We’ve searched the ship and the surrounding debris and there are no survivors.”

The pilots on the C-130 acknowledged, then guided the helicopter to the nearest life raft, which was about a mile away. The raft’s orange canopy was not inflated, and no one was on top of it or under it. Jane started getting worried.
Where are they? Surely there has to be more than one person alive.
They hovered over the raft, hoping a head or an arm would pop out from beneath the canopy.

“No survivors in raft we are over,” said Jane to the C-130. “It is one of ours.”

“Roger. The other three rafts are lined up in almost a straight line to the east. They are about a mile apart.”

“Okay,” said Jane, “we are proceeding to the next one.”

This raft was also a coast guard raft. Again they hovered over the raft, and again no signs of life.
This is bad,
thought Jane.
There were sixteen or seventeen people on this ship. They can’t all be gone.

The Jayhawk moved on to the next raft. This one had a red canopy, fully inflated. Steve put the helo in a hover, slowly descending to thirty feet above the seas. He was worried his hundred-mile-per-hour rotor wash would flip the raft, but quickly realized that with such strong winds most of the swirl created by the rotors was being blown aft. The raft looked stable, and he took that to be a good sign: maybe there were people inside weighing it down. But there was no sign of life below, and he thought,
Please, not another empty life raft, somebody else has to be alive.
A second later a head popped out of the doorway and a survivor started waving. All four aircrew members breathed a sigh of relief.

•  •  •  

Randy had decided against staying on the hook for the next rescue and would instead do a harness deployment, in which he would detach from the cable and swim to the raft. Michael Lufkin relayed this to the pilots, got the okay from Steve, then began putting Randy in the water.

When the swimmer hit the water, about forty feet from the raft, he unhooked and started knifing toward the little vessel as fast as he could. Without the cable on him he became aware of a strange sensation. The waves were going one way but the current was going the other. The current was so strong that if a wave didn’t break directly on Randy, the moving water would propel the swimmer right over the wave top.

Randy arrived at the vessel in just a few seconds. Using handles by the doorway, Randy pulled the top half of his body into the raft. Panting and out of breath, he focused on the faces inside. A bunch of wide-eyed people looked back at him.

“How’s everyone doing?” asked the swimmer.

Silence.

“Are there any injuries?”

The survivors just stared at him.

Randy tried a new approach. “Does anyone have trouble swimming?”

A man who was hunched over in the center of the raft struggled to sit up and looked at Randy. It was Doug Faunt.

Randy looked back at him, asking, “Are you ready to go?”

“Yes, I’m ready.”

“Okay, relax and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Randy backed out of the cavelike shelter of the raft and into the howling wind and crashing seas. He waited at the doorway as Faunt, weighed down by his water-filled survival suit, inched to the door. When Doug got his first leg out of the raft, the water drained into the foot area, swelling it to three times its normal size. He flopped into the water and floated on his back. Randy wrapped his right arm around Doug’s chest and started paddling with his other arm, using his flippers to thrust himself away from the raft. The swimmer kept glancing from the aircraft to the surrounding seas and back again, trying hard not to get blindsided by any big combers. One big wave came thundering in on the men, and Randy decided to swim through it rather than risk its breaking directly on the survivor.

Up in the helicopter Michael Lufkin began lowering the basket, watching in alarm as the wind sent it shooting fifty feet behind the aircraft. He brought the basket back inside, added weight to it, then told the pilots to move forward, deciding it best to let the basket hit the water in a spot where the waves would carry it to the swimmer.

“Okay, basket is in the water,” Michael said over the headset. Then he did a double take while looking at the basket. Instead of being pushed by the waves, the basket drifted into and over the waves, away from Randy. To make matters worse, the weights he’d just added made the basket sink rather than ride on the surface.

“Current took the basket and the weights aren’t working,” said Michael. “I’m going to bring it back up and remove the weights.”

Once that was done, he directed the pilots to a new hovering spot and let the basket hit the water just a few feet from Randy.

Despite the proximity of the basket, the swimmer had to drag the survivor through two large waves to avoid their cascading white water. Faunt swallowed considerable seawater before Randy stuffed him into the basket.

When Faunt was hauled into the aircraft and flopped out of the basket, he broke out into a wide grin. “I saw John Svendsen,” recalled Faunt, “and I shouted his name, telling him I sure was glad to see him. I had been worrying about John and Dan, knowing how dedicated they were to the ship, the crew, and their responsibilities. I was afraid they would get caught up in their duties and not get away from the capsized
Bounty
fast enough.”

Randy had watched Faunt be hoisted, and he figured he would try to save time by swimming back to the raft, which had now drifted almost two hundred yards away. He was swimming directly into most waves and helped by the current, but sometimes a large comber would slam him from the ten o’clock position and other times from the two o’clock side, driving him underwater. His progress seemed to take forever, and he realized he’d have nothing left in his tank if he continued this battle. Randy looked up at the helo and signaled to be picked up.

Once back inside the helicopter he cupped his hands by Lufkin’s ear and shouted that six people were still on the raft but that no one appeared badly injured. “After we get the next survivor in the aircraft, just air-taxi me back to the raft! The current is unbelievable!”

“I know,” said Michael, “it carried the basket the opposite way of the waves!”

The idea for an air taxi—where Randy would be carried just above the tops of the waves rather than lifted into the helicopter—would save precious seconds. Jane had been updating Michael and Steve, telling them they only had twenty minutes to bingo time, and Michael had been thinking air taxi just as Randy had.

•  •  •  

Once the pilots had repositioned the helicopter, Randy lowered into the water, unhooked, swam to the raft, and stuck his head inside.

“Who’s next?”

The survivors stayed quiet.

Randy looked at one of the female survivors closest to him. “Are you ready?”

Jessica Black answered yes, and off they went. This time the basket hoist went smoothly.

Randy used the next couple minutes to catch his breath, and soon the bare hook came down. He clipped the hook to his harness, and as he was about to give the thumbs-up to be lifted, he heard a roar, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a monstrous sea bearing down on him. All he could do was hold his breath before being engulfed in a torrent of white water. The force of the wave was so strong it ripped the mask and snorkel right off Randy’s head.

Michael retracted cable as fast as he could and lifted Randy out of the swirling foam before the next wave buried him.

Well, that was some wake-up call,
thought Randy.
Just got to do the rescue with no mask.

The ocean wasn’t quite done with him yet. Once he was back at the raft and telling the next survivor, Anna Sprague, to come out the doorway, a wave broke directly on the raft’s canopy. Randy was hurled backward, landing ten feet from the raft. He coughed up a bellyful of water and kicked back to the raft, thinking,
This is not good.
We gotta hurry, or we’ll never get all these people out before bingo.

In the cockpit, Steve was thinking the same thing. He knew another helo was on its way, and he had made up his mind he wasn’t going to put the survivors or his crew in danger by extending the bingo time. He also surmised that the survivors were in pretty good shape because each time a new person came into the aircraft, the other survivors let out a cheer.
Just stay focused,
Steve told himself,
we’re not done yet.

He was so focused on his swimmer in the water and holding the aircraft in as steady a hover as possible, he never saw the second helicopter speed by. But Jane did, and over the headset she confirmed to both her crew and the C-130 that she had a visual on the other helicopter.

After Anna Sprague was safely in the helicopter, Randy extracted Mark Warner, and he, too, was quickly hoisted into the helicopter without incident.
Now we’re going good
, thought Randy as he treaded water and waited to be air-taxied back to the life raft and the final three survivors.