Into the Storm
Photography by Thomas Prior
Two ships sank after Hurricane Joaquin hit the Caribbean in 2015. Only one was saved. This is their harrowing story.
Journalist Tristram Korten’s book Into the Storm describes the sinking of two ships in the Atlantic Ocean during the Category 4 Hurricane Joaquin in 2015 and how their respective captains dealt with extreme circumstances, one successfully and the other catastrophically. The book also closely details the role a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter rescue team—more specifically, the efforts of swimmer Ben Cournia, helicopter pilot Rick Post, flight mechanic Joshua Andrews and commander Dave McCarthy—played in saving the 12 crew members of the freighter Minouche after they’d abandoned ship for a liferaft in the midst of a veritable meteorological melee. The following excerpt has been edited for space, and captures the essence of the daring rescue. In doing so, it emphasizes the level of character and commitment that stands behind the motto of the rescue swimmers at the Coast Guard’s Aviation Technical Training Center at Elizabeth City, North Carolina: “So others may live.”
Prefer to listen? Listen to this article in the player below:
Before would-be rescue swimmers can call themselves U.S. Coast Guard aviation survival technicians, they must first survive the training school. It’s not uncommon for two-thirds or more of a class to drop out. Officially, the Coast Guard states that the attrition rate is 50 percent. Anecdotally, it is often much higher. Ben Cournia, for instance, entered with a class of nine. Three graduated, one of whom had started in another class of 12. When all 11 of his original classmates dropped out, this one remaining recruit transferred to Cournia’s class. A recent class of 16 graduated four swimmers; in another, only five of 24 candidates made it through the process.
The physical conditioning is relentless. Cournia recalled waking up at 5:00 A.M., eating only a small breakfast (“otherwise you’d throw up”), then running, running, running: sprints, 12-mile runs, running through waist-high water. Then lunch, and swimming, swimming, swimming: 500-yard sprints, 500 yards underwater (in 25-yard intervals), 3,000 yards of laps. Add to this the survival technique classes, which the recruit cannot fail if he has any hope of graduating. In these classes, swimmers are confronted with simulations—a downed pilot wrapped in a parachute, a crew from a sunken fishing boat—and must figure out the rescue on the fly. There are “water confidence drills” in which an instructor swims up to you and basically tries to drown you. The school boasts fans that can replicate the winds in a Category 1 hurricane, a wave-making machine and speakers that can blare thunderclaps at tremendous volume.
As relentlessly exhausting as the physical training is, the mental tests might be worse. Instructors repeatedly try to undermine the swimmer’s confidence, constantly encouraging him to quit, telling him he’s not good enough.
“Your body can adapt physically,” explained Senior Chief Scott Rady, who coleads the school today with Cournia’s former supervisor John Hall. “But mentally, that’s the one you have to overcome.”
In fact, most of the candidates who don’t make it through the program “self-select out,” as Rady put it. Another percentage can’t continue because of physical injuries. Many of these candidates do return and eventually graduate. (This may be the reason the Coast Guard cites a 50 percent attrition rate.) Since the program started almost 30 years ago, a total of 940 aviation survival technicians have made it through. Today there are 360 rescue swimmers spread out among 26 Coast Guard air stations. Three of them are women.
Now, as Cournia peered down at the roiling sea from the open door of the Jayhawk, he was relying on every shred of his training and conditioning to override his body’s normal response to danger. He had to go where it was not logical to go. He sat on the edge of the metal deck, his legs out the door, his eyes fixed on the liferaft bobbing in the waves below. He reached up and snugged his mask to his face, then clamped his teeth around the snorkel’s mouthpiece. Joshua Andrews checked the cable clipped onto the swimmer’s harness.
“All right, swimmer’s at the cabin door,” Andrews reported into the cabin’s radio. “Ready for harness deployment of the rescue swimmer.”
“Roger, you may begin hoist,” Rick Post responded.
From his seated position, Cournia gave the thumbs-up and then pushed himself out the door into the air.
“Swimmer’s going out the cabin door.” While the pilots struggled to hold the helicopter in a hover, Andrews would be their eyes and ears for what was happening below.
As Cournia descended on the cable, he twisted in the wind. The water beneath him heaved back and forth. Big, long swells surged and then relaxed. Steeper waves crested and broke, causing the surface to erupt in a foamy effervescence.
“Swimmer’s on the way down,” Andrews said. “Swimmer’s in the water. Swimmer’s away. Swimmer’s okay. Clear to move. Back and left 30. Retrieving hoist.”
“Roger,” Post responded. “Back and left.”
When Cournia hit the water the sea felt reassuringly warm, but the strength of the swells and the ferocity of the waves caught him off guard. The water lifted him up and slapped him in the face. Waves crashing over him kept flooding the snorkel, forcing him to blow lungfuls of air through the tube to clear it. Still, he was in his element, and his apprehensions lifted as he steadied himself against the swells. He lifted his head and spotted the life raft a few yards away. Arm over arm, he dragged himself through the water in a freestyle crawl, swimming over and under the waves until he reached it.
Inside the orange floating hexagon, Capt. Renelo Gelera (the Minouche’s skipper) remembered what amounted to someone knocking on the door, a tap-tap on the curtain of the enclosure. He unzipped the curtain and saw a lanky guy in a swim mask hoist himself chest high into the raft, resting on his elbows. Cournia’s exact words may have been lost to the adrenaline of the moment, but they were something like, “Hi, I’m Petty Officer Cournia, U.S. Coast Guard. Does anybody speak English?”
The crew of the Minouche stared at him with wide eyes, tensed with overwhelming joy.
“Yes,” Gelera answered, trying to contain his excitement. “I do.”
“All right, sir, you’re going to interpret for me. Is anyone hurt? No? Good. Okay, I’m going to take you out one at a time. Don’t panic. I’m going to swim you over. The helicopter is going to drop down a basket. I’m going to put you in the basket. Make sure you keep your arms and legs inside the basket in a seated position.”
Gelera repeated the instructions to the crew in Creole.
Something, apparently, was lost in translation. Gelera remembers the rescue swimmer saying something to the effect of, “Listen carefully. I am here in order to save you! But I cannot guarantee that I can make it to all of you. To those who are going to survive, good luck. To those who are going to die, I’m very sorry.”
“That’s what I translated,” Gelera recalled. “I understood him. At that moment, they [the Coast Guard crew] also put their life 50-50.” Gelera thought Cournia was telling them that it was a crapshoot if any of them would survive this ordeal.
(Needless to say, Cournia later recoiled at this. “I would never say that!” he said, then started laughing.)
Henry Latigo, the chief mate, asked Cournia what had happened to their boat. “It’s gone,” Cournia said, and was struck by the shocked expression that flitted across the men’s faces. It was as if, bobbing alone out here in the storm, they were only now grasping the magnitude of their situation.
Cournia asked, “Okay, who’s going first?” Gelera translated, and several hands shot up in the air. Gelera said, “I’m the captain; I’m not going yet. I want to go last.”
Cournia pointed at the most scared-looking man, indicating he should come forward. The sailor did, and Cournia guided him down the boarding ladder of the raft and into the water. Then he grabbed the collar of the sailor’s lifejacket, put the man in a cross-chest carry and started swimming. Cournia could see the helicopter hovering overhead. He waved a chemical light in his hand to signal a pickup. As the Jayhawk swooped over them, the searchlight beam illuminated the cable and basket as if it were spotlighting a solo performance on a Broadway stage.
In the helicopter above, Andrews manned the hoist mounted outside the cabin door, with 200 feet of stainless steel cable, made up of 133 strands of wire, wrapped around a motorized drum. Post may have been flying the bird, and co-pilot David McCarthy may have had operational control, but at this point, Andrews was giving the orders. He was the fulcrum between the pilots and the swimmer (and the survivors) in the water. He gave the directional commands so the pilots knew where to position the helicopter. And he was responsible for the swimmer’s safety.
Down in the water, Cournia and the sailor waited for Andrews to lower the basket, which was just that: stainless steel bars welded together into a basket big enough for a grown man to sit in with his knees up. Post was still getting the hang of maneuvering the helicopter in the high winds and rain. As a result, the crew was having a hard time keeping the basket stationary on the surface of the water. Cournia would get close enough to reach for it, but then a big wave would sweep over them and carry the basket away. When the helicopter tried to move the basket closer, waves caught it and skipped it across the water. Cournia had to make sure that neither he nor the sailor got hit. Finally, after a few passes, he managed to seize and steady the basket. Then he pushed it down so he could float the sailor into it. Cournia reminded the sailor to keep his hands and feet inside at all times. He took a quick look underwater to make sure nothing was clinging to the basket, and finally signaled the okay sign to pull him up.
From above, Andrews was trying to keep his eye on how the swimmer was functioning in the water, which was difficult because it was dark. Andrews could see only the reflective tape on the raft and on Cournia’s gear, along with the chemical light attached to his black mask and the strobe light flickering on top of the raft. Protocol was for someone’s eyes to always be on the swimmer. So when Andrews had to turn his attention to unloading the first survivor, he asked the pilots, “Eyes on swimmer?” They answered in the affirmative and Andrews grappled with unloading the Haitian sailor. Once the man was out of the basket, Andrews pushed it back out the helicopter door and lowered it. After it hit the water, he saw a strobe flashing in the dark. This was the swimmer’s emergency signal for a pickup. Andrews relayed this to Post and McCarthy immediately.
“Initiating emergency pickup,” Andrews said.
“Roger,” Post replied.
When Andrews looked back down, he saw the strobe sinking in the water, flashing more and more faintly. For an instant, he felt a surge of horror. But then he saw Cournia, who had just finished loading the second sailor into the basket and was swimming back to the raft. With a sigh of relief, Andrews realized the light must have been a strobe that had fallen off the survivor’s life vest.
Andrews reeled in the cable and pulled the second sailor into the cabin, still in the basket. Once inside, though, the sailor, barefoot in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, cramped up with fear. His eyes were wide and he refused to get out of the basket. Andrews yelled at him to climb out. When that didn’t work, he tried prying the man’s fingers off the metal bars. Finally, he unceremoniously flipped the basket over and the survivor tumbled out into the cabin.
Andrews looked down for his rescue swimmer. Nothing. Then he spotted him, furiously swimming after the drifting raft.
After sending up the basket for the second time, Cournia had turned to swim back to the raft . . . only to find it wasn’t there. The wind and waves had pushed it more than 100 yards away. He cleared his snorkel, put his head down, and started swimming. Waves crashed over him and pushed him down. He’d surface and continue slashing the water in quick, decisive strokes. After a while, he lifted his head, but the raft still seemed about a football field away. He swam for a few minutes more, then checked his progress. Again, the raft was barely any closer. It seemed like it was drifting as fast as he could swim. Ultimately it took about 10 minutes of powering along in the crawl to reach the raft, but he made it. He pulled out another sailor and signaled for a pickup. By the time this third sailor was loaded and the basket was hoisted, the raft had drifted again. And Cournia was getting tired.
None of this was lost on Andrews. He saw his swimmer constantly struggling to catch up to the raft, and he didn’t think Cournia would last the night if he kept having to give chase like this. He consulted with McCarthy, and they agreed to pull the swimmer and regroup. Andrews sent the cable down and signaled for Cournia to hook in.
After they hoisted Cournia up, the crew debated different approaches. The solution they settled on was to “hover taxi” Cournia to the raft, meaning that the swimmer would dangle above the waves on the cable while Post flew him to the raft. Cournia would then detach and swim out the survivors. A relieved Cournia agreed that this sounded like the best plan.
The method worked well. Cournia was able to extract the next four survivors without incident. The dark cabin of the Jayhawk was filling with heaving bodies intermittently illuminated by the strobes on their life vests. They were dressed in shorts and T-shirts with no shoes. Most seemed dulled by shock.
It was now close to 2:00 A.M. They had been aloft for almost five hours. The crew was losing valuable time fighting the weather. And McCarthy was concerned about fuel. Down in the water, Cournia was worried about the same thing. Hoping to make up for lost time, he had begun speeding up his process, trying to get the sailors out of the raft faster and faster. When he went to the raft for the eighth sailor, even he had to admit he was going too fast.
Inside the raft, Gelera and the crew had calmed down as the rescue operation unfolded. Every time one of them would leave the raft, everyone else repositioned so their weight was evenly distributed. The raft was maintaining its position in the waves, but Gelera was worried that a big wave could still topple them over. When Cournia returned for the eighth time, the sailors could tell something was different. The rescue swimmer was much more brusque and direct. Cournia pointed at one man, a short but heavyset fellow who went by the nickname Maco. “You! Let’s go!” Cournia shouted. Maco started to come forward, but then hesitated. Cournia gave him some space, but Maco refused to move. Maco, it turned out, didn’t know how to swim. Gelera and the others were yelling at him in Creole to jump, “Ale! Ale! Sote!” But Maco couldn’t bring himself to do it. He started to scoot back into the raft.
Cournia could hear himself getting louder and louder as his impatience showed through. He was thinking about the fuel. The Jayhawk carries about 900 gallons, which gives it a 700-mile range depending on the weather, or about six hours of flight time. But flying in this weather was burning more fuel than normal. Just trying to maintain a hover in the headwinds was taking its toll, and they needed to leave enough juice to get back.
Finally, fed up with Maco’s hesitation, Cournia reached forward, grabbed the collar of his life vest, and pulled him into the water. The sailor exited the raft headfirst and splashed into the sea on top of the rescue swimmer. Maco gave a terrified yell and grabbed hold of Cournia, wrapping his legs and arms around him in a panicked clench. He pushed Cournia’s shoulders down, struggling to stay above the water.
Cournia had a flashback to the training pool in Elizabeth City, battling an instructor during a water confidence drill. Now, with Maco, the events unfolded in a kind of slow motion that felt hyperreal. His training kicked in and he did what he had been conditioned to do: suck, tuck and duck. He sucked in a deep breath, tucked his chin to his collarbone to protect his airway, and tried to duck out of the sailor’s grip. The key was to stay calm. He wormed one arm free and gave Maco a gentle tap on his chest to let him know everything was okay. That didn’t work. In fact it seemed to frighten Maco even more. The sailor thrashed about more chaotically, tightening his grip on Cournia, who was still underwater. So Cournia did what he was trained to do next, which was to take his free arm and jam his thumb into a nerve center under Maco’s jawline. This allowed him to work his other hand free so that he could grab Maco’s elbow and jam that thumb into another pressure point there. The sailor froze, and Cournia used the moment to resurface and suck in a lungful of air. Back in control, he flipped Maco around in a front head hold. Then he signaled for the basket.
McCarthy, in the copilot seat, was monitoring all of the operation’s moving parts. Each time a sailor was pulled into the cabin, he reported it to their radio guard, with whom the Jayhawk crew is expected to stay in contact throughout the mission. By now the cutter Northland was on scene and radioed in, awaiting instructions on how it could help. McCarthy was also monitoring wind speeds, the weight inside the cabin, the fuel-burn rate and the radar. As time wore on, McCarthy realized the average time to recover each sailor was taking longer and longer, in spite of Cournia’s efforts to speed things up. At this pace they wouldn’t have enough fuel to stay aloft in order to recover all 12 sailors in one sortie. The Jayhawk was going to have to return to base and refuel. When McCarthy conferred with Post and Andrews, they agreed: It was time to head back. Andrews dropped the cable hook down to Cournia, signaling him to come up.
The swimmer did as he was told; he locked in and rode the cable up. But once inside the cabin, Cournia balked. “Why?” he asked. He was frustrated and pumped full of adrenaline. His job wasn’t over and he wanted to stay with the raft. Andrews remembers him saying “There are still people there!” McCarthy understood where his swimmer’s passion was coming from. He admired that. But as the officer in charge, McCarthy’s first responsibility was for the safety of his crew. He denied the swimmer’s request. McCarthy assured Cournia the sailors would be okay. The Northland was on the scene and able to keep close watch on the raft. This was an order. Post turned the helicopter around and pointed the nose toward the Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater (CGAS Clearwater) in Great Inagua, Bahamas.
Communication with the sailors on the raft was handed over to the Northland. However, when the guardsman on the ship tried radioing, he could hear only muffled static. The radio operator gave instructions to Gelera, who held the radio, that if they could hear him, to key the microphone twice. Two crackly transmissions came through. The guardsman tried to sound as calm and reassuring as he could. His job right now was to keep the survivors from panicking. He explained that the helicopter was low on fuel and had to return to base, but it would fly right back. In the interim, the ship would monitor their safety.
The return flight to base took less than half an hour, shorter than the flight out because they had a tailwind. They arrived over Great Inagua without incident. As Post began the descent, McCarthy thought he’d give his copilot a break, some time to clear his head from the stress of maneuvering the Jayhawk in the storm. So he took the controls for the landing. As they settled on the tarmac and began taxiing to the hangar, McCarthy saw birds huddling on the flight apron. Apparently they were weathering out the storm there. Then, just as he was rolling toward the hangar, McCarthy saw one of the birds startle and lift its wings. He stomped on the brakes. “No, no, don’t do it!” the pilot yelled, to no avail. The bird went straight up into the rotors.
It wasn’t McCarthy’s love of wildlife that had him screaming at the windshield. A bird strike prompts an automatic flight shutdown while the whole aircraft gets inspected for any damage that could compromise its safety. They rolled into the hangar, thinking this inspection would add more than an hour to their turnaround time.
Todd Taylor, the aviation maintenance technician for the base’s other flight crew, watched from the hangar as the bird was flung off to the side. Taylor had been trying to think two steps ahead in order to get the Jayhawk airborne again as fast as possible. Before the helicopter landed he had organized a “hot gas” refueling, where the helicopter lands, turns around and remains on the runway with its engine running while its tanks are filled.
After the bird strike, there would be no hot gas. Now Taylor had another idea. He ran into the storm and searched for the bird. When he found it, a little gray tern with a cap of black feathers, it was 90 percent intact. It had not gotten sucked into the engine or been pureed in the rotor hub. This meant he could order an expedited inspection. Taylor called Clearwater for clearance, which was granted.
Inside, the survivors were unloaded. The rescue swimmer from the second crew had been ordered to meet them and provide first aid. In his zeal, he also thought he’d be replacing Cournia for the second sortie. “Aw, man!” Andrews recalled him saying when told he wouldn’t be heading out.
The expedited inspection took only about 30 minutes. The helicopter crew took advantage of the break. They used the bathroom. They drank water and stretched. As ground crew mechanics inspected the helicopter, Andrews played out all the cable and inspected it to make sure there were no frays. He restocked the cabin with chemical lights.
McCarthy, meanwhile, had his own inspection to do: his crew. They had a quick briefing, and McCarthy looked for any signs of exhaustion in his men. He looked in their eyes and listened for slurred words. If he had seen any indication that they weren’t ready—if they seemed fatigued, if they’d lost any focus—he could have swapped out his crew for the second unit. But the men were alert. More than that, they were eager to get back out there. And it made sense to keep the same team. They had figured out how to handle both the wind and the waves, and they’d developed a system that was working. As McCarthy put it, they were “in their battle rhythm.”
THROUGH SURF AND STORM AND HOWLING GALE
We’re always ready for the call,
We place our trust in Thee.
Through surf and storm and howling gale,
High shall our purpose be.
Semper Paratus is our guide,
Our fame, our glory, too.
To fight to save or fight and die,
Aye! Coast Guard we are for you!
—Coast Guard Marching Song
All Thursday, as Gelera sailed the Minouche into the Windward Passage and the Coasties on Great Inagua hunkered down in their hooches, Hurricane Joaquin’s power grew and its cloud cover metastasized. Tendril-like bands stained the sky for 185 miles out from the eye. In every direction, the sky was mottled in shades of black, gray, light gray and even a terrible white that was not the peaceful puff of a cumulus cloud on a summer’s day, but the roiling white of ice and water violently sucked up and expelled. The storm itself lumbered south at about 5 miles an hour, twisting with an amoral anger.
As the crew of the Northland sailed west off Haiti’s North Claw, they watched the sky fill with increasingly dense gray clouds. The winds picked up and they could feel the long, rolling swells move beneath the hull of the 270-foot cutter. The officers on board had spent the morning and afternoon plotting how to stay out of the storm’s way, yet remain close enough to respond to an emergency if needed. By the time they were off Cap du Môole, Haiti, the wind was blowing 25 knots.
After going over the weather maps, the Northland’s captain, Commander Jason Ryan, had decided to sail his ship south, through the Windward Passage, to escape the storm. He wanted to take the ship to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using the island as a windbreak. The ship could refuel at the U.S. military base there. He set course.
Even beneath the shelter of Cuba’s eastern tip, the seas were 8 to 10 feet. As Ryan was conducting his nightly routine, checking in on the ship’s Combat Information Center, the ship’s main command room, then approving the night orders on the bridge, District 7 called. It was about 9:30 P.M. and there was an emergency. They wanted the Northland to divert to a cargo ship in distress, the Minouche, which had sent a Mayday that the crew was abandoning a sinking ship.
There would be no sleep that night. Ryan gathered his command staff for a quick strategy meeting. The Minouche’s location was far enough south of the storm’s eye—about 140 miles at that point—that Ryan felt it was safe to sail to it, so they plotted a track line to its coordinates and set a course. They would be sailing downswell, with the wind at their stern. Still, the ship was looking at three to four hours to get to the Minouche. That time would be spent scrambling to ready the ship for hurricane conditions.
The captain got on the ship’s public address system and announced the mission. “Good evening, Northland, this is your captain speaking. We have been diverted by the District 7 Command Center to the motor vessel Minouche’s last known position. Prepare for heavy seas.”
Ryan’s engineer officer started to fill the ballast tanks with water so that the ship would ride steadier in rough seas. The standing order to reduce nighttime engine output was rescinded. As the Northland’s twin turbocharged diesel engines roared to life, the first lieutenant ordered heavy-weather lifelines rigged on the forecastle, the forward part of the ship, so that crew members, wearing five-point harnesses, could clip onto the line when they were on deck to avoid being swept overboard. The decks were cleared of unnecessary equipment that might break free in bad weather. Watertight doors and hatches were closed. These were the same procedures as if the ship was getting ready for battle.
Ryan and his officers then debated the rescue options open to them. The seas would be too rough to launch a smaller rescue boat. They might be able to improvise life rings on a long line that could be thrown to the sailors, who could then grab onto the rings and be pulled aboard. The Northland could also drape a ladder-like net off the side and try to drift up to the life raft, then have the men jump in the water and climb up. None of these scenarios were ideal.
In his cabin, Capt. Ryan dressed in his foul-weather gear. He grabbed his binoculars and an extra flashlight. Then he went to the bridge and tracked their progress.
The Northland was moving at a fast clip of about 18 knots, aided by the running winds. But as soon as they cleared Cuba and entered the open expanse of the Windward Passage, the Northland began to rock.
Joaquin’s winds were coming from the south, but also from the west here, and this created a confused sea state. Waves coming from one direction met waves coming from another. Sometimes their energy would cancel each other out. Other times they would combine and stack up, turning 15-foot waves into 20-footers or even higher.
Meanwhile, the Northland’s crew were constantly scanning the water ahead with infrared cameras. Floating cargo has a slight temperature differential, enabling the crew to spot debris before the ship crashed into it.
The ship approached the scene at about 1:45 A.M. Ryan made radio contact with two Good Samaritan vessels standing by, the Falcon Arrow and the Cronus Leader, to let them know they were free to go. After keeping vigil over the tiny raft, they could finally continue their journies. (The ships moved off, but stayed in the area, avoiding the storm.) Then Ryan radioed the Jayhawk crew for a status update. At that point, the helicopter had just finished hoisting the fourth survivor. McCarthy advised Ryan that the pilots were wearing night vision goggles, which meant the Northland had to be careful not to blind them with its searchlight.
Ryan asked how the Northland could assist. “Run an orbit around the raft from about a mile away,” McCarthy answered. That way the helicopter could use the ship’s navigation lights as a reference for the horizon. “Roger that,” Ryan responded.
As the Northland set a course circling the raft, the Jayhawk lifted another two sailors. Then a band of intense rain and wind came through. Ryan and his sailors watched as the helicopter struggled to hold its position, flying up to get above the bad weather. Twenty minutes later the Jayhawk descended and lifted two more sailors, for a total of eight, and McCarthy announced their intentions to fly back to Great Inagua. McCarthy asked the Northland to maintain radio contact with the survivors in the raft.
From inside the raft’s enclosed tent, the men could hear the thud–thud of the helicopter fading as it headed back to Great Inagua with their crewmates. They were now down to four. It was completely dark other than the distant lights of the Northland. The assault from the waves continued, but the raft was holding up. Despite assurances from McCarthy that they were coming back to rescue them, despite the ship hovering on the horizon, the men felt utterly alone as the storm—a storm that seemed to be attacking them personally—raged outside. “They are not coming back,” the chief engineer told his captain. “I think we are going to die.”
The bird strike on Great Inagua that delayed the return of the Jayhawk undoubtedly exacerbated the sailors’ despair and sense of abandonment, but if the engineer could have seen inside the Northland at that moment, he would have been reassured that no one had forgotten about them. Inside the ship’s Combat Information Center, an infrared image of the raft was blown up on a 46-inch screen. The Coasties were watching the raft intensely.
Finally, about an hour and a half after it had left the scene, the helicopter hove back into position over the liferaft with a reassuring whoosh of the rotors. The rain seemed to have intensified, coming down in solid sheets that knocked the aircraft around. Post steadied the Jayhawk into a hover, and Cournia took his stance by the door, ready to deploy. But something was wrong. Post, who couldn’t see anything out the windshield, was flying almost entirely by his instrument panel. His altitude was good, but his hover bar showed him moving even though he felt as if the aircraft was stationary. His mind couldn’t reconcile how his body felt with what the instruments said. This was a dangerous sensation for a pilot. Vertigo could set in and the pilot could think up was down, and try to fly accordingly. He needed to reestablish some frame of reference. Post alerted his crewmates that he was having trouble staying oriented. He hit the “auto depart” button, which takes control of the Jayhawk and lifts it 300 feet in the air, then reestablishes an even longitudinal hover. It’s a reset, a way for the pilot to start over and try again. From there, Post knew which way was up.
McCarthy, meanwhile, radioed the Northland and asked again if the ship would be able to launch a rescue attempt on its own. He needed to constantly assess what options were open to him. But Ryan was even more convinced than before that a ship-based rescue was too risky in these conditions.
Post flew the Jayhawk back down. The raft had drifted, so the crew had to spend a few minutes searching for it. Once they’d located it and positioned themselves above it, Cournia again sat in the open doorway and clipped the hoist hook into his harness. Then he pushed himself out of the helicopter into the night.
In the water, he quickly fell back into the rhythm he had established earlier. He swam up to the raft, pulled himself in and grabbed the first person he saw. This time it was Capt. Gelera—his translator and the one survivor who had specifically asked to go last. “It was dark. I grabbed the wrong one,” Cournia would say in retrospect. But at the time, no one wanted to argue and slow things down, so Gelera splashed into the water. Cournia gave the signal for the basket. Andrews lowered it and Cournia loaded Gelera in. Thumbs up. Andrews hit the hoist button and started lifting the basket. Cournia hung from the basket as it lifted out of the water, as he had done on the previous hoists, in order to keep the cable straight and minimize swing. That technique had been working well. But this time, as he let go and slipped back into the water, a gust of wind pushed the helicopter downward, lowering the basket with Gelera in it. At that exact moment, a large wave came rushing forward. The wave swallowed the basket and pulled the cable taut, like a big fish on a line.
Inside the cabin, the soothingly calm robotic voice of the alarm sensor warned “Altitude, altitude,” as the Jayhawk dropped and Post struggled to gain some lift. Down in the water, the basket was getting carried away by the wave so swiftly that Andrews worried it would get ripped from the hoist. He began frantically playing out cable to put some slack in the line. Then, afraid he might run out of cable, he started giving the pilot directions to keep up with the basket: “Back and left 10 . . . Back and left 20.” Pilots, as a rule, don’t like to hear big numbers. It means something is wrong and getting worse. Post was no exception. He was also dealing with the added challenge of having his sensory perception challenged; the black void outside still played havoc with his orientation, and while he maneuvered the controls to fly backward, he didn’t feel like the craft was in fact moving in reverse. The basket, meanwhile, came ripping through the wave, swinging back wildly in the other direction. Gelera clung with both hands to the sides of the basket as he was plunged into a sensory spin cycle, first submerged in seawater, then sent reeling uncontrollably through the dark night air.
From the liferaft, Chief Mate Latigo peeked through the curtain and saw his captain swinging in such a steep arc, he was sure the basket would flip and Gelera would tumble into the sea. Inside the helicopter, the violence of the return swing pinned Andrews’s head against the door, the cable gouging a deep line in his helmet and knocking his radio off. He was freed only when the cable swung back again in the other direction. By then, Post had regained control of the aircraft, which helped stabilize the cable, allowing Andrews to reel in the basket with a white-knuckled Gelera in it, for the most part unscathed.
Gelera crawled out of the basket and Andrews unclipped it from the cable, then sent the hook down to Cournia for the hover-taxi. But as the cable ran through Andrews’s gloved fingers he felt a snag. This was not good. Andrews inspected the cable as best he could in the dim light. At about the 70-foot mark some strands in the cable had broken, likely as a result of the whipsawing motion during the last recovery. As with the bird strike, an equipment problem of this magnitude triggered an automatic mission shutdown, per Coast Guard regulations. The helicopter would again have to return to Great Inagua, where the crew would have two options. They could swap out the cable drum or they could take the other helicopter. Andrews hoisted Cournia into the aircraft and explained the situation to the crew. Cournia suggested a quick splice, but in Andrews’s estimation, the spot where the cable was frayed was too high—too far from the basket connection—and the splice would not be strong enough for the strain of the work they still had to perform: hoisting the last three sailors. There was no avoiding it. They were headed back.
Cournia knelt down next to Capt. Gelera and explained what was happening. Gelera, struggling to contain his emotions, desperate not to leave anyone behind, replied: “By the way, sir, thank you so much for helping us. But please go back and save the crew members.”
McCarthy again checked with the Northland to see if there was any change in their assessment of the conditions to engage in a rescue operation. Capt. Ryan discussed the options, which still excluded a small boat rescue. Ryan said they could try to drift close enough to the raft so the men could climb aboard. But to do that he would probably wait until there was some daylight, which was still hours away. A nighttime rescue was just too risky. The two men agreed it was best to continue with the helicopter operation for now, even with this new delay.
As Post pointed the Jayhawk northwest toward the island, McCarthy radioed that they would be returning with a frayed hoist cable. He told the base they needed to use the other helicopter and asked that it be prepped and ready for flight. But in keeping with the night’s progress, there was yet another problem. The storm, which by now was heavily battering Great Inagua, had knocked out the island’s main power supply, which came from a giant generator. The air base had a backup generator that immediately kicked in, but the storm killed that as well. This meant the massive concrete doors of the hangar wouldn’t open. There was nothing for the Jayhawk to do except continue to the base and hope that the problem would be solved before they arrived.
On base, the ground crew scrambled for a solution. A giant chain connected to four different motors pulled the doors open and shut. Civilians were in the water, and that helicopter had to come out. The men on base had only minutes before the Jayhawk would return. Todd Taylor, the aviation technician who’d expedited the inspection after the bird strike, told his crew to grab tools and dismantle the motors. Once they were disengaged, the doors would roll with less resistance. The men then strapped to the door one end of a sling normally used to airlift equipment. They attached the other end to a mule, the vehicle used to pull the helicopters out onto the runway. Then they gunned the mule’s diesel engine, with its 212-feet-per-pound of torque, and wrenched the doors open, inch by inch.
By the time the Jayhawk landed, the ground crew was hooking up the second helicopter to tow it onto the runway. Post, McCarthy, Andrews and Cournia jumped out, grabbed the gear they needed and boarded the new Jayhawk. Gelera headed into the hangar to join Maco and the others, finally safe.
The Northland, meanwhile, had moved to within about a half mile of the liferaft and was sailing an oval-shaped pattern around the last three survivors. The seas were still too rough to get any closer. Joaquin remained a Category 4 hurricane, gusting up to 130 miles per hour, and it had grown in size. Hurricane-force winds now extended fifty miles out from the eye, and tropical storm-force winds extended out 200 miles, precisely where the rescue operation was taking place. There was a glimmer of hope, though. The storm was beginning its long-awaited shift to the northwest, a very slow turn at about 3 mph.
These were still dangerous seas for the tiny raft. But there were dangers also for the 270-foot Northland. Turning a ship in high seas can be perilous when the ship is broadside to the power and unpredictability of storm waves, and the cutter was doing it regularly—during every rotation of its oval pattern. It required a dexterous hand at the wheel. The conning officer, who gave commands to the helmsman, was trying to time the waves as he gave his commands. The idea was to drive into a swell slowly, then speed up as the ship turned, to minimize roll. At every turn, the quartermaster of the watch would wait for a signal, then announce over the public address, “Stand by for heavy rolls as the ship comes about.” The conning officer would then give the command for full rudder to turn the ship and “goose the engines” to drive the ship around quickly. Across the ship, the crew were doing crabwalks to get around, scurrying from one handhold to the next, which is why the ship’s safety maxim is “One hand for you, one for the ship.”
Eventually, the helicopter crew whirred back onto the scene in the new Jayhawk. Post, confident and practiced in his ability to hover in the high winds now, smoothly maneuvered into position over the raft. Cournia clipped in, and Andrews lowered him into the waves. The crew was synced like gears in a watch, moving quickly with as little wasted effort as possible. And to Cournia, it looked as if the lightning and rain had gotten even worse since the last sortie, which could generate more friction in the blades. Cournia slipped into the water and swam over to the raft. He pointed at Jules Cadet and pulled him into the sea.
Throughout the night, Cadet had oscillated between bouts of fear and surges of hope. When they’d first jumped into the raft and abandoned ship, he’d thought there was a strong possibility he would die. When the helicopter had arrived and started rescuing people, he’d thought they had a chance. When the helicopter left without him, his mind had spiraled back to its fixation on impending death. Then, when they survived inside the raft for so many hours and the helicopter returned for a third time, he again believed they might survive. But now that he was in the water, with the rescue swimmer gripping him securely, he somehow felt simultaneously safe and accepting that he might not live, despite the fact that he was closer to being rescued than he had been all night. It didn’t make sense, but he felt a strange mix of happiness and fear. He let the swimmer guide him through the water, which was reassuringly warm as well as powerfully threatening, and let the waves he had been cowering from all night wash over him.
Cournia swam Cadet over to the basket and loaded him inside. As the basket was hoisted, Cournia hung on to minimize swing, and as he was lifted out of the water he felt a sudden jolt pass through his entire body. It was so strong that it locked his arms in a spasm of convulsed muscle. He tried to free his grip but couldn’t. Eventually the jolt passed and Cournia was able to drop back into the water.
A special static discharge cable—which had been attached to the basket to siphon excess electricity generated by the helicopter’s blades cutting through the air—had somehow ripped off, and a current of electricity had passed from the helicopter’s metal frame down the cable to the basket. This meant Cournia had to be extra careful to make sure the basket was in contact with the water whenever he touched it, in order to provide a ground for the electricity.
The second-to-last survivor pulled out of the raft was Henry Latigo. When Cournia pointed at him, Latigo scooted forward clutching a plastic bag. “You can’t bring that,” Cournia told him. “Please, sir, may I?” Latigo pleaded. “It has our passports and certificates. If we don’t have this maybe we can’t work?”
Latigo was a lifelong sailor, which in all practical terms meant he was a man of no nation. Like Gelera he had shipped out early, leaving his home on Cebu Island as a young man to become a merchant mariner nearly 40 years ago. He had been married, but the union didn’t survive his long absences. He hadn’t been home to see what family he had left in seven years. He had no permanent address other than the ship he was on, and right now that home was at the bottom of the sea. Without papers, Latigo would be as adrift in the modern world as he was right now. He was a good choice to guard that bag and make sure it arrived onto dry land. It contained his entire existence.
Cournia relented and pulled Latigo and his big plastic bag filled with the crew’s documents, as well as the boat’s money, into the water. Holding on to the collar of Latigo’s life vest, Cournia swam him to the basket, floated him inside and sent him up to the helicopter. When the cable came back down, Cournia clipped himself in and was taxied over to the raft for the very last survivor.
The last sailor’s rescue went so smoothly it was almost forgettable—Cournia, utterly spent by then, has almost no recollection of it—except for the unforgettable fact that a man’s life was being saved. At any rate, the sailor rode up without incident—the last in the ragged line of sodden, desperate men who had been on the receiving end of Joaquin’s fury all night long. When the sailor was safely inside the helicopter’s cabin, Andrews un-clipped the basket and sent the cable and hook down one last time. Cournia, bobbing in seas that had tried and failed to subdue him for the past 10 hours, grabbed the hook and clipped in. As he was lifted out of the water and hoisted up by his crewmate, he felt his body go limp with fatigue at an effort that had pushed his training to the limit. Around him the winds still whipped and below him the waves still collided and plumed into a white froth. Dawn was just starting to speckle the sky with its light, faint rays of green and pink struggling to make their way through the cloud cover.
McCarthy radioed the Northland that the mission was over. District 7 was notified and radioed in one last request: Could the swimmer please puncture the life raft so it would not be a hazard to shipping?
Cournia, safe in the helicopter and finally headed back to base, rolled his eyes.
The request was politely declined.
The storm was still raging, the sky still mostly dark, but McCarthy and Post could see the day’s first light bleeding over the edge of the horizon below the cloud cover as the Jayhawk settled onto the tarmac back on Great Inagua. It was 6:25 A.M. In the left ankle pocket of McCarthy’s flight suit, where it had been the entire time, was his daughter’s stuffed turtle.
After landing and signing the aircraft in, Post walked over to greet the Minouche crew, who were huddled under blankets on the hangar deck. He wanted to make sure they were okay, of course, but he was also curious about what had happened on the ship. The captain explained how their ordeal had gone down: the list, the loss of engine power, the big wave. It had been a horrific night, but they were all smiles now. They said thanks—mési in Haitian Creole—shaking Post’s hand and clapping his shoulder. Post wished them well. Then he headed to his hooch.
The helicopter crew was exhausted but still wired from the adrenaline that had coursed through their veins throughout the night. They all wanted to get a message to their families, but the base’s internet connection and phones were down. Cournia had been messaging with his wife right before he was called to the hangar. His last words to her were something to the effect of “Gotta go, there’s a ship down in a storm.” Post’s wife, Rachel, also a Coast Guard helicopter pilot, was well aware her husband was on a mission in a hurricane and was waiting with growing apprehension to hear whether he was back. Eventually, the base’s communications officer relayed a message through to Clearwater, asking the air station to contact all the families and let them know the guardsmen were safe. Finally, the men could get some rest.
Andrews was starving, but once he got to his hooch, he realized he was too tired to feed himself. Instead, he collapsed into bed.
From the book Into the Storm by Tristram Korten. Copyright © 2018 by Tristram Korten. Reprinted with permission from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
View the original article to see embedded media.
This article originally appeared in the February 2019 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/at-sea/book-excerpt-into-the-storm
