Although it’s the graveyard shift, Search and Rescue (SAR) Coordinator Brian Avelsgard is wide awake and busy at the Command Center in Portsmouth, Virginia. There are two other coordinators working alongside him, and they have also called their captain, David McBride, at home and woken him up to keep him apprised of the rapidly changing situation. Each of these coordinators has a computer with a dual monitor, a couple of phones, and an assortment of emergency procedure manuals for different scenarios. The computers are used for rescue planning. Coordinators can input the type of vessel (particularly the amount of freeboard exposed to the wind), the estimated flight time for a C-130 plane to reach the boat in distress, and current on-scene weather. The computer then assists the coordinator in determining where the vessel may have drifted by the time the aircraft arrives.
The SAR team is well aware that the low-pressure system has grown to a powerful storm centered approximately two hundred miles out to sea off the coast of the Carolinas. The prior evening, when the storm’s leading edge first impacted the inshore waters, the coordinators worked a case involving three fishermen on an eighteen-foot powerboat. The captain of the vessel had radioed the Coast Guard at eight p.m., explaining that he and his friends were trapped in a salt marsh due to wind and waves overpowering the boat. Brian Avelsgard dispatched a small Coast Guard utility boat to rescue the crew, but the rescue attempt had to be aborted because the water in the marsh was not deep enough for the utility boat. The only way to get the men off the vessel was by helicopter, so one was dispatched at nine p.m. The rescue swimmer faced an unusual challenge. Instead of being dropped into the ocean, he was lowered into three feet of water with a mud bottom and performed the rescue while standing up. All three fishermen were hoisted up without incident.
Although the rescue sounds like a simple one, Avelsgard was relieved when it was over. Any time he sends a helicopter up at night, he knows the challenges to the crew are doubled. Now he must be cognizant of the fact that the helicopter crew has used up some of their flying hours. Crews have “bag limits,” or maximum flight times that must be monitored to make sure they have some rest before logging too many hours. Exhaustion is as dangerous to flight personnel as weather conditions.
Now, at approximately two a.m., Avelsgard is keeping track of the sailing vessel Seeker, which is dragging anchor off Diamond Shoals. He has been in communication with Coast Guard Station Oregon Inlet, whose radio operator is in contact with the sailboat captain. They are hoping that the boat can remain in deep water until daybreak, when a rescue won’t be as dangerous. The captain agrees that he is not in a Mayday situation and that he will keep the Coast Guard advised of his situation with periodic updates.
Suddenly, an EPIRB distress notification flashes on the SAR Center’s designated computer screen. It is not from the Seeker but for a vessel named the Lou Pantai. Coordinator Avelsgard has no way of knowing that this is the name of JP’s earlier boat, indicating that the signal came from JP’s backup EPIRB. It washed off the Sean Seamour II during its knockdown and came free of the hardtop dodger so that it floated on the ocean and transmitted. (This is a minor miracle, because it does not have a hydrostatic release mechanism to free it from its cradle, so it should have sunk with the hardtop dodger.) At this point there is no location associated with the beacon. Avelsgard will have to wait for another satellite to pass before he can get a fix, and this length of time can vary widely from case to case. In the meantime, Avelsgard reviews the telephone contacts that the owner of the EPIRB listed when the device was first registered. By making these calls, the SAR Center can gather a wealth of preliminary information. First and foremost, coordinators hope they can talk to the captain of the vessel so they can find out if the EPIRB is a false alarm or truly a distress signal.
False alarms from EPIRBs are a major problem for SAR coordinators. Sometimes the EPIRB starts transmitting when it is undergoing a periodic checkup or when new batteries are installed. In other cases, a water-activated EPIRB is knocked off a boat and sends a signal, or it falls on deck and is activated before the crew can turn it off. If the crew is not in radio range, they have no way to tell the Coast Guard it is a false alarm. Occasionally, a boat owner buys an EPIRB and, incredibly, doesn’t bother to complete the registration process. These signals are especially frustrating to the Coast Guard. If an unregistered EPIRB goes off, it might be a real emergency, but the Coast Guard will have nothing to work with if the first alert is from an undisclosed location due to poor satellite reception. Because the unit wasn’t registered, the Coast Guard has no list of telephone numbers to call and start gathering information about the vessel and where it might be in its voyage. Anyone on a boat in distress without a registered EPIRB had better hope and pray that a subsequent satellite pass will give the SAR team an exact location. Otherwise the Coast Guard just knows that somewhere, anywhere, a boat’s EPIRB is going off.
Captain McBride cites one last example why it’s so important for the SAR coordinator to gather as much information as possible before sending a C-130 or helicopter crew into a dangerous storm. “Every now and then a captain of a vessel will activate the EPIRB thinking they are in real danger. Then an hour later, something changes—maybe they regain engine power, or maybe the waves abate a bit—and the vessel moves on. By the time our rescue crew arrives on-scene, the boat is gone, but our aircraft stays out in the storm searching for the vessel or people in the water.”
While Avelsgard is dialing the number for the first contact associated with the Lou Pantai, yet another distress signal comes in. This one is from a GPIRB registered to a boat named the Cold Duck. A fixed location is given at approximately 225 nautical miles southeast of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on the eastern side of the Gulf Stream near the center of the storm. One of the coordinators starts to call the Cold Duck’s contacts, starting with the home telephone number of the boat’s captain, located in Alabama. The coordinator expects the captain’s wife or a family member to answer and confirm that the vessel is out on the Atlantic and that the distress signal must be for real. Instead, the captain himself answers and says he is at home in bed. He explains that his boat is safely moored at a harbor on the Alabama coast and that the GPIRB must be malfunctioning or that someone tampered with it. The coordinator asks him to go down to the boat and disable the GPIRB so they don’t get any more signals, especially since they are in the middle of coordinating two potential rescues during a storm.
What no one knows is that the identification number for the Cold Duck’s GPIRB is the same as the number assigned to the GPIRB that JP bought for the Sean Seamour II. The IDs are designated by the manufacturer, and it’s up to the GPIRB’s owner to fill out the forms that go to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Both JP and the Cold Duck owner did so correctly. JP’s GPIRB was the older of the two, so he was the first one to send his information in. Months later, when the Cold Duck owner did the same thing, NOAA’s clerical process showed that the same ID number had been registered earlier. The NOAA operator overrode JP’s earlier registration, because each beacon is required to have a unique ID. The operator assumed that there was only one GPIRB, and it had been sold by the owner of the Sean Seamour II to the owner of the Cold Duck, so the registration for the Cold Duck became the active one. The whole GPIRB issue could have been catastrophic if JP had not kept the older EPIRB.
When an EPIRB is activated, a satellite detects the signal and relays the information to a NOAA group called Mission Control, located in Maryland. The operators at Mission Control decode the satellite information and convert it to longitude and latitude to determine which Coast Guard SAR Center is closest to the accident scene. The location fix, along with the identity of the vessel in distress, is passed to the proper SAR Center on a dedicated communication link via computer. This is how Brian Avelsgard was notified of the Lou Pantai EPIRB, followed by the Cold Duck GPIRB. Brian and his fellow SAR coordinators are focused on the Lou Pantai EPIRB (the one that fell off the Sean Seamour II), and just as he begins to call the first contact, a satellite gets a fix on the vessel and Mission Control relays the position: 225 nautical miles southeast of Elizabeth City. Before Avelsgard can process that this is the same position as the Cold Duck’s—which they thought was from a malfunctioning GPIRB—yet another EPIRB signal is detected. This one is from the Flying Colours, though no location is fixed. “We got another one!” shouts Avelsgard.
Avelsgard and McBride don’t need a location to know that the Flying Colours is likely off the coast of the Carolinas, where the storm must be exploding with more intensity than forecast. From Avelsgard’s perspective, all hell seems to be breaking loose out at sea. He’s had three emergency beacons go off in the last hour, and another vessel, the Seeker, is in trouble. The SAR coordinators know they are in for a hectic night, and each person digs in and begins the tasks associated with saving lives.
One of the coordinators alerts the Coast Guard C-130 captain on duty that they have an EPIRB hit with a fixed location and that he and his crew should prepare the plane and go to the scene. This advance work will take a bit longer than normal because the C-130 that’s ready for the mission is the one that landed at the civilian airport in Norfolk rather than the Coast Guard air station at Elizabeth City. The direction of the strong wind gusts at Elizabeth City is the same as the previous evening, so the safer runway is the one at Norfolk. The C-130 crew, staying at a hotel in Norfolk, hop in a van and race to the airport.
SAR coordinators activate the Amver program, but there are no ships near the coordinates from the EPIRB associated with the Lou Pantai. The closest Coast Guard cutter, the Tampa, is diverted from fisheries patrol off the coast of New Jersey to the distress scene of the Lou Pantai and the Flying Colours. It will not be an easy mission in such brutal, rampaging seas. They don’t expect to arrive for twenty-seven bruising hours. The captain of the Tampa, Steven A. Banks, likens the beating they take to being inside a 270-foot-long washing machine in the agitation cycle. Trying to operate in that wild motion takes its toll on the crew; many have sustained cuts and bruises as they brace themselves at their various stations. All the Coasties are focused on reaching the distress area as quickly as humanly possible, knowing that sailors might literally be barely hanging on to life. On board the Tampa is sophisticated radar supplemented by “Big Eye” binoculars; both are just the kind of equipment able to find a capsized boat or life raft.
• • •
The telephone calls to the contacts for the Lou Pantai are not going well. First JP’s son and daughter are contacted, and both tell the Coast Guard that their father sold that boat years ago. They explain that their father has a newer boat, the Sean Seamour II, but they don’t know if it is still in port outside Jacksonville, Florida, or if JP is even on it. Now the coordinators are really confused. Avelsgard thinks, This is bizarre. We have one emergency beacon to a vessel called the Cold Duck which is in port in Alabama, another to a vessel called the Lou Pantai that’s registered to a captain who sold it years ago. Then he realizes both emergency beacons are transmitting from the same location in the Atlantic, near the storm’s center. He is certain a boat is in trouble there, and he’s glad he alerted the C-130 crew to get ready to launch. He continues down the contacts for the Lou Pantai until he reaches a woman named Betty de Lutz, on Cape Cod.
• • •
Betty—Jean Pierre’s stepmother—is woken from a sound sleep by the ringing of the telephone. “Hello,” she answers groggily.
“This is the U.S. Coast Guard calling. Is your son, Jean Pierre de Lutz, on the ocean?”
“Yes,” she answers with trepidation.
“We have an emergency beacon registered to him going off. Do you know the name of his boat?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Is it the Lou Pantai?”
“Well, that was the name of his old boat, but he sold it. He now has a larger boat, but I’m not sure of its name. But if you have an emergency signal, it must be from him.”
Avelsgard tells Betty they are preparing to launch a C-130 plane to go to the boat. “We will call you back soon and keep you updated. We have more than one emergency beacon going off.”
Betty immediately starts praying for the safety of her son and his crew. She makes tea and sits by the phone, waiting for more information. When the phone rings, she jumps, then picks up the receiver, hoping for good news. Instead, the Coast Guard coordinator asks her to tell him everything she knows about JP’s proposed voyage. After they talk, Betty thinks of JP and how tough his life has been. She remembers the cruelty of her former husband toward his son and JP’s close call with Hurricane Bertha. But she also thinks of his newfound happiness with Mayke and their home in the mountains. Mayke! I should call Mayke. She reaches for the phone. Wait. Don’t do it. There’s nothing she can do, and this will just terrify her.
Betty starts cleaning the house to keep busy, though her mind envisions huge black waves on a storm-tossed sea.