WHEN THE GALE swept over Ireland during Monday night, it seemed like any other summer storm that catches a few boats out in the Western Approaches to England. The wind built to thirty then forty knots. But it kept increasing, and by the time it reached fifty and more, the coastguards who watch over the 180-mile stretch of water between Land’s End and Fastnet Rock knew they had a force 10 gale on their hands.
The distress calls increased in number as the wind strengthened. A yacht named Regardless lost her rudder before midnight, and the lifeboat based in Baltimore, Ireland, was dispatched to tow her in. Then Wild Goose, Accanito, and Magic sent out Maydays over marine radio frequencies, and by 3:00 A.M. (British Summer Time), on Tuesday morning, August 14, four lifeboats—three Irish and one English—were pounding over and through seas they reported as “very high” in search of half a dozen distressed yachts.
The people who live on either side of the Western Approaches are never surprised by bad weather, even during August, normally the warmest month of the year. Neither are they surprised by what wind and waves can do to ships and yachts. Yet as the airwaves became filled with Maydays and the sky over the Approaches was dotted with flares, the coastguards and lifeboat men stationed in the Irish Republic and in western Britain soon realized that a major disaster was developing that early morning. At 3:16 A.M., the Land’s End Coastguard station requested help from the Southern Rescue Co-ordination Centre (SRCC) at Plymouth. The air force and naval officers at the SRCC were not at all surprised by the request; they had been monitoring the distress frequencies and the weather was deteriorating. They also knew that many yachts—just how many they were not sure—were out in the Western Approaches participating in the 605-mile Fastnet race. The SRCC ordered that search and rescue airplanes and helicopters be brought to readiness for takeoff at dawn at the Kinloss and Culdrose air bases.
First light came slowly on that wind-torn, overcast morning, but by 5:30, the Culdrose Naval Air Station, near Helston in Cornwall, was vibrating with the whirl of blades and the whine of turbine engines. The first helicopter lifted off at 5:35, manned by the standby crew that is always within a few minutes of the base. Fifteen minutes later, another helicopter was aloft; its pilot and airmen had been called in from summer leave. Those two were followed by six more, some borrowed from bases as far away as Prestwick, Scotland.
By 6:30, three helicopters and a Nimrod search and rescue airplane, from Kinloss, were over the Western Approaches. Warm and dry, the helicopter crews monitored the radios and peered down at the broiling water, searching for yachts in trouble. Two hundred feet below them, in much less comfort, the crews of the lifeboats, of the fisheries protection vessel HMS Angelsey, and of the Dutch frigate Overijssel (the guard ship for the race since no British ship had been available) squinted through the stinging spray and cold, driving wind. Far above flew the Nimrod, which, with her battery of radios and tracking devices (its military function is to trace submarines), assumed the job of on-scene search commander. Its radios, with a range far greater than any of those below, were picking up panic-stricken voices from all over the Western Approaches. The distress calls overlapped with each other and gave confusingly similar messages: was it one boat or were there ten that had capsized, been dismasted, lost rudders or crews? And where were they? With twenty thousand square miles to cover, and with poor visibility, the rescuers were almost helpless.
For a while, only good luck brought the rescuers to the yachts in trouble. When they arrived, the helicopter crews discovered that many, if not most, of the crews wanted to abandon ship immediately. The helicopter crews are experts at their business, and their ability is legendary in Great Britain. In all of 1978, air-sea rescue helicopters based at Culdrose had saved one hundred and fifty people from sinking boats and ships, beaches, and cliffs.
“Can we be taken off?” a man in the French yacht Tarantula radioed to a helicopter.
“It won’t be easy,” the pilot responded.
Her crew thought Tarantula was sinking; they felt they had to abandon. Because the mast of the wildly rolling yacht was a menace to the retrieving cable, the airmen, hovering forty feet overhead, indicated that they could only pick people out of the water. One sailor quickly jumped overboard and swam away from the yacht. The helicopter crew dropped the cable and rescue harness to him, and, in his bulky life jacket, he struggled to fit into the sling as waves broke over him. After twenty minutes, he signaled to the airmen, who winched him up. Secured to the cable only by his tightly clenched hands, the sailor skimmed through the thirty-foot waves and was blown through a great arc by the sixty-knot wind until he was hauled into the chopper’s cabin. Understandably discouraged by their shipmate’s experience, the remainder of Tarantula’s crew decided to stay on board and risk sinking.
Shuttling back and forth from their base to the maelstrom, the helicopters were to rescue seventy-four sailors. Despite their extraordinary efforts, the airmen could not find a yacht named Grimalkin. By midmorning on Tuesday, the SRCC knew that more than three hundred yachts crewed by almost three thousand sailors were caught in the storm. Many boats were never heard from, either because they did not have radios or because they were lucky and safe. Others sent out distress calls and were quickly located; a few unfortunate boats radioed Mayday and were not found until they were beyond help.
At 6:00 A.M. Tuesday, a coastguard broadcast said, “Yacht Grimalkin capsized in position thirty miles north-west of Land’s End.” Before dawn, Grimalkin had sent out a Mayday and a position, and the message had been relayed to Land’s End by a larger yacht (perhaps the seventy-seven-foot round-the-world racer Condor of Bermuda). At 6:30, Culdrose told a helicopter with the call sign Wessex-520 to fly over the reported position on its way to the Isles of Scilly, where five yachts were said to have dragged their anchors and gone ashore. Wessex-520 found nothing at “position thirty miles north-west of Land’s End” and returned to Culdrose to refuel. At about the same time, the coastguards (which serve as the first alert in the British maritime rescue system) asked the St. Ives, Cornwall, lifeboat to launch in search of Grimalkin. En route to the reported position, the lifeboat was directed by the Nimrod airplane to the French yacht Azenora II, which was participating not in the Fastnet race but in a race for single-handed sailors from Ireland to Brittany. The lifeboat towed the little yacht and her one-man crew to St. Ives.
At 7:15, another Wessex helicopter, number 521, lifted off from Culdrose with orders to search for Grimalkin. About an hour later, its pilot reported, “Am not in communication with anyone. Returning to Culdrose.” Clearly, Grimalkin was not in the position she had reported. Soon, a new position was given by somebody who had seen her in the middle of the Western Approaches: 50º50’ north, 6º50’ west—sixty-five miles northwest of Land’s End.
Culdrose once again dispatched Wessex-520 to find Grimalkin and, if necessary, rescue her crew. But the helicopter first came across the dismasted and sinking yacht Magic, whose distress had been reported as early as 5:00 A.M. At about 10:30, Magic’s five crew members were hauled into the helicopter and flown to Culdrose, where they were taken to the sick bay, given hot baths, and put to bed.
A bit later, a Sea King-type helicopter, larger and faster than the Wessex type, picked three men out of a life raft. They said they had abandoned Grimalkin, leaving behind two dead or dying companions.
Meanwhile, Wessex-527 was flying three- and four-hour sorties out into the Approaches, returning to Culdrose for periods as brief as five minutes to refuel, change crews, and disembark survivors. At 11:20, the helicopter approached Camargue, a thirty-four-foot English sloop whose crew had endured a fearsome battering. At 8:45 A.M., she had been smashed by a wave that threw all men on deck overboard. Two were rolled back on deck by the same wave, but Wilf Gribble, who had been steering, was left hanging upside down over the transom, tangled in lifelines that had been broken under the impact of his flying body. Gribble crawled back aboard.
An hour later, a huge wave broke on her deck, threw Gribble and the steering wheel he was holding overboard, and rolled Camargue completely over, where she remained for several seconds before righting herself. Gribble again climbed back aboard over the transom, and he helped retrieve another man who was dragging in the water at the end of the rope tether of his safety harness. Arthur Moss, the boat’s owner, was pulled through the water with such force that some of his clothes and his wristwatch were torn off.
Camargue’s crew had had enough; Moss sent a Mayday over marine radio. When the helicopter arrived, the men, realizing that they could not be picked off the yacht, went into the water one after another—some voluntarily, others pushed by Moss. As one man later said, “The idea of jumping in was appalling,” but there was no other way to get off the yacht, which seemed to be foundering. Wessex-527 retrieved the men one at a time.
With the eight men of Camargue’s crew on board, the helicopter returned to Culdrose, refueled, and was back in the air fifteen minutes later. After several hours of fruitless searching, she refueled at the British Airways helicopter base on St. Mary’s, in the Isles of Scilly, and headed west once more to resume the search.
Again short of fuel, Wessex-527 approached a racing yacht named Golden Apple of the Sun. An Irish boat (her name is from a poem by Yeats), she was one of the stars of the 1979 yacht racing summer. With a crew that included a three-time Olympic yachting medalist, Rodney Pattison, and her celebrated designer, Ron Holland, this forty-three-footer was a member of the three-boat Irish team competing in the Admiral’s Cup, an unofficial world championship of ocean racing that includes the Fastnet as its major race. Coming into the Fastnet race, the Irish had been leading the eighteen other competing countries, but the race had been their undoing. One member of the Irish team, Regardless, had lost her rudder, and now Golden Apple of the Sun was also rudderless. Early that morning, the cables had jumped off the rudder quadrant, and the crew had lowered the sails for two hours to make repairs. They got under way again, but a couple of hours later, Ron Holland, who was at the helm, completely lost control. The rudder had broken off.
The helicopter drops a hook to an airman and a Camargue crew member. Royal Navy
The crew had planned for such an emergency. They screwed a metal plate to the end of the spinnaker pole and hung the pole over the stern to serve as an emergency tiller. But the spinnaker pole almost immediately broke. Depressed as only a sure winner-turned-loser can be, the wet, cold crew hung on to the violently rolling boat. They were made no happier by hearing a radio report that a man was lost and presumed drowned from another racing yacht, Festina Tertia.
A helicopter, Wessex-527, appeared on the horizon, quickly approached, and hovered overhead. By radio, its pilot told Golden Apple of the Sun’s owner, Hugh Coveney, that he would have to make up his mind quickly about abandoning. With the Scilly Isles only forty miles to leeward, Coveney decided to go ashore and charter a powerboat to return to tow Golden Apple to port. Some of the crew disagreed, but the navigation lights were turned on, a radar reflector was hoisted, and bumpers were hung over the side. This was partly to protect her against collision with other vessels, partly to discourage would-be salvagers, who by law could lay claim to the yacht if her crew abandoned her with no plans to return.
Coveney decided to paddle out from the boat in the life raft. Its CO2 cartridge was triggered, but the raft inflated only partially. When it was dropped in the water, its bowline immediately parted, but a crew member managed to grab it before it drifted away. The entire ten-man crew did not fit into the raft, so some men had to lie across others. When they were all aboard, the raft did not float away from Golden Apple, which threatened to roll over on its awkwardly seated crew. Seeing this risk, the helicopter’s diver, Leading Aircrewman Smiler Grinney, dropped down from the Wessex, swam over, and pulled the near awash raft away from the yacht, and the pilot helped by aiming the downdraft between the vessels. The sailors were hauled, one by one, into the helicopter.
Grimalkin still had not been found as the eighteen men rescued by Wessex-527 and the dozens more picked up by the seven other helicopters recovered from their ordeal in the Culdrose sick bay. When Sea King-590 took off at 6:30, it was on one of the last missions of the day. It had flown down from Prestwick, Scotland, Tuesday morning. This was the first mission for one of her two winchmen, Peter Harrison, a twenty-year-old midshipman who had only recently completed two years of training in air-sea rescue.
After two hours of patrolling, the crew spotted a dismasted white yacht with a black transom on which was written: “Grimalkin, Southampton, RAFYC.” Two motionless men were sprawled in her cockpit. Peter Harrison stepped into the sling, and in his helmet, overalls, life jacket, and emergency pack, which included an uninflated two-man life raft, he was lowered to the yacht by the winch operator. Grimalkin rose on a wave to meet him, and he hit her deck with a bone-crushing thud.
Harrison picked himself up and looked around the deck of the wildly rolling yacht. She was a mess, with bits of mast, rigging, and sails strewn everywhere. He turned to the two men and told them that they had little time: it was getting dark, the helicopter could not wait, they had to abandon now.
One of the men, the younger one, seemed not to be listening. With tears pouring down his cheeks, he said, over and over again, “I must get my clothes.” The other man, lying in the bottom of the cockpit, said nothing. It took a moment for Harrison to realize that the other man was dead.
