Listening to his fellow crewmates, Bob Doyle was certain that he was in the best shape of any of them. Gig Mork was “as tough as shoe leather,” enduring without a word of complaint. Mark Morley was grievously cold. And Mike DeCapua was also sliding toward serious trouble.
Then the moment for which Doyle had so fervently hoped and so patiently waited during close to seven hours of freezing hell came to pass when the rescue basket plopped down in the water just thirty feet away.
Seeing his chance, Doyle wrapped his legs around Mark Morley, unzipped his own suit, reached inside, located the knife he had dangling from a loop of halibut ganion he wore around his neck, and slid it carefully from its sheath. Then he painstakingly zipped his suit all the way back up, sliding the sealing mechanism up over his chest and up along the underside of his chin, securing it just below his mouth. Though some seawater did spill in, Doyle was relieved, even delighted, that he’d managed to retrieve his knife without flooding his survival suit altogether.
“Bob, you take Mark,” yelled Gig Mork. “You’re probably a better
swimmer than I am. Take him to the basket! Mike and I’ll wait and catch the next ride.”
With those words, Mark Morley suddenly jolted awake. His revival startled Doyle. It was as if Morley had been hibernating the entire time, lingering in a physical state somewhere near death, lost in the numbed semiconsciousness of the extreme stages of hypothermia.
“We’re going to do it, Mark!” shouted Doyle, astonished at his lost friend’s sudden recovery.
“You damn right we’re going to do it!” agreed Morley.
Doyle was thrilled to have him back. He drew Morley in close then and yelled into his face. “This is it, Mark!” he announced, his voice building. “We gotta go now, man! We gotta catch this one! This is our chance! We’re going to make it! We’re going to do it! This is it! Do you hear me? I need everything you’ve got!”
With his adrenaline pumping, Doyle cut the ropes that bound them. Doyle was amazed at Morley’s determination to live. Yet in spite of it, Doyle soon discovered that his skipper could barely move. Without his glasses, he was nearly blind now, as well. But he was still fighting. Morley, he realized, was “one hell of a fighter.” And with that, Doyle began dragging Morley through the water toward the waiting basket.
“Let’s go, Mark! Let’s go!” repeated Doyle again and again.
“I’m trying! I’m trying!” Morley assured him.
They slid down the face of the approaching swell and managed to reach the basket, which was almost completely submerged in the body of the wave. Doyle immediately set out to help Morley into it, but he quickly discovered that his friend was so stiff, and his survival suit was so filled with seawater, that there was no way to accomplish the task. Instead, he worked his way around to the opposite side of the basket and crawled inside. Quickly positioning himself on his knees, Doyle reached out between the corner posts and cable rigging, grabbed Morley under the arms, and tried to pull him into the basket. He managed to get Morley’s arms and elbows inside, but then, as he tried to yank the rest of the skipper’s body aboard, the wave dropped out from under them, leaving them suspended in air.
As the water fell away, Mark Morley was left dangling in space,
clutching the side of the basket and struggling mightily to bear up under, in addition to his own weight, the sizable burden of seawater in his suit, all of which was now threatening to break his grip and strip him away.
Blind to the details of the drama unfolding below, Fred Kalt began hoisting them toward the waiting helicopter at top speed.
“Hang on!” yelled Doyle to his friend as they rose.
Dangling beneath the helo on the end of the 150-foot length of cable, they began swinging back and forth through the sleet-filled space, spinning slowly as they rose, in long pendulum-like arcs.
“Don’t drop me, Bob!” begged Mark Morley, his pasty white face and pleading eyes peering up at Doyle. “Please don’t drop me!”
“I’m not going to drop you, Mark!” screamed Doyle. “Just hang on!”
Doyle was on his hands and knees inside the basket, pushing frantically down on Morley’s arms. But as the chopper dipped and rolled, the basket responded in kind, leaping and falling and heaving about in ever-tightening circles as it ascended toward the helo’s cabin door.
“Hang on to me, Bob! Hang on!” yelled Mark Morley.
Except for the sticklike patches of retrotape occasionally reflecting back, those riding the basket remained invisible to the men in the chopper. The basket swung back and forth under the aircraft’s belly, emerging only briefly. When it did, the grinding force of the cable rubbing against the helo eased, allowing Fred Kalt a better angle on the basket.
“Hang on, Bob!” yelled Morley, still clinging to the side of the rising basket.
“He was looking at me,” Bob Doyle recalls, “and he said, ‘Don’t drop me!’ And I said, ‘I’m not!’ I tried to grab onto the hood material on the top of his head, biting at it with my teeth, but I couldn’t.”
“I yelled at him, ‘We’re there! We’re almost there! Hang on, Mark! Hang on!’”
“We got up to the helicopter, and Mark yelled, ‘Hang on!’ But I couldn’t hang on to him any longer, because we were just hanging and hanging and hanging. He was still hanging, and he was looking me in the face, and I could feel him slipping.”
When Doyle looked again into Mark Morley’s blanched face, he saw a poignant expression of disbelief lingering there.
“He was freezing,” recalls Doyle. “I was looking into Mark’s eyes when he fell. Then I just saw him floating through space.”
Those inside the helicopter had a somewhat different perspective. The moment the basket outside rose even with the side door, Fred Kalt proclaimed flatly, “Survivor is at the cabin door.”
Then, just as he’d done ten thousand times before, he swung the rectangular-shaped basket into a lengthwise position and reefed back on it.
“Bringing in the basket, sir,” he added.
But the basket refused to budge. Kalt couldn’t figure it out. He’d raised the basket up to the door and stopped it in exactly the place he always had. Perhaps he’d failed to lift it high enough. Kalt hoisted it a few inches higher and attempted once again to pull it aboard, but the basket still refused to swing in. Some part of it seemed to be bumping into the ledge of the doorway.
“The basket won’t come in!” he radioed Lee Honnald finally. “Pull, Lee! Pull the basket! It’s not coming in!”
Kalt sat down on the floor, propped one foot on either side of the door opening, and pulled forcefully on the nearest end of the basket. “Pull!” yelled Kalt, giving it his all.
“I’m pulling as hard as I can!” said Lee Honnald, joining in the effort.
Normally, pulling in the basket was a perfunctory part of the exercise. Mike Fish couldn’t grasp why the basket wouldn’t slide right in as it always did. As he peered down near his crewmate’s feet, he spotted the hooded head and drenched white face of a man clinging to the outside of the rescue basket. His hands and arms were actually draped inside the far side of the litter. He was straining desperately to hold on, while the man crouched inside the small basket was fighting frantically to pin the man’s arms there and keep him from slipping.
Two healthy young Coast Guard men, their systems charged with
adrenaline, could easily exert the combined pulling force of five hundred pounds or more in such a situation. Each time they yanked on the rescue basket, however, the clinging figure was slammed against the side of the helicopter.
Then the battered survivor looked up at Fish, and, just for a moment, their eyes met.
“Fred! There’s someone hanging on the basket!” yelled Mike Fish, pointing.
In just the time it took Mike Fish to point with his arm and speak those seven words, the man (Mark Morley) vanished. Fish was astonished. One second the man was there, and in the next, he was gone.
The instant Morley fell, the basket came sailing in, carrying Bob Doyle inside. Kalt glanced at Fish. He was soaked with sweat, his face red and dripping from the slap of the wind and spray blasting him. “A guy just fell,” reiterated Mike Fish.
Hoping for the best, Fish glanced back at his computer screen to see how far the man had fallen. He was sickened by what he saw. The fluorescent green numbers on the face of the altitude gauge read 103 feet.
A heavy silence followed. The watery impact after falling from such a height would essentially be like striking concrete.
“What’s going on?” Torpey demanded. “What’s happening?”
“I think someone fell,” replied Kalt.
“Who fell?” asked Torpey. “How’d a guy who was in the basket fall out?”
“I think there was someone hanging on the outside of the basket,” replied Kalt.
Mike Fish helped lift the survivor from the basket. The fisherman was almost inert with cold. In the dim indigo light of the rear cabin, he could see the man’s face pressing through the circular hole cut in the hood of his survival suit. There was something faintly familiar about it.
As Kalt shoved the rescue basket back out the side door, Fish dragged the survivor off to the side and strapped him into a seat against the far wall. Then the man pulled back the hood of his survival suit.
No one on board could believe it. It was Bob Doyle! He was one of them. He’d retired as a Coast Guard warrant officer the year before, saying that he was going to follow his dream of becoming a commercial fisherman.
“Good God, it’s Bob Doyle!” Fish radioed for all to hear. “Hey, we’ve got Bob Doyle aboard here with us!”
“Our Bob Doyle?” replied Steve Torpey. He glanced back, but could barely recognize the man. Doyle now had a thick red beard, something he had never had while serving at the USCG Air Station back in Sitka.
“Who fell?” Kalt asked Doyle.
“The skipper, Mark Morley,” he replied. “I think he’s probably dead.”
Now Mike Fish began plying Doyle with a rapid-fire series of questions. “What boat are you guys off of? What happened? Where are the other people? How many people were on the boat? And how many are in the water now?”
“There were four of us in the water,” said Doyle. “There were five people on the boat, but we lost Dave Hanlon. He got swept away early on. I think that he, too, is probably dead.” He paused, then said, “I had ahold of Mark, but I was losing my grip. And I was starting to get pulled out of the basket myself. I did everything I could to hold on to him, but I just couldn’t hold on to him any longer. That’s when he slipped and fell off.”
When Bob Doyle and Mark Morley first untied themselves and ventured out toward the rescue basket, those left behind feared for them.
What’s going to happen if they don’t make it? thought Mike DeCapua. If they don’t make the basket and another wave catches them out there, we’re not going to be able to get together again.
“Yes! Yes!” yelled DeCapua as the hazy, dripping forms of the basket and bodies rose from the sea.
One man was inside the basket, while the other appeared to be
hanging from the side. Once airborne, however, the chopper carrying them drifted steadily downwind, and the vision of both men and aircraft vanished into the storm.
“They’re not going to come back, are they?” asked Mike DeCapua. “They aren’t going to be able to get us, are they, Gig?”
“Oh, come on now,” countered Gig Mork. “We’re going to make it. But whatever you do, just don’t let go of the EPIRB. If you do let go of that baby, I’ll drown you myself!”
“Okay, Gig. Okay.”
As Fish looked after their first survivor, Steve Torpey let the helicopter slide back and spotted the body of Mark Morley. He was floating facedown in the water. Torpey saw him drift up and over the crest of a wave, then slide down the other side. He was spread-eagled and, if not dead, clearly unconscious. At that point, Torpey was faced with a momentous decision. For a time, he studied the body for any sign of life or movement. He was finally forced to conclude that, without help from either their rescue swimmer or Morley himself, there would be no way of getting him into the basket. In such a violent sea, however, there was no way that either he or Ted Le Feuvre could, in good conscience, deploy their rescue swimmer.
“Sir, who do you want to go for next?” asked Fred Kalt.
“Let’s go for the two guys next to the EPIRB,” replied Torpey regretfully.
Despite the emotional roller coaster of gaining one survivor, then losing another, Torpey and Kalt had acquired, in their flight maneuvers, an almost telepathic communication. Snatching the one fisherman from the sea and bringing him safely on board had served to solidify that connection and boost their confidence.
“Fred, begin the hoist again,” said Torpey.
Kalt played out approximately 125 feet of cable and started conning his friend into position. “Forward and right three hundred feet,” he said.
Twenty minutes of trial and error later, of losing ground and position,
and then regaining it, Kalt radioed Torpey. “Basket’s in the water, sir. Hold position.”
This time, as Kalt watched, he saw the hazy figures of what appeared to be the last two fishermen abandon the EPIRB, free themselves from the security of their rope loops, and begin making their sluggish way toward the fluorescent form of the rescue basket. Once again, as the helicopter teetered in its tenuous hover, Kalt patiently tried to allow the almost indecipherable figures all the time he could before taking up the slack.
Mike DeCapua and Gig Mork had been waiting for the right moment to make their move. To DeCapua, the idea of leaving the security of the EPIRB and lines behind was “scary as hell.” Then they saw the basket drop down on the side of a wave well off and away from them. They would have to swim a ways, but they decided to go for it.
But when Gig Mork loosened the grip he had on Mike DeCapua, he discovered that his friend could barely move. “Come on, man!” encouraged Gig Mork, tugging on him as they went. “You can do it! Hell, we’re almost there!”
“Sir, I think we have the survivors in the basket” Kalt said, radioing his pilot. “Preparing to take the load.” There was nothing more to be done except hoist them, and Kalt made haste now to accomplish that task.
When the wind-battered basket and its exhausted cargo broke free of the sea, Gig Mork and Mike DeCapua were caught still climbing aboard, clinging tenaciously to the outside of it, they had risen perhaps forty feet toward the comfort and security of the chopper hovering above, when a wave six stories high drove into them.
Crouched in the chopper’s doorway, Fred Kalt hit the lift switch, flipping it to its maximum up setting. But he knew it was hopeless. There was no way to alter the potentially disastrous encounter unfolding
before his eyes. The head-on collision between the basket and the towering breaker that reached nearly up to the chopper itself was unavoidable.
Mork and DeCapua braced themselves as the oncoming wave exploded over the basket, burying it under several fathoms of moving sea. They could hear the helicopter engines revving high under the strain.
They surfaced, choking. As the basket rose, Mike DeCapua was nearly stripped away. He fumbled for a handhold, caught himself, then slipped again, tumbling awkwardly backward. I’m dead, he thought as he plunged into the sea.
“Somebody else fell,” radioed Lee Honnald in the helicopter. “A wave hit him.”
“He’s all right, isn’t he?” shot back the captain.
“Yah, he’s still swimming.”
While the impact of the wave knocked Mike DeCapua off the basket, Gig Mork continued his ascent. His wiry, labor-hardened body was wrapped around the frame of the basket as tenaciously as a monkey to a cage. Stunned by the collision, Mork nevertheless held fast. The second he felt himself break free of the water, he inhaled deeply of the cold January air. Though his survival suit was heavy with seepage, he maintained a death grip on the wire corner cable of the rescue litter, and as he rose on his spray-soaked journey, he could feel himself being pressed down by the G-forces and encountered the cold buffeting of the storm winds as he climbed toward the clacking chopper overhead. There’s no way I’m going to let go of this! he thought.
He’d been hoisted nearly to the chopper by the time he realized that Mike DeCapua was missing. He’s gone! Mike’s gone! thought Gig Mork. I’m going up. I can’t help Mike now. If I let go now and fall back down there and go after him, I’m not going to make it, either.
“The tension,” recalls Gig Mork, “got worse and worse as I drew closer to that chopper. You’re so tense the whole time, seven hours of fighting that stuff, of getting so close and wanting to get there. You’re going and you’re going and you’re going, and all the while, it’s a real adrenaline rush. And then you get there and—boom—you feel like butter on the skillet—you just melt.
“Inside the helicopter, one of the Coast Guard guys pulled me down between his legs and left me lying there. I just lay there for a while. I couldn’t move at all.”
As he looked around, Mork expected to see Mark Morley already on board. “Hey, Bob!” he called to Doyle from his prone position on the floor. “Where’s Mark?”
“He didn’t make it,” replied Doyle.
“What do you mean, he didn’t make it? Where the hell’s he at?”
“He fell from the basket.”
Gig Mork received the news in silent disbelief.
“Where’s Mike?” asked Bob Doyle finally.
“He fell, too,” said Mork dejectedly.