Sebastian Junger: The Perfect Storm

PJs are known to carry dye for just such emergencies, and this undoubtedly comes from Rick Smith. The pilot circles lower and sees a dark shape at the center—probably Rick Smith himself. The search plane crew drop a marker buoy, life raft, and flare kit, and the pilot radios the coordinates in to Boston. A helicopter is diverted to the scene and the cutter Tamaroa, two and a half hours away, changes course and starts heading for the spot. An H-60 launches from Elizabeth City, escorted by a tanker plane, and a Navy jet equipped with forward-looking infrared is readied for takeoff. If the rescuers can't get Smith by helicopter, they'll get him by ship; if they can't get him by ship, they'll drop a life raft; if he's too weak to get into the life raft, they'll drop a rescue swimmer. Smith is one of their own, and they're going to get him one way or another.

It's full dark when the first helicopter, zeroed-in by the marker buoy, arrives on-scene. There's no sign of Smith. The Coast Guard pilot who spotted him, debriefed back on-base, says the dye was fresh and he was "awful sure" there was a man in the middle of it.

The seas were too rough to tell whether he swam to the life raft that was dropped to him, though. Three hours later one of the helicopter pilots radios that they've spotted Smith near the radio marker buoy. Another H-60 and tanker plane prepare to launch from Suffolk, but no sooner are those orders given than the pilot on-scene corrects himself: He didn't spot a person, he spotted a life raft. It was probably dropped by the Coast Guard earlier that day. The Suffolk aircraft stand down.

Throughout that night the storm slides south along the coast and then doubles back on itself, heading toward Nova Scotia and dissipating by the hour. The convective engine of the storm that sucks warm moist air off the ocean is finally starting to break down in cold northern water. By the morning of November 1st the conditions are stable enough to evacuate John Spillane, and he's strapped into a rescue litter and carried out of his room and onto the aft deck of the Tamaroa. He's hoisted up into the belly of an H-3 and flown to Atlantic City, where he's rushed into intensive care and given two units of blood. A few hours later a Coast Guardsman tracks down a search pilot who says that he dropped green dye into the water to mark a line he'd seen. That explains the dye but not the person spotted at the center of it. A Coast Guard survival specialist named Mike Hyde says that Smith could stay warm virtually forever in a quarter-inch wetsuit, but that he might drown by inhaling water into his lungs. There aren't any charts or graphs for survival time in the conditions he was in, Hyde says.

If Smith made it through the storm, though, Hyde's personal guess is that he could survive another four days. Eventually, he'll die of dehydration. The sea is much calmer now, but the search has been going full-bore for seventy-two hours without turning up anything; chances are almost nonexistent that Smith is alive. On the morning of November 2nd—the storm now over Prince Edward Island and failing fast—the cutter Tamaroa makes port at Shinnecock Inlet, Long Island, and Ruvola, Buschor, and Mioli are taken off by motor launch. Rick Smith's wife, Marianne, is at Suffolk Airbase for the event, and several people express concern over her watching the airmen reunited with their families.

What do they think, that I want those women to lose their husbands, too? she wonders. She takes John Brehm, the PJ supervisor, aside and says, Look, John, if they haven't found Rick by now, they're not going to. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a widow and I need to know what's going to happen.

Brehm expresses the hope that they might still find him, but Marianne just shakes her head. If he were alive, he'd signal, she says. He's not alive.

Marianne Smith, who's nursing a three-week-old baby, practically hasn't slept since the ditching. She found out about it late the first night, when someone from the airbase called and woke her up out of an exhausted sleep. It took her a minute to even understand what the person was saying, and when she did, he reassured her that it was a controlled ditching and everything would be fine. Things were not fine, though. First they wouldn't tell her which four crew members had been picked up by the Tamaroa (she understandably assumed one of them was her husband), and then they said they'd spotted him at the center of some green dye, and then they lost him again. Now she's between worlds, treated as a widow by everyone on base but still reassured that her husband will be found alive. No one, it seems, can openly face the fact that Rick Smith is dead. The planes keep going out, the grids keep getting flown.

Finally, after nine days of round-the-clock flights, the Coast Guard suspends its search for Rick Smith. The consensus is that he must have hit the water so hard that he was knocked unconscious and drowned. Another possibility is that Spillane hit him when he landed, or that the life raft hit him, or that he jumped with his gunner's strap on. The gunner's strap is used to keep crewmen from falling out of helicopters, and if Smith jumped with it on, he'd have just dangled below the helicopter until Ruvola set it down.

John Spillane prefers to believe that Smith was knocked out on impact. He was weighed down by a lot of gear, and he must have lost position during his fall and hit the water flat. Spillane's only memory of the fall is exactly that: starting to flail and thinking, "My God, what a long way down." Those words, or something very like them, are probably the last thoughts that went through Rick Smith's mind.

WHILE aircraft are crisscrossing the waters off the coast of Maryland, an even larger search continues for the Andrea Gail. Fifteen aircraft, including a Navy P-3 transferred from the Smith search, are flying grids southwest of Sable Island, where a life raft would most likely have drifted. A rumor ripples through Gloucester that Billy Tyne called someone on a satellite phone the night of the 29th, but Bob Brown chases the rumor down and tells the Coast Guard it's bogus. Half the boats in the sword fleet—the Laurie Dawn 8, Mr. Simon, Mary T, and Eishin Maru—sustain considerable damage and cut their trips short. The eastern half of the fleet misses the full fury of the storm ("Oh, we only had about seventy-knot winds," Linda Greenlaw recalls), but such extreme weather generally ruins the fishing for days, and most of the eastern boats head in as well.

Nothing is seen or heard of the Andrea Gail until November 1 st when Albert Johnston, steaming for home, plows straight through a cluster of blue fuel barrels. They're a hundred miles southwest of Sable, and they all have AG stencilled on the side. "The barrels went down either side of the hull, I didn't even have to change course," says Johnston. "It was spooky. You know, just a few fuel barrels, that's all that was left."

An hour later Johnston passes another cluster, then a third, and calls their position in to the Coast Guard. The barrels don't, by themselves, mean the Andrea Gail went down— they could have just washed off the deck—but they're not a good sign. The Canadian and American Coast Guards keep widening the search area without finding anything; finally, on November 4th, things start to turn up. A Coast Guardsman on a routine beach patrol around Sable Island finds a propane tank and radio beacon with Andrea Gail painted on them. The beacon is for locating fishing gear and has been switched on, which may have been a desperate attempt to surround the stricken boat with as many electronically active objects as possible. Normally they're stowed in the "off" position.

And then, on the afternoon of November 5th, an EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. It's an orange 406-megahertz model, built by an American company named Koden, and the ring switch has been turned off. That means that it can't signal even if it hits the water.