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The inside story of the Alaska Ranger rescue

As he rose and plunged in the 20-foot swells, Abram Heller could hear his helicopter fly away without him. The Coast Guard rescue swimmer was too preoccupied to look up. He had to inflate a life raft, pull aboard three hypothermic survivors from a sunken fishing boat and see if he could locate any more people nearby.

He wasn’t scared, he said — there wasn’t any time for that.

“I was pretty busy,” said Heller, a third-class aviation survival technician. “The gravity of it didn’t really hit me for a while.”

Heller and his three raftmates were floating alone in the Bering Sea, more than 100 miles from land, in the pre-dawn hours of March 23. The air was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit; the water temperature was just above freezing.

Video

Survivors are offloaded

The Coast Guard cutter Munro

Audio

The mayday call from the Alaska Ranger

The fishermen Heller had rescued were the last three surviving crew members of the fishing vessel Alaska Ranger — a 35-year-old, 198-foot “head-and-gut” boat home-ported in Seattle — that sank hours earlier. Five crew members were killed.

But 42 of them survived, almost half of whom were rescued by the Coast Guard, in what top officials said was one of the largest, most complicated rescues in Alaska history. So large, in fact, that Heller gave his spot aboard his H-65C Dolphin helicopter to a survivor.

Neither the Coast Guard nor Alaskan authorities know definitively what caused the Ranger to sink, but subsequent hearings and investigations have helped piece together what it took to rescue the survivors plucked from the water.

The Ranger lost control of its rudder just before 3 a.m. Shortly thereafter, the ship began taking on water. The vessel’s master, Eric Jacobsen, issued a mayday picked up by Coast Guardsmen throughout southern Alaska.

About 100 miles to the north, the Coast Guard cutter Munro turned south; its skipper, Capt. Craig Lloyd, ordered flank speed.

When the call came in at the Coast Guard forward operating base on St. Paul Island, in the middle of the Bering, the crew was asleep — all except for the helicopter’s pilot, Lt. Steve Bonn. Bonn and his three crewmates — aircraft commander Lt. Brian McLaughlin, flight mechanic Aviation Maintenance Technician 2nd Class Robert Debolt and rescue swimmer AST2 O’Brien Hollow — weren’t even the standby team that morning, so Bonn had a hard sell when he woke them up with their assignment: A 200-foot ship was sinking in the Bering; there could be 47 people in the water.

“Nobody believed me,” Bonn said. “They were saying, ‘Get the hell away from me.’”

Their MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter’s fuel was topped off. Soon they were airborne, plotting a course to the last known position of the Alaska Ranger.

As they flew, McLaughlin picked up radio traffic between the Ranger and its sister ship, the Alaska Warrior, both owned by the Seattle-based Fishing Co. of Alaska. McLaughlin asked Jacobsen to describe his situation, and Jacobsen said the Ranger was listing 45 degrees to starboard and flooding below decks; crew members were abandoning ship.

Jacobsen confirmed they had put on their cold-water survival outfits, nicknamed “gumby suits” because of their floppy arms and legs, but he didn’t know how many people were in the ship’s life rafts and how many had simply jumped into the water.

McLaughlin keyed his radio and hailed the Ranger again, but all he heard was static.

‘The sea was ... killing them’

By the time the Jayhawk was within sight of the Ranger’s last position, the fishing boat was gone. But the pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, spotted flashing lights on the horizon. Below, a face appeared from under the cover of a life raft and a man began waving at them “like a bumblebee,” Bonn said.

The Coast Guardsmen began a sort of rescue triage: The people in the raft were comparatively dry, and because they were waving, the helo crew could tell they were still relatively healthy. People floating by themselves were in the most danger, Hollow said. When they spotted a man in the drink, the crew got ready.

Hollow’s first rescue was textbook: He was lowered into the water, trailing a cable attached to his harness and a rescue strop, a soft orange loop that he pulled over the arms and head of the first survivor. After a wave to the flight mechanic, Hollow and the man he rescued were winched swiftly up.

Hollow pulled up three more survivors this way, one at a time, when he spotted a chain of six people in survivor suits linked together. He shouted to his flight mechanic that he would jump into the water disconnected from his lifeline and begin loading Alaska Ranger crew members into the rescue basket.

“It would just expedite the rescue,” Hollow said.

Rear Adm. Arthur “Gene” Brooks, the Coast Guard’s top commander in Alaska, helped coordinate from his headquarters in Juneau. “Even with cold weather suits, they were dying at the two-hour point,” he said. “The sea was already killing them.”

A helicopter rescue in the Bering Sea is a clumsy, dangerous dance. Hollow fumbled with the Alaska Ranger survivors to get them into the rescue basket. The fishermen’s gumby suits were swollen with seawater, and they pitched in the swells. As Debolt sat on the edge of the Jayhawk’s side door looking down at Hollow, he gave radio instructions every few moments — “Back and left 50. Forward and right 10. Hold; hold” — so the pilots could keep the helicopter over the people in the water.

Complicating the choreography, the aircrew also had to compensate for the swimmers’ vertical movement with each wave.

“When you lower a cable with a rescue swimmer on it and you have a 20-foot swell, if you don’t have enough slack out in the water, when that swell drops out from underneath him, the cable will go taut and he’ll get jerked out of the water,” Hollow said.

“It’s about the most difficult thing to do,” Bonn said. “This case involved the most difficult aspect of everything we train to do.”

On top of it all, snow squalls blew intermittently across the Bering, which reflected the helicopter’s lights and blinded Bonn in his night-vision goggles. The sudden whiteouts forced McLaughlin to switch off the helicopter’s lights every few minutes, so the pilots didn’t lose sight of Hollow and the survivors.

But the crew got into a rhythm, and after about 50 minutes, Bonn said, there were 13 badly chilled fishermen on the deck of the helicopter; Debolt found himself slipping on a sheet of ice that formed from the water draining out of their gumby suits. He told McLaughlin that the aircraft couldn’t hold any more people — one of the fishermen had slid precariously close to the open door — so the Coast Guardsmen had to determine where to take their passengers.

‘Ships passing in the night’

Commanders in Juneau wanted the Alaska Ranger survivors taken to Dutch Harbor, about 120 miles east, but McLaughlin vetoed that; the survivors still in the water would die before the helicopter got back. So the Jayhawk flew to the Ranger’s sister ship, the Alaska Warrior, which also was retrieving survivors. The helo hovered overhead for 10 minutes, evaluating whether it could deposit people there. But the ship’s intricate rigging was as dangerous as concertina wire as it swung in the 20-foot seas, and the helicopter couldn’t hover low enough to deposit its passengers. The crew decided it would have to fly to the Munro.

The Munro was still charging south at flank speed, and the crew of its H-65C Dolphin helicopter was going through their pre-flight checklist. The Dolphin is a smaller, shorter-range helicopter than the Jayhawk, so it had to wait until the Munro was within about 80 miles of the sink site.

The Dolphin’s commander, Lt. T.J. Schmitz, was getting updates on the situation to the south, and given the number of survivors in the water, he told his rescue swimmer, Heller, that he might have to stay in the water to make room in the helo for a fishermen. Heller put on extra layers.

At 5:55 a.m., the Munro zigzagged again into the wind and the Dolphin — carrying Schmitz, Heller, co-pilot Lt. Greg Gedemer and flight mechanic AMT2 Alfred Musgrave — lifted off the port side of the cutter.

The Jayhawk and the Dolphin passed each other — McLaughlin and his crew flying north to the cutter, Schmitz and his crew flying south to the sink site — “like ships passing in the night,” Bonn said. Each crew could see the lights of the other helo.

When the Dolphin arrived, the crew went to work. Musgrave lowered the rescue basket with Heller, who began helping fishermen climb inside. Within a few minutes, Heller had sent up three survivors who’d been floating by themselves. He then swam to two fishermen clinging to a clump of nets.

“One of the guys was in pretty decent shape,” Heller said. “The other guy, not so much.”

He was slipping out of consciousness. The man in better shape told Heller: “Take this guy first.”

Heller began helping the man disentangle his arms from the nets, but he started to struggle. He wouldn’t release his grip.

“You gotta let go!” his shipmate yelled. “You gotta let go, man!”

Suddenly, the man became docile, so Heller swam with him away from the flotsam and Musgrave lowered the rescue basket. But as Heller lifted him, the fisherman panicked again. For 10 minutes, the two men struggled: “He’d go in one way, I’d pull him out; he’d go in another way, it wouldn’t work. At one point, he was locked on to the outside, hanging on for dear life.”

Finally, Heller got him situated and gave the signal for Musgrave to hoist the basket. He watched for a few seconds as the basket ascended to the helicopter, then turned away to rescue the second fisherman at the nets.

Moments later, the man slipped out of the basket and fell about 45 feet into the Bering.

“He’s gone!” Musgrave called over the helicopter’s intercom. Schmitz shone the Dolphin’s searchlight on the man’s body, which floated face-down. He flashed the light at Heller, who looked up from the second fisherman, and then flashed the light on the body, but a swell blocked Heller’s view. He went back to helping the second survivor.

“At that point, I needed to refocus my crew,” Schmitz wrote in his after-action report. “I told the [flight mechanic]: ‘We need to move on, we need to save the people we can.’”

Hours later, back on the Munro, Heller found out the man he’d wrestled into the rescue basket had fallen back in the sea. His body was later recovered by the Alaska Warrior.

A ‘tense’ return

The Dolphin crew brought aboard the second survivor from the nets, then brought up Heller.

The helicopter then spotted four fishermen floating in their survival suits with their elbows linked together, as they’d been trained. But the Dolphin, with a cabin about the size of a small minivan, was already carrying four survivors and its flight crew of three, and running low on fuel. Schmitz knew they needed to refuel, and the Coast Guardsmen agreed to take back another fisherman in Heller’s place. Musgrave kicked out the Dolphin’s six-person crew raft, brought up one of the survivors in the basket, and left Heller in the ocean.

“The entire flight back was pretty tense,” Schmitz said.

As his helicopter flew off over the horizon, Heller loaded the last three survivors aboard the raft.

One of the men was slipping into hypothermia, so Heller talked to him and shook him to try to keep him awake. The other two fishermen were in better condition. One of them told Heller he was never getting on a ship again.

Back at the Munro, Bonn was hovering over the cutter’s flight deck as Debolt in the Jayhawk lowered down each of the survivors. The cutter had slowed, but the ship still pitched in the 20-foot seas, and seawater crashed over its bow. Crew members formed a line inside the helo hangar and ran out each time the Jayhawk’s basket neared the flight deck. They walked each survivor to the crew’s mess, which had been set up for first aid.

When the last survivor was down, McLaughlin radioed the Munro that he needed gas. The Jayhawk was too large to land on the ship’s flight deck, so the cutter’s crew had to feed a fuel hose up to Debolt, who pulled out a bulkhead cover and plugged it in. The helo crew had trained for an in-flight refueling like this but had never done it before for real.

After a few minutes of fueling, the Jayhawk needed to break away. The Dolphin was 18 minutes out and had about 26 minutes’ worth of fuel until “splash.” Schmitz reported that the helo was minus one rescue swimmer.

The sailors on the cutter scrambled to disconnect the refueling hose from the Jayhawk and ready the flight deck for the Dolphin to land; the ship increased to flank speed to close the distance.

The Jayhawk and the Dolphin passed each other again as Bonn flew south to the navigation point that Musgrave had marked as the location of Heller’s raft.

Heller heard the rotors of the Jayhawk before he saw it, and by the time the helicopter was hovering overhead he was hanging off the side of the raft, ready to load his three raftmates into the rescue basket. They had been bobbing in the swells for about 40 minutes.

“I was ready to go,” Heller said.

When the three fishermen were aboard the helicopter, Heller slashed the life raft with his knife so it would sink and not distract other rescuers, then was pulled up into the Jayhawk. He threw up; he had swallowed a lot of seawater.

The Jayhawk’s crew spotted one last person in the water, and sent down Hollow to bring him up. The man was unresponsive, and his suit was too swollen with water to lift him into the helo.

Hollow used his knife to puncture the distended booties of the gumby suit and drain out the water, the pilots added power, and Debolt and Heller helped pull the man onboard. He was dead. The Coast Guardsmen searched for more survivors, then flew back to the ship.

At the Munro, the Jayhawk dropped off its survivors and its extra rescue swimmer, refueled, and got ready to fly back to the sink site before commanders told them to stand down. The helicopter flew back to St. Paul Island; it had been in the air for 8½ hours.

By midday, the Coast Guard had rescued 20 survivors and the Alaska Warrior had recovered 22; five fishermen were dead, including one who was never found. The Munro and the Warrior sailed for Dutch Harbor, about 120 miles west, where they deposited the crew of the Ranger.

Although the investigation into what sank the Alaska Ranger isn’t finished, commanders did reach a conclusion about the work of the Coast Guardsmen involved: The crew of the Munro was awarded the Coast Guard Unit Citation on Thursday, and each member of the two helicopter crews received an Air Medal.

“You’re lucky if you ever do it once in your career,” Bonn said of the scale of the operation. “It’s mind-boggling.”