Part 2:  Bailing Water For His Life!

To recap Part 1:  Thirty years ago this week, I was 25 years old, going about my daily round.  I didn’t know that on an 86-foot sailboat in a storm off the coast of Cape May NJ, my younger brother was bailing water for his life, after all the pumps onboard had failed.

To read Part 1 in its entirety:

http://www.open.salon.com/blog/faith_paulsen/2010/10/27/the_ill-fated_voyage_of_the_schooner_mariah

On Saturday October 25, 1980, according to a written account of the event, which was published in Yachting in August 1981, the Coast Guard radioed the crew of Mariah that it was sending the 210-foot cutter Alert to their location. 

But Alert was over ten hours away.

The C-140 air transport that had unsuccessfully air-dropped them a new pump a few hours earlier reappeared, dropping a second pump (inside a drum) to the crew.

 I steered toward the drum, visible only every two or three waves, and finally it appeared on the crest of the wave ahead of us.  Ed gaffed the parachute which immediately began to tear.  The drum submerged as the pressure on it increased, and finally broke away.  Strike two. 

Another pump was dropped well ahead of us, and once again I pointed Mariah toward it.  The trail line was difficult to spot in the foamy sea, and once we saw and gaffed it, it was too late.  There was no loop in the end of the line; it slipped off into the sea.  Strike three. 

They were instructed to wait for another pump.  The cutter Alert was on its way.  But the crew had been bailing for 20 hours, several were seasick, and everyone was exhausted, discouraged.  They went back to their bucket-passing, taking turns resting, hoping help would come soon.

 Seasickness could not hold us back; J vomited into the buckets as he dumped them overboard. 

At 2145 the helicopter arrived.  The winds were up over hurricane force with waves well over 40 feet.  I brought the boat up as close to the wind as possible, about abeam to the seas. . .  In the pitch dark, the helicopter had trouble maneuvering around our 86-foot mainmast, and after a half hour backed off and radioed that instead of lowering a pump, he would begin evacuation procedures. 

But even that proved complicated.

The two least-experienced crew members were chosen to get into an inflatable life raft first, to be lifted into the helicopter.  They “streamed” the life raft out on a line behind Mariah. 

 The helicopter’s huge floodlights illuminated the monstrous waves as the basket bounced across the water and life raft. . .  Overall, it took nearly 40 minutes for [the two crew members] to reach the helicopter.

Next, it was time to recover the life raft and evacuate two more crew members.

And so the remaining four crew members had no other options but to wait in their doomed vessel for the Coast Guard cutter Alert.  When it arrived, two Coast Guard frogmen were sent to bring a life raft alongside the Mariah to evacuate the remaining members of the crew.

Including my brother.

The Mariah was never seen again. 

The two Coast Guard frogmen were put up for well-deserved commendations. 

My brother and the rest of the crew were home in a few days, grateful to be alive.  I got married that December, and my brother went on to law school and became a successful attorney with a wonderful wife and daughter.   And he's still a sailor.

In August 1981 Yachting published my brother’s first-person account of “The Loss of the Mariah,” in his own very seaworthy words, which I have quoted above.

But that day when my mother called me to share the wonderful news, “Your brother is okay,” it seemed such a strange thing to say, such a strange thing to celebrate.  Of course he was okay.  Hadn’t he been okay all along?

Going about my normal day as if nothing was out of the ordinary, I didn’t know how close we came to losing him, until it was all over.

Seafaring lore includes sad tales about sunken ships, haunted by ghosts of their crew.  

But this isn’t one of those stories.  Because the crew of Mariah survived.

Thirty years ago this week.