The Perfect Storm

Albert Johnston, on the Mary T, gets hit a few hours after the Andrea Gail but not as hard. He keeps an eye on Hurricane Grace, as the storm moves north. When Grace collides with the Canadian low front and the Sable Island storm, the three storms combine to become a retrograde, meaning they’re heading back west, toward land. This spares the swordfleet from the worst of the storm, but it does not spare the sloop Satori, on which Stimpson, Leonard, and Bylander are in trouble. The seas are knocking the small boat about so hard that Stimpson knows they won’t last much longer. She puts out a mayday call. Both women have prepared to die; Leonard says he will go down with the ship. The Coast Guard sends the cutter Tamaroa, as well as a Falcon jet. The jet establishes radio contact when it arrives, but the situation does not look good. It takes the Tamaroa twelve hours to arrive, but they cannot perform a ship-to-ship rescue because of the high seas; when they attempt it, the small boat they put in is lost, and now six people need rescue instead of three. Finally, an H3 helicopter with a rescue swimmer aboard goes into the water, but the waves are too high. The three aboard the Satori have to jump into the water in survival suits, and the swimmer rescues them, then the three men who put into the water from the Tamaroa. When they fly back to land, almost immediately another call comes in: a helicopter has gone down, and five National Guardsmen are in the high seas.