Swept Into the Crest of Danger

The breeze was kicking up and a line of squalls was bearing down that morning on Albemarle Sound, a ragged gash cutting into the upper North Carolina coastline.

At the U.S. Coast Guard station in Elizabeth City, N.C., where the Pasquotank River widens into the Albemarle, much of the base was deserted, as it almost always is on a Sunday morning.

The four-man search and rescue crew was whiling its way through the first part of its 24-hour shift. Lt. Dan Molphen, the duty helicopter commander, was trying to get some sleep after being awakened in the early hours of the morning by buddies calling from a party in Alaska.

In the operations room, Lt. Jason Ryan was feeling a tinge of apprehension as he studied the weather conditions offshore. Storm and gale warnings were posted up and down the coast, which, as he later put it, “can make a mission turn south very quickly.”

At 11:32 a.m. on Dec. 17, Ryan took a call from a satellite telephone operator, who patched him through to a ship in distress more than 200 miles offshore. The panicked voice on the other end of the line was too garbled at first for Ryan to understand.

“What is the name of your vessel?” Ryan asked.

“SeaBreeze I,” came the reply. “SeaBreeze I. We lost engines. We lost engines.”

After finally ascertaining the ship’s coordinates, Ryan sounded the alarm, setting off a harrowing rescue effort that taxed the skills of the Coast Guard to its limits. In the hours that passed, the focus of the base and the Coast Guard command center in Portsmouth, Va., would be on the three rescue helicopters and two C-130 Hercules transports that flew into ground zero visibility and hurricane-force winds, looking for a crippled 605-foot luxury liner that was taking on water with 34 crewmen on board.

In those hours, there would be moments of great courage and cowardice, with the backdrop of huge waves, pummeling winds, a sinking ship and a tight community waiting for news of its men. There would be pushing and shoving by crewmen trying to be first off the ship. And the Coast Guard would test the limit of a rescue helicopter by filling it with 30 people when six is the norm.

And then, when it was all over, there would be little of the bravado that normally accompanies such feats. They would say they went to the brink and were happy to have simply survived. This is a recounting of those events, based on interviews with those who performed the rescue.

Weather Closing In

Lt. Cmdr. Randy Watson had already been up in a chopper that morning. Ordinarily, he would have been off duty, but he and his crew had reported in because they’d been designated as one of the Coast Guard’s representatives for a yearly flyover at nearby Kitty Hawk, to commemorate the Wright brothers’ first flight.

The flyover had been rough as the weather began to close in. By the time the alarm sounded, Watson had already returned to base and was about to head home. And having been up already, he had only one thing to impart to pilot Dan Molphen: It was going to be bad up there. Molphen waited as a ground crew topped his three fuel tanks, while Watson and his crew scrambled into flight suits, readying themselves to follow.

As Molphen took off to the east in his HH-60 Jayhawk rescue helicopter, Watson waited as his own helicopter was refueled. He made some rough mental calculations, taking into account the weather and the distance to the ship. If the stranded sailors were in lifeboats or rafts, the Coast Guard could never rescue them all. The time would be too short.

“I figured I’d have about an hour on the scene, max,” he said.

He was speaking from experience. The Elizabeth City base is one of the busiest along the Atlantic coast. The Coast Guard search and rescue teams there perform between 300 and 400 missions a year.

Ten minutes after Molphen launched, Watson and his crew of three took off as well, heading out to sea and toward the blackened clouds over the Atlantic. At about the same time, Cmdr. Charles W. Holman took off from Elizabeth City in a C-130 Lockheed Hercules, the durable workhorse of the armed forces. But he, too, did not hold out much hope for the ship.

“All ingredients were ripe for a disastrous outcome,” he would say later, “both to the mariners on board the vessel and the rescuers.”

Cruise Company Failed

Fate had not been kind to the SeaBreeze I of late. Once one of the crown jewels of the Florida-based Premier Cruise Lines, it had been an oceangoing playground that could accommodate more than 800 passengers, pampered by a crew of 400. Built in 1958, it cruised everywhere from Canada to the Caribbean, with its lounges and disco and casino. But Premier had run into financial troubles. In September, the 21,000-ton SeaBreeze was unceremoniously taken over by creditors when Florida-based Premier, the world’s fifth-largest cruise ship company, went out of business. The company’s ships were seized by the investment bank of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette Inc., which held Premier’s mortgage debt.

Authorities in Halifax, Nova Scotia, boarded the SeaBreeze and other Premier ships, giving passengers only a few minutes to pack and leave.

The SeaBreeze languished in port for two months while ownership issues were being cleared up. Finally, this month, the cruise ship left Halifax, stopped in Boston to refuel and was bound that fateful Sunday for Charleston, S.C., where the owners were going to decide whether or not to sell it.

The ship, registered under the Panamanian flag, was manned by a skeleton crew of multinationals when it encountered rough seas off the mid-Atlantic coast. According to reports that morning, the ship began to founder when a cooling line pumping seawater to the engine ruptured and the lower compartments began to fill with water.

No Visibility

Dan Molphen flipped on his radar and didn’t like what he saw. A swath of dark images on the screen told him the line of storms ahead was 40 miles wide. Molphen, piloting the lead helicopter, looked for any sign of a less turbulent corridor, but saw none. So he set a direct course for the ship and, in a matter of minutes, his visibility dropped to zero. He was flying on instruments while being buffeted by 75-knot winds. For long minutes, he focused his concentration on the control panel and nothing else.

Co-pilot Craig Neubecker became the eyes of the helicopter while working the radio as well, even as the chopper was pummeled by the wind and rain. In the rear of the Jayhawk, swimmer Darren Reeves and mechanic Lorne Green waited as their time approached.

In the 120,000-pound C-130, Holman was fighting to keep the plane steady; lightning was flashing all around the plane. As the transport pitched and rolled, three of Holman’s crewmen began to vomit. A 22-year veteran of the Coast Guard, Holman knew he shouldn’t be flying into the thunderstorm, but the gravity of the SeaBreeze’s condition made him decide it was a risk worth taking. From what he’d been told, the ship would sink in less than an hour.

If there was any good news in all of this, it was the tail wind that pushed the aircraft along. Molphen’s helicopter was traveling at 190 knots; Holman was pushing ahead even faster. When both emerged from the storm front, they looked down at a frothing ocean with 30- to 50-foot waves. Soon after that, Molphen heard Holman’s voice over the radio. He’d found the SeaBreeze and was talking to the captain, telling him to get his men aft, by the swimming pool, for the rescue choppers that were on their way.

Other Ships Enlisted

On shore, the command center in Portsmouth was in high gear, checking for any military or merchant vessels in the vicinity of the stricken ship. The U.S. Navy amphibious ship Saipan, with helicopters aboard, was diverted from its position 165 miles to the south.

Other merchant ships in the area were enlisted as well, while a third helicopter and second C-130 were sent up. And in Elizabeth City, word spread quickly that a tough mission was underway. It is a town small enough so that it’s easy to hear rescue aircraft taking off. One phone call led to another as word went out in town. Those attending a local Christmas pageant heard cell phones beeping throughout the audience.

Mob of Frightened Sailors

Now it was Darren Reeves’ turn. He was the swimmer of Molphen’s crew, the one who had to go down to the ship and begin the rescue mission. Those who know him well say he’s the kind you want around when there’s trouble.

As Molphen fought to keep the Jayhawk steady, Reeves snapped the steel cable on to his harness and Green, the mechanic, lowered him to the SeaBreeze deck.

What Reeves found was a mob of frightened sailors, battling each other, pushing and shoving to be the first on the rescue basket.

“These guys are like pirates,” Reeves radioed to the chopper. “They’ve got knives and they’re fighting each other.”

Reeves saw a large knife tucked into the belt of one of the sailors. He jerked it out and tossed it into the pool. Then he laid out their options: cooperate and they might live, but this was their only chance. No one else could save them.

Order restored, Reeves began sending them up two at a time, even as the chopper bucked in the wind, often pushed down to the level of the ship by its force. At times, the rotor blades were a hair’s breath from hitting the ship, and the curling waves sent salt spray against the cockpit windshield.

What happened in those next moments is a kind of blur as one man after another was pulled from the ship. The original plan was for each chopper to take 17 crewmen, but everyone lost count as Molphen’s rear compartment was stacked like cordwood with SeaBreeze crewmen. Finally, when there was no more room, Reeves was pulled up. And Watson, who had arrived by then, sent his swimmer onto the ship for the remainder of the crew.

Crush of Bodies

Confusion set in when Watson pulled up only eight people, including the captain and first officer. Holman, flying the C-130 and coordinating the rescue, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He asked Molphen how many he had in his chopper. The answer back was that the chopper pilot couldn’t be sure.

“It was absolutely horrible in the back of the chopper, all arms and legs and butts,” said Molphen. “Lorne and Darren couldn’t move, and their legs were going numb.”

In the rush to get the crewmen off the deck of the SeaBreeze, Molphen had brought up 26 crewmen, meaning that 30 people were on the helicopter for the 2 1/2-hour ride back to the Oceana Naval Air Station, near Virginia Beach, Va. Some of the crewmen screamed in pain from the crush of human bodies as the helicopter headed directly into the wind and back into the storm front.

On shore, it became a waiting game to make sure all the aircraft returned. Holman sent the other C-130 back out to the ship to make sure no one had been left on board. At the air station, ambulances were lined up in a long row. When Molphen landed, the crewmen began to stagger out of the helicopter, finally uncurling themselves after the numbing journey to dry land.

Ship Sank Within Hours

The SeaBreeze sank within hours of the rescue. The next day, a plane was sent out over the ship’s last known location and the only thing found was floating debris. Molphen was called on the carpet for not keeping better track of how many crewmen he rescued. Nonetheless, he and other crew members made the rounds of network talk shows.

The cause of the sinking is still under investigation, by both the owners and the Panamanian government, and there is a tight lid on any comment from that quarter. All the crew members have been repatriated to their respective countries, including the Philippines, Greece, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

But for the men who conducted the rescue, there is the glow of having survived, of having lived through a heart-thumping ordeal.

Holman spent a fair amount of time writing up his report about what happened over the Atlantic that day, about how any one thing could have turned the rescue effort into a disaster. People could have been left behind. Choppers could have been lost.

And then, at the end of the report, is this sentence: “God had mercy on the Coast Guard, and the survivors, this day.”