Early Hopes Gave Way to a Sea of Despair

Eric Hermann, captain of the Wesley Q, was yelling. Then his big voice cracked, slowed, softened.

“Oh, my God,” he said, as the realization sank in. “We’ve got a body.”

Until we hauled in the woman’s remains, the four of us--Hermann, his shipmate Matt Keegan, a Times photographer and I--had been running on adrenaline. Alaska Airlines Flight 261 had gone down, and the photographer and I had driven, separately, through traffic, daylight fading, to meet Hermann and Keegan at Dock F on Channel Islands Harbor.

Their 36-foot sportfishing boat clipped across the dark and glassy Pacific at the equivalent of 30 mph, turning the moderate 4-to-6-foot chop into hard, crazy peaks and slopes.

We clutched our stomachs and tried to look straight ahead instead of down. The gloaming sky, first pink, turned to gray and then almost black. We grew disoriented. Each time the horizon tilted, we lost all sense of place, and then we’d hang on and get our bearings again. We focused on getting out there, to the scene. We saw the boat lights ahead, choppers circling in the sky. The radio blared instructions from the Coast Guard dispatchers.

We didn’t know anything--how far the plane had fallen, how hard it had hit, how deep and cold the water was--so we rode fast, our eyes searching for survivors, hoping against the odds that we might get lucky and pull someone on board.

Had I known that nobody could possibly have made it, I probably would have gotten sick much earlier. Instead, I hung on, breathing lungs full of chilly air, mind over churning body. I thought about what I would ask the survivors when we found them. I promised myself I wouldn’t flinch no matter how badly they were wounded.

But the sickness in Hermann’s voice got to me. He was 30, strong, cheerful and confident. And when he broke, so did I. Staggering out of the cabin to the edge of the boat, I dropped to my knees.

There were bits of flotsam everywhere, much of it pulverized human remains we had mistaken at a distance for plane insulation. For a moment I was afraid I was going to fall overboard, and I wondered if I could swim in the human soup.

The engine humming, we rode in circles, radioing every few minutes for the Coast Guard to come get the human remains too large for us to haul in. We were surrounded by debris, and with hooks and bare hands Hermann and Keegan pulled pieces of the plane onto the deck: fuselage, an empty plane seat, an uninflated life raft, a table tray and a green carry-on suitcase, partly unzipped, full of water and personal belongings.

Keegan and Hermann were incredible. This was their first search and rescue, but they had been on the water for years, and they approached their task as a matter of course.

I wrote in the dark, letters colliding with letters, without looking at my notebook. The photographer struggled on deck. Sometimes he could see through his lens, other times, it was too dizzying. So he just held out his camera and clicked away, each flash popping into the circus of reds and blues and yellows of emergency and searchlights.

We pulled aboard a striped handbag and radioed. The Coast Guard instructed us to leave everything intact once we secured it, not to touch anything. I didn’t, but had to fight the urge to pull open the flap and peer inside, to make a personal connection with the victim.

I’d worked in Florida before I moved to California, covered fatal wrecks and fires, hurricanes and tornadoes, even an execution. But nothing prepared me for this, a tragedy still unfolding before us in the eerie mist, jet fuel permeating the air.

The ocean was frightening. But it can also be a comforting force. I tried to keep my mind on that. But, as we moved through the churning water, I didn’t have much luck.