Okay, here are some pictures from today's rescue at sea. These are only a few, for I'm pretty tired and am going to crash pretty soon. Bed is sounding pretty good right now.
I'll let the others give the details, but in short, here ya go.
I was out with Bud, Fishoholic, and Chasin' Tale (sp) going after some tuna, Tuesday morning. Once we got out there, we heard Ken, Crazyfish, on the Spotted Owl, on the radion mention their boat was taking on water. They chose to keep fishing and stuck by the rest of the pack. We asked him to keep us up to date every 10 mins or so as to their status. Reports were, that their pump was bailing water faster than it was coming in.
Afternoon: They started in a little earlier, before Tuna Time, SeaFox, Thunder, and us, Seelicious, picked up gear and ran. While running in, we heard, that up ahead, the Spotted Owl was taking on water more rapidly, and the motor had died. We heard, "We're dead in the water". They were about 5 miles ahead of us, and we ran to them to assist in any way we could.
By this time, they had hailed the Coasties. 2 47's from Garibaldi were en route, as well as the copter from Hammond. We all sat nearby for any help we could give.
Within just a few minutes, you could hear the thumping of the bird coming from the north.
The copter hovered closer, and let down the rescue swimmer to get in the boat and assess the situation.
Once on board, the swimmer radio'ed above to drop a portable pump to try and syphen out the water, and tow the boat back to port. The copter hovered in extremely close to the water, kicking up a big spray, leaned to the side, and dumped the pump overboard.
The pump was dropped, the swimmer got back in, swam out to the pump, drug it back to the boat, and assembled it. after a couple pulls, it began running and started dumping water out of the boat.
At this point, the cavalry, 2 47's were on the horizon, crashing through the waves toward us at what had to be 30-some knots. Once arrived, they pulled alongside Crazyfish and Spotted Owl.
Once they had the situation under control, the four of us that were there to assist, left and continued our way back to the barn. John, Fishoholic, has some more great pics, that I can't wait to see!
I was switching between the digital still camera and the Video camera. The rescue swimmer being deployed is on video and currently being edited for youtube, or somewhere similar. That video is coming soon!
Glad everything turned out alright. It was a situation that could've been ended up much worse, but thanks to quick action by the Coast Guard, it was avoided. All hats off to every one of you!
