"The Perfect Storm" & the Heroic SAR Operations of the Cutter Tamaroa
by William H. Thiesen, PhD
Atlantic Area Historian
United States Coast Guard
Next year will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of “The Perfect Storm,” also known as the “Halloween Nor’easter” because it struck in late October 1991. It was the third major weather event to hit the East Coast in an unusually active month. By October 28th, two large weather systems collided off the East Coast. Hurricane Grace had formed on October 27th and was moving from the southeast on course for an un-named extra-tropical cyclone. The two weather systems spawned a much larger and more powerful storm. By October 30, NOAA data buoys reported sustained winds of over sixty miles per hour with gusts well over seventy, and waves as high as forty feet.
Based on the book, the movie “The Perfect Storm” mistakenly depicted the Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa as one of the Service’s more modern 210-foot Reliance-class cutters, but the search and rescue operations of the actual Tamaroa (WMEC-166) make for a more amazing story. Built by the U.S. Navy in 1943 as seagoing tug USS Zuni for towing damaged battleships, Tamaroa relied on a single screw. She had a seaworthy design and a relatively high freeboard of ten feet, but her World War II crew nicknamed her the “Automatic Trough Finder.” In 1946, the Coast Guard received this surplus Navy vessel into the fleet and, by the time of the storm, she was celebrating almost fifty years of service.
The thirty-two-foot sailboat Satori served not only as a yacht, but also as a home for her owner and he invited two experienced sailors to help sail her from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Bermuda. The three sailed into the middle of the storm and, at around midnight on October 29th, a freighter relayed Satori’s first distress calls to Boston’s Coast Guard District 1 operations center. Not long after the calls came in, an HU-25 Guardian Falcon Jet from Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod located Satori. As day broke, Coast Guard HH-3F Pelican helicopters and HU-25 jets flew cover in shifts until Tamaroa and could slug her way through the stormy seas.
Around mid-day, the Coast Guard assets assembled for Satori included a Coast Guard jet flying cover; an H-3 hovering overhead; and the nearby Tam, now standing by and experiencing nerve-wracking ninety-degree rolls. After the District 1 commander determined Satori’s voyage “manifestly unsafe,” Tam’s captain, Commander Larry Brudnicki, ordered an evacuation of the sailboat using Tam’s rigid-hull-inflatable boat (RIB). The seas proved insurmountable for the RIB, so the hovering H-3 deployed its rescue swimmer, to avoid the danger posed to the helicopter’s hoist cable by Satori’s wildly swinging mast. Satori’s crew entered the water and, with the assistance of the rescue swimmer, the process took less than twenty minutes. After an hour’s flight back to Air Station Cape Cod, the H-3 touched down safely with all three of Satori’s crew.
Not long after the Satori rescue, Tamaroa had to alter course and render assistance yet again. This time, a New York Air National Guard HH-60 helicopter returning from its own storm-related mission, ran low on fuel, could not connect with its C-130 fuel tanker and had to ditch ninety miles south of Montauk, New York. Another Falcon jet took off from Cape Cod and flew a circular “sector” search with a twenty-mile radius around the H-60’s last known position. The jet’s commander had brought along night-vision goggles allowing his crew to see the downed helicopter crew’s emergency strobes and to vector in a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. Unfortunately, wind speeds now reached 100 miles per hour and attempts to use the rescue hoist failed because the wind blew the basket dangerously close the helicopter’s tail rotor. Again, the Tam would prove the storm victims’ best chance for survival.
After a four-hour transit from the Satori evacuation site, Tamaroa arrived in the vicinity of the downed airmen. The sea state and winds had worsened with the cutter rolling through an arc of 110 degrees; and the World War II tug’s gunwales, which ordinarily stood ten feet above the water, swung from even with the water level to twenty-feet above it. Commander Brudnicki looked out from the bridge to see wave tops towering over the ship. Green water swept Tam’s deck, swamping the deck crew, while engine room personnel worked feverishly to keep the fifty-year-old powerplant running. A breakdown during this critical point, especially with only one screw, would prove disastrous. With the National Guard aircrew fighting for their lives in the roiling water, Commander Brudnicki tried several times to position the cutter upsea of the men and drift down on them for the rescue. After two hours, Tam succeeded in maneuvering next to the hypothermic aircrew while the deck gang dropped a scramble net over the ship’s side. By pulling the net up in sync with the cutter’s severe roll, the Tam’s crew retrieved one airman and then pulled up a group of three others. The downed H-60’s pararescueman, Rick Smith, was never found despite a massive search effort later mounted to locate him.
Among the many other response efforts mounted during the 1991 “Perfect Storm,” these operations demonstrated the importance of employing aviation and sea-going assets together to get the job done. In the evacuation of the Satori, the sea state prevented the Tamaroa from extricating the crew from the sailboat, but it took only minutes for an H-3 helicopter to evacuate them from the water. In the rescue of the Air National Guard helicopter crew, the men of the Tamaroa overcame extreme weather conditions to retrieve the airmen from the mountainous seas.
In addition, the fact that the aging Tamaroa managed to rescue the four National Guard aircrew demonstrates the ability of Coast Guard personnel to use the assets at hand to complete the mission. In both cases, these Coast Guardsmen overcame technological and environmental obstacles and met the challenges head-on with resourcefulness, resilience and adaptability. In recognition of the Tamaroa’s achievements in The Perfect Storm, the cutter received the Coast Guard Unit Commendation and the Coast Guard Foundation Award. In addition, many of the crew received the Air Force Commendation Medal and eighteen of Tam’s crew received the Coast Guard Medal, the largest group recognition in the history of that Service award.
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