Coast Guardsman recalls harrowing Galaxy rescue

Coast Guard rescue swimmer Jason Quinn spent two years training for the day when he might have to jump into the ocean to save a life. On Sunday, as the 180-foot Seattle-based Galaxy burned in the Bering Sea, that day arrived. Quinn saved not one life — but five.

Fighting through 15-foot seas, Quinn grabbed four crew members and the skipper, David Shoemaker, as they leaped one by one off the foundering ship. He stuffed each into a wire basket that then carried them up to the safety of a hovering HH60 JayHawk helicopter.

Pumped up on adrenaline, Quinn, 24, said he didn't have time to worry about the pools of oil that floated around the vessel as flames shot from the stern deck. Neither did he flinch at the Bering Sea chill that normally seeps through even a dry suit. Indeed, Quinn, at 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds, was sweating profusely.

"I had to wring out my socks when I got back on board," Quinn recalled. "I didn't even know the water was cold."

Quinn was on the front lines of a harrowing — at times chaotic — rescue mission involving his four-person helicopter crew and three fishing vessels that arrived on the scene.

The disaster claimed the lives of three of the 26-person crew, a death toll that threatened to go much higher in the first few hours after the Galaxy fire broke out. A fourth man perished after a rogue wave swept him off the deck of a rescue vessel.

By yesterday afternoon, all the survivors had been either airlifted or ferried back to shore, cautioned not to speak to reporters until they had been interviewed by Coast Guard investigators.

Coast Guard and vessel owners are hoping to retrieve the fire-scarred Galaxy, in part to help determine the cause of the accident. But as of late yesterday, the Galaxy was nowhere to be found. It might have drifted off or it might have sunk, according to Coast Guard officials.

Quinn's rescue helicopter departed from a base in the remote Aleutian Island village of Cold Bay in growing darkness. It was 5 p.m. The crew was led by Lt. Cmdr. Melissa Rivera, 32, who shared pilot duties with 31-year-old Lt. Kendall Garran. Flight mechanic Mike Simone, 30, doubled as hoist operator for the basket rescue. Quinn served as a swimmer and emergency medical technician.

By about 7 p.m., the helicopter arrived on the scene. The three fishing vessels got there at roughly the same time, Garran said.

Fire appeared to be consuming the entire ship. By then, most of the survivors had evacuated. Some had reached a life raft while at least two others, including a federal fishery observer, struggled to stay alive in the chilly water.

Hovering over the vessel, the Coast Guard team spotted three men huddled on top of the pilothouse. None wore survival suits, and the heat was so intense it was bubbling the paint.

On the bow, cornered by the fire, stood skipper Shoemaker and two other crew members. All three had donned survival suits.

The first priority was to try to rescue the three men from their precarious stern perch. They circled several times, searching for some way to get a basket down on deck, but there were too many obstacles that could tangle the hoist line. Then, as they continued to circle, a series of small explosions sent more flames shooting out of the roof of the pilothouse.

"We determined that it was absolutely not safe to have the helicopter hovering over the vessel," Garran said.

So the team made a difficult decision: Quinn would go into the ocean.

"The one thing you'll find with any Coast Guard rescue crew is that failure is not an option," Garran said. "We were thinking about how can we get this done."

When Quinn got the nod, he said his mind raced with emotions. This was the job that he was trained to do — now it was time.

He put on a harness and was lowered into the ocean. He splashed down within 20 to 30 feet of the pitching vessel. It was twilight. Snow squalls whipped across the ocean. And it was noisy, with the thumping of the helicopter overhead, and the roar of wind and waves. From the troughs of the waves, Quinn could look up to see the vessel lurching precariously, the stern propeller screws lifting entirely out of the water.

As bad as it was on board, it took courage for the three men — one at a time — to abandon ship. They had to leap some 40 feet into a bitter-cold sea.

One jumped with a buoy tied around his waist, the other two without any flotation devices at all. The force of the fall drove them beneath the surface. As they popped up, Quinn maneuvered to grab them.

"I pulled them away from the boat — I wanted to get away from that boat as quick as possible."

Quinn helped each man into the basket. Then he was hauled back up into the helicopter. The helicopter moved close to the bow and Quinn went back into the ocean.

By then, one of the three crew members on the bow had already jumped and was being picked up by one of the rescue boats.

Then a second jumped, and Quinn helped him into the basket. Finally, Shoemaker — suffering from cracked ribs and severe burns — made the plunge and was helped into the basket. He was the last to leave the ship.

Still, the work was not done.

One crewman — Jose R. Rodas of Pasco — was lifted out of the water. He had no pulse — but Quinn tried unsuccessfully to revive him with cardiopulmonary resuscitation as the helicopter scrambled back to the nearest island.

The five survivors were overcome with cold, barely able to talk. The crew gave them extra clothes.

Yesterday, the crew was on its way back to its base in Kodiak. For Quinn, now a veteran of at-sea rescues, he was headed home to his wife and three children.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com.