Circling sharks, other terrors till rescue
Come sunup, the challenge would be finding a way to make him more visible. His dark hair and blue T-shirt would fade into the blue sea. Only by attaching himself to a buoy could he distinguish his body from the endless water.
Aldridge figured he’d gone over about 40 miles south of Montauk Point. His friend Pete Spong’s line of lobster traps couldn’t be that far away. He had to at least try.
The sky lightened, but it was the moon that illuminated the dorsal fins of two sharks closing in. Mere shadows in the water below, each ran about 6 to 8 feet long.
In a night filled with terror, this was the topper. Aldridge grabbed for his buck knife, but was almost too frightened to open it. A small graze would leak blood into the water and that would be lethal.
The sharks circled for almost 30 minutes. Aldridge fought to control his breathing, aiming to slow his heart rate. Forcing himself to focus on his plans for the coming daylight, he slowly swam away. The sharks let him go. On the Anna Mary, Sosinski was piecing things together. Spong, passing by on the Brooke C, had radioed Aldridge to no answer about 4:30 a.m.
Knowing that Aldridge was missing by then already narrowed the search field. But Sosinski pulled another important clue from the recess of his memory. He and Aldridge had planned to fill the cooling tanks about 3 a.m.
Sosinski stepped away from the radio to investigate and saw the broken handle. He immediately radioed the Coast Guard. By then, the Coast Guard’s computerized Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System was spitting out data as it would throughout the operation. But it would also prove dangerously misleading.
While the search area was calculated on the trajectory of drift, Aldridge was not drifting. By any means possible, he was plowing through ocean, fighting like hell for his life.
The number of ships at sea swelled as the hours passed. The two Coast Guard motorboats already in the water were joined by two 87-foot cutters from Sandy Hook, N.J., and Newport, R.I.
A volunteer fleet of 23 boats, the majority manned by fishermen who knew Aldridge personally, took direction from Sosinski, in turn guided by the Coast Guard.
At 12:45, the Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System crashed. The searchers were now sailing blind and, due to the mistaken drift assumption, to the west of Aldridge.
Aldridge began his long swim toward the targeted buoy at sunrise. Clutching his boots to his chest, he frog-kicked forward with only one arm free to propel him. It was exhausting.
“You swim or you die,” he told himself.
Another fin surfaced, and his heart pummeled his chest. This time he felt a brush against his body before a 500-pound sunfish leaped out of the ocean.
Aldridge was within 30 yards of the buoy when the current pulled him away. He had no choice but to strike out for the buoy at the west end of the trapline.
It was then, drained by fresh desperation and harrowing thoughts, Aldridge hit on a lifesaving strategy. He determined he would concentrate on a vacuum cleaner.
“Vacuum cleaners are so normal and so far away from all this,” he remembered thinking. “It alleviates the fear, lifts the misery to remember vacuum cleaners.”
Though the waves kept fighting him off, Aldridge finally fell on the buoy. But not only were the currents trying to separate him from it, he could tell from sightings that the search was taking place to the west.
It took more than an hour to gird himself to swim to the next buoy, cutting free the one he was clinging to. Without it, Aldridge would be invisible again.
He pushed the buoy into the swells and chased it as it bobbed ahead. An hour into the journey, the Anna Mary came and went. It took another hour to reach the next buoy.
Tying the two together, he straddled the rope. After almost 12 hours battling the ocean, Aldridge was finally seated on it, not in it. But it wasn’t that long of a rest.
Bobbing on top of the ocean, the buoys signaled his location to the helicopter he had sighted twice throughout the day. This time, though, there was no missing him.
The sighting was reported at 2:58 p.m. As the rescue swimmer gripped Aldridge in a body tow, he saw something that made him shout a frantic request. His boots were drifting away. “My boots! Can we get them? They saved my life.”
It wasn’t just the boots, of course. It was the vacuum cleaner, too. But above all, it was fisherman John Aldridge’s fierce determination and understanding.
Others could search for him, but only he could fight for his life.