Reader's Digest Asia Pacific

RACING THE STORM

The sailors thought they could make it home before the storm hit. But it arrived early, unleashing hurricane-force winds

- MATTHEW TEAGUE FROM SMITHSONIA­N MAGAZINE

These sailors thought they could make it home before the storm hit.

On this April morning, yachts traced gentle circles on Alabama’s Mobile Bay, preparing for the Dauphin Island Regatta. On board the

Kyla, a lightweigh­t 4.8-metre catamaran, Ron Gaston and Hana Blalack made an unusual crew. He was tall and lanky, 50 years old, with decades of sailing experience. She was 15, tiny, pale and redheaded, and had never stepped on a sailing boat. But Hana trusted Ron, who was like a father to her. And Ron’s daughter, Sarah, was like a sister.

One day each spring, sai lors gather in central Mobile Bay and sprint about 33 kilometres south to Dauphin Island. On this morning of April 25, 2015, there were other boats like Ron’s, Hobie Cats that could be pulled by hand onto a beach. There were also sleek, purpose-built race boats with oversized masts and great oceangoing vessels with plush cabins. All told, 125 boats with 475 sailors and guests had signed up for the regatta.

At 7.44am, as sailors began to gather on the bay for a 9.30 start, the website of the Fairhope Yacht Club, which was hosting the regatta M that year, posted a message about the race: “Cancelled due to inclement weather.”

But at 8.10am, the yacht club insisted the regatta was on. Gary Garner, then commodore of the yacht club, said the cancellati­on was an error, the result of a garbled message. The confusion delayed the start by an hour.

A false start cost another half-hour, and the boats were still circling at 10.45am when the National Weather Service (NWS) in Mobile issued a dire prediction: “Thundersto­rms will move in from the west this afternoon and across the marine area. Some of the thundersto­rms may be strong or severe.”

Only eight boats withdrew. As Garner would later say, “It’s no big deal for us to see a weather report that says scattered thundersto­rms, or even scattered severe thundersto­rms. If you want to race sailing boats, and race long-distance, you’re going to get into storms.”

On board the Razr, a 7.3-metre boat, 17-year-old Lennard Luiten, his father and three friends scrutinise­d incoming weather reports: the storm appeared likely to arrive at 4.15pm, which should give them time to cross the finish line and return to home port before the front arrived.

Lennard felt thrilled as the moment approached. He and his father,

Robert, had bought the Razr as a half-sunk lost cause, and spent a year rebuilding it. Now the five crew members smiled at each other. For the first time, they agreed, they had the boat ‘tuned’ just right. They timed their start with precision and led the field for the first half-hour.

The small catamarans were among the fastest boats, though, and the Kyla hurtled Hana and Ron forwards. On the open water Hana felt herself relax. She and Ron passed an 11- metre sailboat called the Wind Nuts, captained by Ron’s friend Scott Godbold. “Hey!” Ron called out, waving.

Godbold and his wife, Hope, had come to watch their son Matthew race and to help out if anyone had trouble. He waved back.

MOBILE BAY IS ABOUT 48 kilometres long and half as wide. A deep shipping channel runs up its centre, but much of the bay is so shallow an adult could stand on its muddy bottom. On the northweste­rn shore stands the city of Mobile, dotted with shining high-rises. The mouth of the bay is guarded by Dauphin Island and Fort Morgan peninsula. Between them a gap of just under five kilometres of open water leads into the vast Gulf of Mexico.

During the first half of the race, Hana and Ron chased his brother, Shane Gaston, who sailed on an identical catamaran. Conditions were ideal, with high winds but smooth water. About 2pm, as they arrived at the finish line, Hana looked back. Ron’s brother was a minute behind them. “Hey, we won!” she said. Typically, once crews finish the race they pull into harbour at Dauphin Island for a trophy ceremony and a night’s rest. But the Gaston

brothers decided to sail home, assuming they’d beat the storm; others made the same choice. The brothers headed north along the bay’s western shore.

Shortly before 3pm, Ron and Hana watched as storm clouds rolled towards them from the west. “We may get some rain,” he said, with characteri­stic understate­ment.

By now the storm, which had first come alive in Texas, had crossed three states to reach the edge of Mobile Bay. At the NWS office in Mobile, meteorolog­ists watched it advance on radar. Jason Beaman, the meteorolog­ist in charge of coordinati­ng the office’s warnings, noted the unusual way the storm, rather than blow itself out quickly, kept gaining in strength. “It was an engine, like a machine that keeps running,” he said.

UNDER THE DAUPHIN Island Bridge, a nearly five-kilometre span that links the island to the mainland, 17-yearold Sarah Gaston struggled to control a small boat with her sailing partner, Jim Gates, a 74-year-old family friend, as wind and rain came over the bay.

“We just were looking for any land at that point,” Sarah said later. “But everything was white. We couldn’t see land. We couldn’t even see the bridge.”

Farther north, the Gaston brothers were getting closer to the Buccaneer Yacht Club, on the bay’s western shore.

Lightning crackled. “Don’t touch anything metal,” Ron told Hana. They huddled on their boat’s trampoline – the fabric deck between the two hulls.

Just over three kilometres behind, Shane, along with Shane’s son Con- nor, disappeare­d behind a curtain of rain.

Within moments the rain caught up with the Kyla. It came so fast, and so dense, that the world seemed reduced to a small grey room, with no horizon, no sky, no shore.

Then, without warning, the winds rose to 117 kilometres per hour – hurricane strength. Ron and Hana never had a moment to let down their sails.

The front of the Kyla rose up from the water, stood for an instant on its tail, then flipped sideways. The bay was only two metres deep at that spot, so the mast jabbed into the mud and snapped in two.

Hana flew off, hitting her head on

As the boat blew away, Ron faced a decision that seemed surreal: he could let go of the boat, or Hana

the boom, a horizontal spar attached to the mast. Ron landed between her and the boat, and grabbed her with one hand and a rope attached to the boat with the other.

The vertical trampoline caught the wind like a sail. As the boat blew away, it pulled Ron through the water, away from Hana, stretching his arms. He faced a decision that seemed surreal: he could let go of the boat, or Hana.

He let go of the boat. Hana and Ron both wore life jackets, but two-anda-half-metre swells crashed on them, threatenin­g to separate or drown them.

The two wrapped their arms around each other, and Hana tucked her head against Ron’s chest to find a pocket of air free from the piercing rain.

In the chaos, Ron thought, for a moment, of his daughter. But as he and Hana rolled under the waves, his mind went blank and grey as the seascape.

Sarah and Jim’s boat had also bucked them into the water.

The mast snapped, sending the sails loose. “Jim!” Sarah cried out, trying to shift the sails. Finally, they found each other, and dragged themselves back into the wreckage of their boat.

ABOUT 48 KILOMETRES NORTH, a Coast Guard ensign named Phillip McNamara stood his first-ever shift as duty officer. As the storm bore down on Mobile Bay, distress calls came in from sailors in the water, people stranded on sandbars, frantic witnesses on land. Several times he rang his superior, Commander Chris Cederholm, for advice about how to respond.

“By the third call it was clear something big was happening,” Cederholm said recently. When he arrived at the station, he triggered a “Mass Rescue Operation” protocol, summoning a response from air, land and sea.

As authoritie­s scrambled to grasp the scale of the storm, hundreds of sailors on the bay struggled to survive it. The wind flipped the Luitens’ Razr, slinging the crew – Lennard, his father, 71-year-old Jimmie Brown, and teenage friends Adam Clark and Jacob Pouncey – into the water.

Brown struggled in a raincoat. Lennard swam around the boat, searching for his dad, whom he found with Jacob. After 20 minutes or so, twoand-a-half-metre waves threatened to drown them, and Lennard struck out for the shore to find help.

Normally, a storm’s hard edge blows past in two or three minutes; this storm continued for 45 minutes.

A DOZEN COAST GUARD ships responded, along with several planes, helicopter­s and a team who prowled the coastline on all-terrain vehicles. People on horses searched the bay’s clay banks for survivors. At the Coast Guard outpost on Dauphin Island, Scott Bannon, a major with Alabama’s Marine Resources Division, made call after call to the families and friends of

boat owners and captains, trying to work out how many people might be missing.

Near the Dauphin Island Bridge, a Coast Guard rescue boat picked up Sarah Gaston and Jim Gates. She had suffered a leg injury and hypothermi­a, and as her rescuers pulled her onto their deck, she went into shock.

Ron and Hana were closer to the middle of the bay, where the likelihood of rescue was frightenin­gly low. “All you can really see above water is someone’s head,” Bannon explained later. “You can easily pass within a few feet and never see someone in the water.”

Ron and Hana had now been in the water for two hours. They tried to swim for shore, but the waves and current locked them in place. To stave off the horror of their predicamen­t, Hana made jokes. “I don’t think we’re going to make it home for dinner,” she said.

“Look,” Ron said, pulling a phone from his pocket. At the same moment, Hana pulled out a GPS unit that she had tucked into her life preserver.

Hana called emergency services. A dispatcher answered: “What is your emergency and location?” “I’m in Mobile Bay,” Hana said. “The bay area?” “No, ma’am. I’m in the bay. I’m in the water.” Using the phone and GPS, and watching the blue lights of a patrol boat, she guided rescuers to their location.

As an officer pulled her from the water and onto the deck, Hana asked, “This boat isn’t going to capsize too, is it?”

SHANE AND CONNOR Gaston had also gone overboard. Three times the wind flipped their boat before it eventually broke the mast. They used the small jib sail to fight their way towards the western shore. Once

on land, they knocked on someone’s door, borrowed a phone, and called the Coast Guard to report that they’d survived.

As the sun started to set that evening, Scott and Hope Godbold sailed into the Coast Guard’s Dauphin Island station with three survivors.

“It was amazing,” said Bannon. The odds against finding even one person in more than 1000 square kilometres of choppy sea were outrageous.

After leaving Hope and the survivors at the station, Godbold was joined by his father, Kenny, and together they continued the search. Scott had in mind a teenager he knew: Lennard Luiten, who remained missing. Lennard’s father had been found alive, as had his friend Jacob. But two other Razr crew members – Adam Clark and Jimmie Brown – had not survived.

By this point Lennard would have been in the water, without a life jacket, for six hours. Night had come, and the men knew the chances of finding the boy were vanishingl­y remote. Scott eased his boat into the bay, listening for any sound in the darkness.

Finally, a voice drifted over the water: “Help!”

Hours earlier, the current had swept Lennard towards the sea. He swam towards an oil platform, but the waves worked against him, and he watched the platform move slowly from his south to his north. There was nothing but sea and darkness, and still he hoped: Maybe his hand would find a crab trap. Maybe a buoy.

Now Kenny shined a torch into his face, and Scott said, “Is that you, Lennard?”

TEN VESSELS SANK or were destroyed by the storm, and 40 people were rescued from the water. A halfdozen sailors died. It was one of the worst recreation­al sailing disasters in American history.

Working with the Coast Guard, which is investigat­ing the disaster, regatta organisers have adopted more stringent safety measures.

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P. | 50
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The regatta was in Mobile Bay, on the Alabama coast
 ??  ?? Hana Blalack and Ron Gaston were in the water for more than two hours
Hana Blalack and Ron Gaston were in the water for more than two hours

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