BREATH TAKING
Daring rescue of woman under boat by scuba Finest
Time was running out near Execution Rocks.
A woman was trapped under a capsized 25-foot boat not far from the remote lighthouse in the Long Island Sound. She could not swim and was not wearing a lifejacket. The victim, 46, was in an air pocket and surrounded by floating debris.
The two NYPD officers who saved her are up for a Daily News Hometown Heroes Award after pulling off a daring rescue that sounds like a scene from a Tom Cruise movie.
Within minutes of hearing the distress call over Channel 16, an emergency radio frequency used by mariners, Police Officer James Roche and Detective Brian Mullen of the scuba team, part of the police department’s harbor unit, were in a helicopter. They were lowered by rope into the cool, quickly-moving water between the northeast shore of the Bronx and Sands Point, L.I.
“You are lowered in feetfirst and disconnect from the hook,” Roche, 37, says. “And you start swimming. It was a bad current — 1 to 2 knots. You are in a lot of scuba gear, and you have to kick as hard as you can. I stayed focused on the boat and controlled my breathing. You’re breathing into a full-face mask. There’s no switching up tanks; we only have so much air.”
The Coast Guard and the Fire Department had already rescued six others from that boat, but no one knew what shape she was in. Though it was a sunny, warm day on June 9, the water was about 71 degrees, which feels cold fast. She was likely starting to suffer from hypothermia.
“It was a little tricky because it was a tight fit to get into the cabin on the capsized boat with all of my scuba gear on,” Mullen, 45, recalled. “There was a lot of debris in the cabin, cushions — things people would take for a day trip on a boat. Fishing rods were blocking my entrance into that tight entryway into the cabin. Then trying to get her out was tricky.”
Roche used his knife to cut through fishing lines and nets. Mullen tried to get her to swim with him, but she could not go underwater.
Meanwhile, Roche was behind them, waiting. “It really felt like an eternity,” Roche said.
Mullen pointed to where Roche needed to go. “I swam underneath the railings and got to the forward part of the boat and saw a hatch,” Roche said. “And I saw her feet sticking out.”
On the second try, Roche dislodged her. Kicking hard, he held her as he swam to the surface, about 7 feet. Then it was about a 50-foot swim to the Fire Department boat. She was taken to North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, L.I.
“It could not have gone any better,” says Roche, who has been in his dream job on the scuba team for three years. “Everybody was in the right place at the right time.”
Even after 19 years on the force and a dozen on the scuba team, Mullen had never encountered a similar situation.
“You wait for these calls, and every job that we do is leading up to this,” Mullen said. “You don’t train for this. You just accumulate all the experience you have, and do the best you can.”