PART TWO

The basket came down again and picked up a second person, Jayhawk flight mechanic Brian Lickfield. When it settled into the water a third time, Watson grabbed on. It jerked, the signal for him to get inside.

Watson was still warm in his dry suit. But the two Selendang Ayu crewmen he could see had to be cold in the 48-degree water. One was a few yards away.

"I pounded on his life preserver, and there was no response," Watson said. He looked into the man's eyes. Pupils were fixed. He appeared to be dead.

The wreckage of the ditched helicopter.

The other Selendang Ayu sailor was too far away to swim to, so Watson climbed into the basket and rode to the hovering helicopter.

 Petty Officer Greg Gibbons watched from the open door of the Dolphin 150 feet above. In the beginning, there had been five "targets" in the water -- just forms, really, bodies rolling in the surf, glimpsed from the height of a 15-story building through a blizzard in the dark.

Now, with three rescued, Gibbons could see only one man on the waves.

He dropped the basket to the swells. Working together, flight mechanic and pilots, they trolled the basket back and forth -- easy, easy -- trying to bring the cage next to the last visible man.

The body came alive: Rajiv Dias, 24, from India, lunged at the basket and tried to grab on. But he couldn't hold it and again went limp, collapsing into the sea.

"I knew he wasn't getting in," Gibbons said. "And then, by the grace of God, a big wave came along and smashed him into the basket."

The basket flipped upright. Gibbons saw that the man, unconscious and limp, was tangled in the cable, lying partly over the basket.

Now what? Bring up the basket with the man fouled?

Take a chance that he would fall off halfway up? "I didn't want to kill him with the cable"

 On the headset, Gibbons spoke to Eason and Kornexl:

"He won't get in and I can't get him off."

Eason said he'd bring the Dolphin down to 100 feet or so while Gibbons hauled the man in. As Dias rose, Gibbons could see his oil-covered torso, steam rising off his head. "I thought he was burnt." Dias was coated in glistening black oil, which looked like blood in the cabin's dim light. It was thick, reeking and foul. But even more alarming, the cable was wrapped around his neck.

"I was face to face with him," Gibbons said. "He had foam coming out of his nose, his mouth." Dias was limp, seemingly dead.

Gibbons readied the basket to hoist another person.

But in the open door, exposed to the gusting wind and snow, he could see no one else in the sea.

Lickfield knelt over Dias, cleaning off his face, opening his airway. Dias jerked, gasped, and began to breathe.

The Dolphin moved toward the shore, following the drift of the tumbling debris in the crashing waves below, searching for signs of the six missing Jayhawk passengers. Dias was clinging to life, clearly in need of medical attention to survive. His body temperature was later found to be 78 degrees Fahrenheit, low enough to kill.

 But there were still two people on the grounded freighter: Selendang Ayu Capt. Kailash Singh and Petty Officer Aaron Bean, a Jayhawk crewman lowered to the ship when its endangered crew balked at getting in the rescue basket.

It was a tough call, Eason said later.  "We knew if (Dias) was going to live, we had to get him in."

 The Dolphin commander decided to leave the two men on the ship, fly the injured survivor to Dutch Harbor, and return as soon as they could.

From the deck of the grounded freighter, two men watched with dismay as the Jayhawk helicopter, laboring to lift the last of the Selendang Ayu crew off the heaving ship, flamed out in a towering rogue wave and crashed into the sea

It was about 6 p.m. on Dec. 8, two and a half days since the huge cargo vessel had shut down its engine for repairs and not been able to get it started again.

 Gripping a line attached to a life raft, U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer Aaron Bean, who had ridden the chopper basket down to help get the freighter crew off, sought shelter beneath an overhang with the ship's captain, Kailash Singh. Bean was trained for disasters on the sea, but even he wondered if they would both survive.

 For a while there had been two helicopters over the ship -- one dropping and raising a rescue basket as fast as possible, lifting people one by one off the swamping deck while a second hovered nearby. Now the first chopper was in pieces in the water and the second was racing toward Dutch Harbour 50 miles away with four survivors aboard.

In the ocean below, six men were dead.

 Bean knew his colleagues would return, but it would be an hour or longer. In the heart of the raging storm, a lot could happen in an hour.

Bean looked down the expanse of the 738-foot wreck, over seven hatches covering holds filled with 66,000 tons of soybeans, past cranes and booms, toward the

pilot house as large as an office building. Waves flushed across the deck like surf over a reef. He decided it was safest to stay put at the front of the ship.

The Selendang Ayu was taking on water. Swirling waves yanked at the life raft, jerking the rope from Bean's hands. He dashed down the slippery deck and recaptured it. He had to hold on.

Above the din of the wind and the thunder of waves slamming against metal, Bean heard an immense boom, a gut-thumping crack.

"What's that?" he asked the captain.

 "The ship is breaking," was the reply.

It was the sound of a freighter longer than two football fields snapping in half.

"It wasn't a whole lot of crumpling and crashing," Bean said later. "It was 'kaboom' and then lights out and there she blows. She peeled in half."

Moments later, the floodlights blinked out, leaving Bean and Singh in darkness. The back half of the enormous ship, severed completely from the front, began drifting shoreward.

The front half, with the two men hanging on, stayed afloat, buoyed by bulkheads that miraculously held under the strain.

"I could not explain how the vessel was still floating after it tore in half," Bean said. "But we held on. Pretty much all we could do was hold on."

 Bean, 23, from Colorado, had trained as a rescue swimmer that summer. He learned to leap into the ocean to help people too cold or too weak to help themselves. People like him were the Coast Guard's last resort in a crisis.

 Bean looked the captain over. Like his crew, he wore an inexpensive life jacket over regular clothing, sneakers on his feet. He'd told Bean he couldn't swim.

There were no survival suits on board. Just the life raft.

"I sat there and I looked at it. I looked at it for a long time because I knew something was going to have to be done. I knew I was going to have to do something, something big, something heroic, something people were going to write about."

Another wave slammed the ship, washing over the decks, yanking on the raft. This time the line snapped.

When Bean reeled it in, he found only a frayed end.

"I radioed the Alex Haley, and I let them know. 'This vessel is breaking up, my life raft is gone. ...' The master had explained to me he can't swim, I told him, I said, 'I'm a rescue swimmer. I can keep you afloat.' I don't know if that gave him any comfort or not, but we didn't have a life raft and he was in street clothes. So I didn't expect (him) to last long out in the seas."

 Increased pressure in the cargo holds began blowing air from the vents, a sign Bean recognized as proof of the rising water level below decks. Waves rained down on the two men. The captain panicked, clambering upwards, trying to keep his feet out of the water.

"I tried not to let the water, the rushing water on the deck, knock me over," Bean said. "I just held on."

 Two hours passed this way. How long could the pieces of the Selendang Ayu stay afloat?

Then Bean's hand-held radio crackled. The Dolphin helicopter was back.

"They called me ... and they said, 'We're going to come from a very high, high hoist.' And I said, 'That sounds like an excellent plan, sir.' "

At the controls of the Dolphin, Lt. Tim Eason looked for reflections from life vests in the water, people waving.

Anything. But the seas were so big, the surf so shattered, that he couldn't distinguish objects or bodies.

As the chopper pulled over the front fragment of the broken freighter, Petty Officer 3rd Class Greg Gibbons knelt in the open cabin door, shoved out the cage, and dropped it toward the deck, where he could see Bean's strobe light.

The winds caught it and lofted it back from the Dolphin, angling maybe 70 feet behind.

It was like manoeuvring a kite between trees in a windstorm. The basket would descend, then blow off to the side. Gibbons would pull it up and try again. "My grip was gone, trying to hold on so tight," he said.

They radioed Bean, asked him and the captain to move as far toward the broken end of the ship as they could.

Gibbons finally brought the basket to rest on the ship's wet, shuddering deck. Bean helped Singh in and watched him rise into the air.

"And I looked up at the sky -- the master was going up, he was clear of the vessel, where were stars, you know, there were mountains in the background. 'And I said, 'this could be a good night.' "

 The basket started back down, whipping sideways in the wind. Bean looked straight up as a snow squall swallowed the stars and the mountains and the sky.

 "I said, 'Merry frigging Christmas!' I was scared. I knew that these guys were flying up there in the snow, and I saw the basket coming down sideways, so I wasn't sure the basket was going to get to me."

But it landed on the deck right in front of him. In the open door nearly 200 feet up, Gibbons watched Bean vault into the cage. "I've never seen someone jump in a basket so quick," he said.

As Bean cleared the ship and was hoisted to the Dolphin, Gibbons shoved out his leg, catching the basket, stopping its spin, seeing Bean's big grin. He pulled the young rescue swimmer in.

Behind them, in the chopper cabin, captain Singh sat hunched, subdued, hands dripping oil. Cold. Gibbons gave him something to wipe his hands. He handed Bean a half bottle of water and a Snicker's bar.

"I remember looking back and seeing Aaron just sitting there smiling and (Singh) had a big chunk of Snickers bar going into his mouth."

Bean buckled up, then plugged into the intercom. The pilots asked him how he was doing.

"And I told them that I was doing mighty fine."

******

Some days after the crew were rescued from the ship and the weather abated salvage operations began to lessen the enviromental impact the break up of the wreck would have on the area, a crew removed the masts and radar tower from the monkey islad to make  helo landing pad to put crews aboard to work pumps etc to drain the ships bunkers which were pumped into 'bags' then airlifted ashore by the helos.

Helicopter on Monkey island

The end some time later

REPORT OF THE ENSUING COURT CASE

Some interesting details about cost effectiveness measures on the high seas and ‘flogging the log’

 By JOEL GAY and NICOLE TSONG

Anchorage Daily News

Published: March 31, 2005

 The captain of the Selendang Ayu pleaded guilty Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Anchorage to a single charge of lying to federal investigators looking into his vessel's wreck on the rocks near Unalaska in December.

 The 738-foot Malaysian-flagged freighter lost power and drifted 140 miles before it eventually broke in half on Unalaska Island and spilled more than 300,000

gallons of fuel oil into a national wildlife refuge. Six crewmen died when a Coast Guard helicopter crashed while attempting to lift them off the stricken ship.

Under the terms of a plea agreement approved by Judge Ralph Beistline, Capt. Kailash Bhushan Singh was sentenced to three years' probation. The agreement centred on statements Singh made to federal investigators on how long his vessel lay dead in

the water before he notified the Coast Guard. He first claimed the ship was powerless for 13 hours. He later admitted it was 15 hours.

The agreement and Wednesday's court hearing revealed new information uncovered by investigators about the days before and after the shipwreck:

 • After the ship lost power, the crew spent nearly four hours trying to radio for assistance before using the satellite phone that immediately made their plight known and started help on the way.

 • Company officials knew the vessel was drifting helplessly toward land but didn't initiate efforts to locate a tugboat for hours.

 • the captain and crew routinely falsified logs and misled the company that chartered their ship in order to reduce expenses.

While Wednesday's plea deal allows Singh to return home to New Delhi, India, U.S. Attorney Tim Burgess said the shipwreck investigation is not over. Charges could eventually be filed against officials of IMC Group, the Singapore-based firm that operated the Selendang Ayu, he said.

"I can assure you that in these types of cases, we always try to assign liability wherever it lies," Burgess said. "If individuals up the chain made decisions and issued orders that led to these events, we're certainly going to look at that."

Court documents released Wed-nesday, along with courtroom testimony; provide the best picture to date of what happened after the ship left Seattle for China last November with more than 60,000 tons of soybeans on board. They show a shipping company keenly concerned about expenses.

The ship was hired for $35,500 per day, with an expectation it would travel an average of 13.5 knots. But if mechanical problems forced the ship to slow down or stop, its owners would be docked for the down time, known as "off-hire."

Initially, the trip went faster than anticipated. But Singh made false reports to the chartering company and in the ship's log books showing he had travelled fewer miles.

The difference between the actual and reported locations is known in the industry as "pocket miles." If the ship eventually had to slow down or stop later in the voyage, the captain could use pocket miles and never report the slower progress -- and never go off-hire, costing the ship owners money.

 Trouble began Dec. 6 when water and steam began spraying from a crack in one of the main engine's massive cylinder liners. At 9:50 a.m., the chief engineer shut down the engine and the ship began to drift. He then notified Singh. Contrary to standard maritime practice, the captain didn't log the time or location.

 "Captain Singh knew that if he accurately recorded the engine failure his vessel would immediately be considered off-hire," the charging documents say.  Around 4 p.m., when repairs still weren't complete, Singh put a false entry in the deck log saying the engine had stopped at 12:15 p.m., more than two hours after it had actually shut down.

They never got it started again.

 Around 8:30 p.m., Singh notified his home office of the problem.

With seas rising, he tried around 9 p.m. to contact the Dutch Harbour harbour master by VHF radio. He couldn't reach the office, nor could his deck officers, who tried every 20 to 30 minutes for nearly four hours, the investigation shows.

 At 12:50 a.m. on Dec. 7, after drifting for 15 hours, Singh used the ship's satellite telephone to call Dutch Harbour and request help for the first time.

 The Coast Guard dispatched the cutter Alex Haley to the scene from Bering Sea fisheries patrol but also advised Singh to locate a tug through his company. It took his office "several hours," the court documents say, to locate the tug that eventually responded from Dutch Harbour.

 The ship ran aground Dec. 8 at 5:05 p.m. The helicopter crashed later that evening. Singh and the 19 surviving crewmen were taken to Dutch Harbour.

In the following days, Singh told National Transportation Safety Board investigators that the engine stopped at 12:15 p.m. on Dec. 6, not the actual time of 9:50 a.m. At his instruction, his crew confirmed the erroneous time.

 But four days after his initial interview, Singh changed his story.

 His attorney, Michael Chalos, who represented Exxon Valdez Capt. Joe Hazelwood in that 1989 spill, called Singh's decision to lie to investigators and tell his crew to do the same "irrational."

The captain slept just one hour from the time the engine was shut down until the ship ran aground about 55 hours later, Chalos said. He witnessed the helicopter crash that killed six of his crew and was on the ship's deck as it ripped in two on the rocks.

Battered by waves and winds, Singh became hypothermic waiting for a helicopter to rescue him and a Coast Guard rescue swimmer who had boarded the vessel, Chalos said. Singh arrived in Dutch Harbour exhausted, in shock and grieving.

But after he slept and spoke with an attorney about how to correct his misstatements, Singh told investigators the truth, Chalos said.

"I think he understood the gravity of what he'd done," Chalos said.

 In the long run, the two-hour time difference may not have mattered.

"It would've made no material difference in what happened out there," said Jim Lawrence, spokesman for the IMC Group. "There just wasn't a tug of material strength out there to save the day."

 Others aren't convinced the delay was inconsequential.

Rick Steiner, an advocate for shipping safety improvements, said the additional time might have helped keep the ship off the rocks.

 "Even with substandard tugs, that was another two hours to work," Steiner said. "It doesn't necessarily mean it would've averted disaster, but it could've made a difference."

 At his hearing Wednesday, Singh, a slender man with a dark, neatly groomed moustache and proper bearing, sat at a table in the federal courtroom as his wife looked on and answered questions from the judge in clipped, accented English.

He told Beistline he accepted that he made a mistake and apologized.

 "In a case of this sort of situation in the future, I definitely would do it in a different manner," said Singh, 53.

Beistline said he was sympathetic to Singh's situation and understood he was under extreme stress. But that does not justify how he acted, the judge said. In addition to the probation, he ordered Singh to pay a $100 fee.

 The judge considered rejecting the deal over one line that is generally a standard provision in plea agreements. The U.S. government agreed it would not

prosecute Singh further based on information it had so far, but Beistline said he was worried other claims could come up in the case.

 After prosecutors and Chalos agreed to amend the agreement, the guilty plea and sentencing went forward. The new language means Singh could face future charges if new evidence arises.

 As a condition of his agreement, he also agreed to return to Alaska for court dates, hearings and trials if others are charged as a result of the investigation.

 In a statement afterward, Burgess said Singh's case was "the first stage in this investigation," including a closer look at the issue of pocket miles.

"This practice, whether by a company or an individual, is a great concern," Burgess said. It can lead to false logbook entries that U.S. officials may rely on for their investigations.

 The Anchorage attorney's office will keep investigating the incident, he said, and the NTSB has yet to announce its findings. Additional charges against the ship's crew, managers or owners could result, Burgess said.