THE LOSS OF THE “SELENDANG AYU”

I used the story that came in one of my  'Google alerts' as it has such a wealth of detail in the story originally published in the Anchorage Daily News.

 The six-year-old Malaysian registered cargo ship “MV Selendang Ayu” departed Seattle on Nov 28^th. 2004 with a full load, 60,000 tons of Soya Beans bound for Xiamen in China.

Her route was the Great Circle track across the Bering Sea in the high latitudes skirting the Alaskan and Russian continents then into the Sea of Japan, a route used by some 2000 vessels each year trading between USA west coast ports and the Far East, as it is the shortest sea distance between the two points.

This route cuts through the Aleutian Islands a long chain of islands that spreads southwest from Alaska.

The “Selendang Ayu” transited through the island chain via the Unimak Pass between Dutch Harbour on Unalaska Island and Cold Harbour on the Southern tip of the Alaskan Peninsula nine days after leaving Seattle. 

The trip had been dogged by storms and engine problems.

A few hours after her transit through Unimak Pass trouble with one of the ship's enormous cylinders (a crack in the cylinder liner) had prompted the crew to take a dangerous chance and shut the engine down shortly before 10 a.m. on Dec. 6.

The plan was to fix the engine, restart it, and continue the journey, losing as little time as possible.

But the engine would not restart. The crew tried again and again to fire it up. 

Rising winds drove the powerless vessel toward tiny Bogoslof Island, an emerging volcano in the Alaska Maritime. 

At 8-30 pm the Captain notified the owners via the satellite telephone, at 9pm he started to try and notify the Dutch harbour harbour master and local authorities of the vessels predicament by VHF Radio, he and his officers persisted trying the radio  for 4 hours before the captain finally used the ship’s satellite telephone to notify Dutch harbour and requested help for the first time at 0100 on Dec 7^th. The request was passed onto the big US Coastgaurd base on Kodiak Island, Alaska.

 The ship had now drifted about 70 miles in the 15 hours since the engine was stopped.  

That morning Lt. David Neel and Doug Watson, both Jayhawk helicopter pilots stationed at the big U.S. Coast Guard station in Kodiak, were on a C-130 transport plane on the way to St. Paul for a week of search-and-rescue duty with the crab fishery around the Pribilof Islands.

 In mid-flight, Kodiak radioed new orders: Go instead to Cold Bay, an outpost near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula. Neel and Watson should prepare to take a Jayhawk on a rescue mission to Unalaska Island in the Aleutians. A ship might be in trouble.

 Neel, then 37, he had 10 years of experience as a helicopter pilot, including a stint in Bosnia with an elite special operations unit of U.S. Army Black Hawks. Watson, then 32, had just finished his seventh year in the Coast Guard, having transferred to Kodiak from Clearwater, Fla.

The two pilots arrived at Cold Bay by 1 p.m. that Tuesday. By evening, two Jayhawks had been flown in. The men went to bed that night at the Cold Bay Lodge, ready to fly when called, not knowing if they would be needed.

   At 3:30 a.m. on Dec. 7, the Coast Guard's North Pacific search and rescue coordinator, having been notified of the request for a tow, called the Selendang Ayu by satellite phone.

The Selendang Ayu's captain, Kailash Bhushan Singh, said his vessel was drifting southeast at about 2 mph, according to Capt. Michael Kendall, head of search and Rescue for the Coast Guard in Alaska.

But he offered few details except that they were moving toward Bogoslof Island. The captain declined an offer of mechanical help.

 "We got notified the engine was dead," Kendall said. "And they were working on it but were having trouble."

 The Coast Guard diverted its cutter “Alex Haley”, on the way home to Kodiak after a month long patrol of the boundary between the United States and Russia, toward the freighter 55 miles away.

 The first of three ocean-going tugs, the “Sydney Foss”, headed out from Dutch Harbour into weather that was quickly building into a storm.

 When the 283-foot “Alex Haley” reached the ship about 11 a.m., it could only stand by, ready to rescue crew members if the captain asked, or if the Selendang Ayu began to ground or sink.

The cutter was equipped with an 8-inch towline suited for a factory trawler or fishing boat. It could not pull such an enormous vessel in the dramatically worsening weather.

 Commanding the Alex Haley was Capt. Matt Bell, a 19-year Coast Guard veteran. He'd sailed the Bering Sea maybe 25 times but had rarely seen the conditions he found that day.

"The winds were howling -- 40, 50, 60 knots, with seas building," he said. Blizzards and fog swallowed the sky, blocked the horizon.

"It was a 700-foot vessel, and we couldn't see it."

 With a tug still hours away, it seemed as though nothing could stop the Selendang Ayu from wrecking itself on Bogoslof, where leaking fuel or an escape of Norway rats could trigger an ecological catastrophe for wildlife.

 Then, for a few hours, the wind changed, raising hopes that disaster could be averted. A slight shift to the west turned the freighter a few degrees to the north, and instead of grounding on the beach, it skirted the island by three or four miles.

The good luck didn't last. The wind gradually veered back to the northwest, growing even stronger, driving the ship at almost 3 mph toward a new hazard: the rugged, uninhabited northwest coast of Unalaska Island.

 But even now, the ship's crew wasn't technically in "grave danger," Bell said. With no immediate threat to life, the Coast Guard would not overrule the captain's decision not to evacuate his crew.

 A deep-draft vessel like the Selendang Ayu could handle such seas. It was more a floating island than a foundering ship.

And if conditions stabilized, as its captain suggested, they could repair the engine and get back under way.

"It's the master's ship," Bell said. "The danger was coming, but it wasn't immediate."

 The ocean-going tugboat Sydney Foss, fighting the storm, reached the Selendang Ayu about 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 7, joining the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley on the scene. As darkness fell, the tug crew set about securing a line to the bow of the massive ship, a difficult job that took two hours.  

With the line attached, the 3,000-horsepower tug began to pull, straining to turn the huge freighter away from the savage wind and waves smashing at its sides and overrunning the decks.

But the tug wasn't strong enough."They were pulling with all their might ... but they couldn't bring the bow into the wind," said Capt. Michael Kendall, head of search and rescue for the Coast Guard in Alaska.

 The Redeemer, a salvage boat from Dutch Harbour, had also reached the ship. After assessing the situation, Capt. David Magone figured no boat in Alaska had the horsepower to move the foundering freighter.

 You'd need a tug five times as powerful as the Foss to horse the Selendang Ayu, he said. "It was like trying to tow the Empire State Building."

 But the tug did make some difference. It slowed the freighter's drift by a third, Kendall said, buying rescuers a few hours.

The 4,000-horsepower tug James Dunlap and its three-man crew arrived about 3 a.m. the next day after an eight-hour trip from Dutch Harbour through seas fast going berserk. The plan had been to join with the Foss and try towing the freighter in tandem. But seas and winds were too rough by then to throw another line or even approach the Selendang Ayu too closely. They could only watch as the Foss laboured up and down in the swells.

 Then at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, the Foss line snapped.

The Selendang Ayu resumed its rapid drift toward disaster. It was now only 11 miles from shore.

 "We started talking about evacuation," Kendall said.

Coast Guard officers on the cutter and at command centres in Kodiak and Juneau talked by radio about dropping survival suits, about what to do if the ship hit rocks and broke apart.

 At 7:30 a.m., back in Cold Bay, the local lodge owner roused Coast Guard Lt. David Neel. New orders from Kodiak: Two HH-60 Jayhawks, dispatched to the Aleutians the day before just in case, were to fly immediately to the port town of Dutch Harbour, the airport closest to the Selendang Ayu.

With Neel at the controls of the first Jayhawk, the crew of four flew through racking snow squalls. "You could just see it getting light in the east," Neel said.

They reached Dutch Harbour about 11 a.m. Dec. 8. Coast Guard operations told the crew, which included Neel, Lt. Doug Watson, Petty Officer Brian Lickfield, the flight mechanic, and Aaron Bean, a specially trained rescue swimmer, to take some time for lunch while decisions were made about how to help the Selendang Ayu.

They were still at Amelia's restaurant, scarfing down burritos and omelets, when Neel's cell phone rang. New orders: Fly immediately to the scene.

"I ordered coffee to go," said Lickfield, who hadn't gotten his food yet.

By noon, as the two Jayhawks ploughed through whipping squalls that swallowed horizon and sky, the Selendang Ayu was two hours from the rocks with options running out.

Capt. Matt Bell, skipper of the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley, urged Selendang Ayu Capt. Kailash Singh to drop his starboard anchor. But the captain was afraid it would tangle with the port chain already in the water. 

Moments later the port anchor chain snapped, Kendall said.

The tug James Dunlap motored in close, its 101 feet looking tiny against the vast freighter, Bell said. Tug captain Rob Campbell thought he might try to get a line over.

"The ship's going up and down, and I'm standing there watching some of the crewmen running up and down on (the Selendang Ayu) deck, wondering if we even got anything to them whether they could get it tied down. ...

We were just taking on so much water that I just couldn't put my guys on the deck. ...There was no reason for anybody to die," he said.

Although the ship was only a few miles from the beach, lives were not in immediate danger and the Coast Guard still felt it could not override the captain.

 As minutes ticked away, the Alex Haley manoeuvred closer and radioed to the Selendang Ayu officers: Put all crew in life jackets, transfer fuel to centre tanks.

Bell ordered the cutter within 100 yards, extremely close for the conditions. The deck crew used a special gun to shoot over a lightweight rope called a "messenger line" that the Selendang Ayu mariners could use to pull a tow cable on board.  The Selendang Ayu crew secured the messenger line, but it quickly snapped.

As the cutter struggled to attempt a tow, the first Jayhawk rounded Cape Kovrizhka against winds gusting to 70 mph. The 35- to 40-minute flight from Dutch had been rough: gut-wrenching turbulence, snow squalls so dense that radar reported them as solid land.

Hurtling forward at nearly 100 mph, bounced and knocked by the gusts, pilots Neel and Watson scanned for vessels. Gradually the Selendang Ayu emerged from the gloom, perhaps a mile offshore.

 "It looks like an aircraft carrier, but it's a lot closer to the shore than I thought it would be," Neel said. The pilots assumed they'd need to take 26 people off the freighter in shifts.

Their helicopter couldn't hold them all at once. They monitored the radio transmissions, surprised at what they heard.

 "The Alex Haley saw the situation getting pretty dire," Watson said. "They were saying, 'Captain, we recommend you start sending people out to be hoisted.'

The drifting, heaving freighter, carrying 440,000 gallons of bunker fuel in addition to its 66,000-ton cargo of soybeans, was going to wreck within the hour, Bell predicted. Nonessential personnel must come off now.

 "I got the impression that he was not willing to do that at that point," Neel said. "The fact of the matter is, they could all have been off that ship within the next hour or so -- we could have done that easy, no problem. It was going to be nine plus nine plus eight. That's how I thought it out."

 But Singh radioed that he still wasn't ready to evacuate his crew.

 "He's saying, 'OK, I'm trying my starboard anchor, and I need all 26 of my people,'" Neel said. "Which was astounding to me."

 The Selendang Ayu crew managed to drop the starboard anchor. It bit bedrock bottom with a stunning jolt. The bow fetched up, pointing for the first time directly into the wind, and the stern of the 738-foot ship swung perpendicular to the crashing, washing-machine seas.

 The drift toward disaster had hesitated one mile off the rocks. It was about 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 8.

With Watson at the controls and Neel on the radio, with Lickfield readying the basket and Bean standing by, and despite the Selendang Ayu captain's refusal to let his crew leave, the Jayhawk, one of the Coast Guard's most reliable "Big Iron" rescue birds, descended toward the freighter.

Pointed into the wind, the Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter hovered above the deck of the heaving freighter and struggled to hold its position in 60 and 70 Mph gusts of wind.

 The chopper was ready to evacuate the Selendang Ayu crew as wind and seas drove the ship toward the northwest coast of Unalaska Island, now only one mile away.

But the deck below remained empty.

 Flight mechanic Brian Lickfield lowered a metal basket large enough to seat a man, placing it just aft of the focsle head at the ship's bow.

Held secure by a harness, Lickfield leaned out the chopper door into the screaming wind and looked down at the empty basket.

Where are those guys?

As minutes passed, some Selendang Ayu crewmen emerged from the forward tower, looked up at the helicopter, glanced at the basket.

Then they disappeared under the overhang.

 Finally, Jayhawk commander Lt. David Neel radioed the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley in exasperation.

"There's nobody out there. We need some people out there now!"

 "It should have taken 10 minutes to get them off," Neel, a Coast Guard rescuer for six years and former Army pilot, said later. "Instead it took about an hour to get (the first) nine people. ... They wasted a lot of hoists and a lot of time. In the end, the time turned into lives."

 Finally two Selendang Ayu crewmen wearing orange life jackets and street clothes came on deck. Lickfield was stunned to see them start loading the hoist with luggage ---- duffles, bags, and suitcases.

 "I was like, 'I can't believe this,' " Lickfield said. "I had no choice but to take them up."

 As Lickfield and Bean unloaded the things from the basket, Neel called Capt. Singh directly on the radio. "Hey, captain, we're to trying to get your people off the ship, not their bags," he said.

 Singh agreed immediately, Neel said. Ever-polite on the radio, the Selendang Ayu master told Neel to have no hesitation about ordering his crewmen to leave their lugage behind.

 Finally, two men appeared on the open deck. One at a time, they were lifted to the helicopter.

 Then another long wait. Two more people emerged and were hoisted up. Slowly, more trickled out.

"They started coming in ones and twos," Lickfield said. With nine men finally loaded, the helicopter flew toward the Alex Haley, a mile or so away.

The second Jayhawk had arrived from Dutch Harbour. It took position over the Selendang Ayu's bow to hoist the next nine men.

 By then, the freighter had drifted visibly closer to shore. The wind and waves were growing ever stronger.

 In the first Jayhawk's crammed and vibrating cabin, Lickfield studied the nine Selendang Ayu seamen. They seemed in good spirits, smiling, excited about taking a ride in a helicopter. But Lickfield was dismayed at how his temporary charges were dressed. None of them had survival suits. For flotation, they wore inexpensive

orange life jackets made of block foam. Their jeans, hooded sweatshirts and sneakers were inadequate for a walk in a winter storm, let alone for being hoisted 40 feet in a basket exposed to a blizzard over frigid Alaska waters.

 If any of the Selendang Ayu's crew ended up in the 48-degree water wearing their cotton clothing, they would lose the ability to swim within minutes ---- to struggle, to grab on. Even with life jackets keeping them afloat, surviving long in rough seas would be hard.

Transferring nine men from the Jayhawk down to the Alex Haley entailed some of the most difficult basket work Lickfield and Watson had ever done.

The cutter's deck rose and fell 20 to 30 feet at a time. Gale winds blasted everyone. To drop the rescued crewmen to the bucking, tilting deck, Watson had to raise and lower the helicopter in sync with the cutter.

 Gusts swung the basket perilously as Lickfield, on his knees, tethered in the open door with the gale blowing in his face, guided it down.

They deposited the nine men, plus their baggage, safely on the ship below, but Capt. Matt Bell, commander of the Haley, had seen enough wild manoeuvres for one day. He told the second Jayhawk, which had hoisted nine more Selendang Ayu crew to safety, to take them into Dutch Harbor.

No more risking men or machines doing airborne drop-offs in gale-force wind on heaving seas.

 At that point, Neel figured he and his crew would go back and pick the last eight men off the freighter, then scoot into Dutch Harbour and be done. One hour more of duty, they'd all be on dry land, 26 men saved, in time to catch the seafood buffet that evening at the Grand Aleutian Hotel.

"It will be great," he thought to himself.

But when they returned to the Selendang Ayu, Neel and his crew once again looked down on an empty deck.

Once again, no one came out.

Neel called the Alex Haley.

 "I've only got enough gas to be out here another 25, 30 minutes, and I've got to go back," he said.

The Alex Haley raised Capt. Singh and told him he needed to get his crew on deck immediately.

The captain refused. The starboard anchor was holding, he said. He and the remaining seven mariners, most of them engine room crew, would stay on board and continue trying to restart the engine.

The Haley: "Are you sure (the anchor is) holding?"

Singh: "All my instruments say it's not holding, but I think it is."

Listening in from the Jayhawk, Neel was amazed.

 "The Alex Haley comes back on, incredulous. 'All your instruments are telling you it's not holding, and you're saying it is?' "

"That's right," the captain said.

The second Jayhawk remained on scene for a while. But with no one to rescue and fuel running low, it headed toward Cold Bay to fill its tanks and change flight crews. In the middle of the trip, something went wrong with the transmission.

The chopper made it to Cold Bay but it would be out of service for several days.

Now, with no Jayhawks close by, the catastrophe feared for two days happened. Shortly after 5 p.m. on Dec. 8, the Selendang Ayu struck rocks off Unalaska Island, grounding itself in a pounding sea.

 Captain Singh radioed the Alex Haley. Now he wanted his crew evacuated ---- immediately.

 Back at the Dutch Harbor airport, Lt. David Neel, commander of the first Jayhawk, answered his cell phone: "You're the only show in town," Kodiak operations told him. He would have to gather his weary crew, lift into the storm again, and fly 50 miles back to the disaster to rescue whoever was left on board the grounded freighter.

 His crew's first reaction was a string of frustrated questions. They want us back NOW? Where is the second Jayhawk? Why hadn't the Selendang Ayu crew gotten off earlier? "We were all a little bit miffed," Neel said. "There had been so many opportunities for these people to get off, but they didn't do it."

Nevertheless, there was no real hesitation, he said.

They waited on the tarmac for the blowing snow to ease enough for them to see the runway lights, then rose into the air and headed north around the mountains.

Back at the scene of the shipwreck, a third helicopter, nestled aboard the cutter Alex Haley, became the focus of attention.

It was an agile, lightweight Dolphin with a crew of three, including commander Lt. Tim Eason, co-pilot Lt. Rob Kornexl and flight mechanic Petty Officer 3rd Class Greg Gibbons.

 Among Coast Guard pilots, the HH-60 Jayhawks are "Big Iron," the unstoppable rescue workhorses of "Perfect Storm" fame. The smaller orange Dolphins, often carried on cutters, have been criticized as underpowered and subject to engine problems and crashes. They often get dissed as "Tupperwolf" for their plastic and "Screaming S--tcans" for a distinctive high-pitched whine.

 All day, the sea and wind had been too rough to launch the Dolphin, and now conditions were even worse. But with the Selendang Ayu grounded and no Jayhawk immediately available, Capt. Matt Bell of the Alex Haley asked the crew to go airborne.

The cutter's operations officer found Eason and Kornexl at dinner. "The proverbial s--t has hit the fan," he said to the command pilot. "Can you launch?"

Eason later said he and his crew never doubted they should try. "Despite the conditions, we had confidence," he said. "I don't mean to be a cliche, but that's what we do."

 As the Dolphin rose into the air, the returning Jayhawk hurtled in from the north, reaching the grounded freighter about the same time. The pilots talked on the

radio about which crew should perform the rescue. The Dolphin crew was pumped for action but reluctantly agreed the Jayhawk should make the attempt. The smaller Dolphin would almost certainly need two trips to safely remove all eight men; the Jayhawk could take them all at once.

 The Dolphin moved to a standby position. Swells rose to 30 or 35 feet, washing the ship's decks like waves over a reef. "It was unreal what the winds were doing,Eason said.

 With Lt. Doug Watson at the controls, the returned Jayhawk approached the freighter. The ship's lights blazed. Lickfield dropped the basket to the deck.

 "Everything is good," Neel said later. "Eight people were standing by. We think it's going to be easy."From 40 feet up, leaning out into the furious blizzard, Lickfield gestured to the eight men. Get in. Get in. GET IN!

They didn't move.

 "These guys were petrified," Neel said. "They stared at me and stared at the basket. I just could not convey enough urgency for them to move. I'm thinking, 'My God, these guys are not moving!' "

Lickfield told the pilots he needed to pull up the basket and send down Aaron Bean, their 27-year-old rescue swimmer.

Neel, the aircraft's commander, said he was reluctant at first. It wasn't as if there was an injured victim on the verge of drowning in rough seas. The Selendang Ayu's crewmembers were standing on the deck of an immense ocean-going ship. To be saved, all they had to do was sit down in the metal cage at their feet.

 "In no way are we willing to exchange our life for their life," said Neel, who as an Army pilot had flown soldiers into war zones at night. But someone needed to get the endangered crew into the rescue basket so Neel gave Bean the call. He said yes. Bean went down and took charge of the scene, lined the crew up.

One man went up, the basket came back down.

Second man up, basket down.

Third man up, basket down.

"We're just knocking them down like dominoes," Neel said. "We were getting the baskets up and it's looking good."

Fourth up. Then fifth. Sixth.

 Watson struggled to maintain the Jayhawk's stability against the winds.

"We would have to back off every once in a while because a set of waves was coming in," he said. "They were getting a little bigger, water was beginning to break over the top of the bow of the boat."

The seventh man climbed into the basket, leaving only the Selendang captain and Bean on the deck. Lickfield started the hoist.

Neel noticed a big swell rolling toward the ship, bigger than the others. "I thought, 'It's a ways out there. We've got time to finish the seventh hoist.'"

Lickfield heard urgency in Neel's voice. He maxed out the hoist motor and the basket rushed upward.

Neel was saying: "This is a really big wave. We need to go back and up."

 As Lickfield reached out and swung the basket through the door, bringing the seventh crewman into the cabin. The ocean exploded. The windshield went dark. Water blasted through the open door.

"UP! UP! UP!" Lickfield yelled.

The engine power was failing. To correct, Neel pushed the stick forward, to the left. But he could hear the engines winding down and feel the aircraft begin to drop.

 "I got a sick feeling in my stomach," Lickfield said, "and I knew we were going to crash."

Frigid water gushed into the cabin, filling the cockpit, and everything went dark as 10 men fell into the sea.

'It happened so quickly, there really was no moment of fear.

Within maybe two seconds after being awash in white, we were in the water."

When the Jayhawk went down, Lt. Doug Watson was at the controls, focused on hovering as close to the grounded Selendang Ayu as possible, fighting blizzard gusts so his flight mechanic could lift crewmen off the freighter's deck.

Suddenly red lights flashed on the console, warning horns beeped. As the cockpit filled with water from a swamping wave, he could see nothing out the windows.

Then he was upside down, in the dark, strapped to his seat, under water.

Going down.

First thought: This water isn't so cold. Then, stark panic.

"I started frantically looking for a door handle, just trying to find some way to get out," he said. "That only lasted a second, and I sort of forced myself to calm down, and relax, and take it easy, take it easy."

 Watson remembered once hearing that Jayhawks sank like scrap iron. He didn't have much time. "OK," he thought, "How am I going to get out of this?"

He had trained for it. He had practiced in pools, with cockpit mock-ups, even wearing blinders, panic tamed by repetition. He told himself he could survive. He groped for the door handle.

He couldn't find it. OK, he told himself. I can't get out the door. I need my bottle.

 Strapped to his harness was a bottle containing maybe two minutes of air, a tiny tank called a Helicopter Emergency Egress Device, the HEEDs bottle. Watson had practiced breathing on it. He knew it would save him.

But it wouldn't work.

OK, he told himself. Try the door again.

Again, and again, he groped for the handle Not there.

 Stop it, he told himself. Go back to your HEEDs bottle.

Try it again. This time, sweet, damp air flowed. Watson took a normal breath, then another. "It was like the fog of despair lifted and I knew for certain I was getting out.

... so now I can really relax. I've got about two minutes. Plenty of time.' "

 With oxygen helping his brain work, he found the handle immediately. He cracked the cockpit door open slightly, but didn't let go. Rescue swimming instructors had pounded it in: Always hold on to something. Find a reference point, then never let it go.

"I knew if I let go and I didn't have a hold of anything and I released myself from my seat belt, I would be free-floating in the cabin. I could get disoriented and lost, and I could still drown."

He pulled himself over and out the door, swinging from the cockpit into the blackness of the sea.