NEAH BAY — A burning boat, thick fog and cold seas resulted in a dramatic rescue in waters north of Neah Bay by a Coast Guard air crew.
An hour after the skipper of the Dawn Trader, a 25-foot pleasure craft, reported that his boat was on fire Sunday morning and he was abandoning it, a MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew from Port Angeles located him in a partially submerged life raft near the burning boat.
“It was probably one of the most challenging rescues I’ve ever been on,” said Lt. Cmdr. Edward Geraghty, the copter pilot, said Monday.
The man, who was suffering from severe hypothermia, has not been identified.
The Dawn Trader was not listed as being a registered boat in Clallam or Jefferson counties.
The man was flown to Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles.
Olympic Medical Center does not release the condition of a patient unless his name is known.
To see more photos and video of this dramatic rescue, go to http://www.d13.uscgnews.com/go/doc/4007/2218266/.
The rescue effort began when dispatchers at Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound in Seattle received the mayday call at 11 a.m.
The caller said his boat near the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca had an engine fire that spread, and he was putting on a survival suit and launching his life raft.
The helicopter air crew from Air Station/Sector Field Office Port Angeles and a 25-foot response-boat crew from Station Neah Bay were dispatched, and the operators of a nearby civilian vessel also took part in the search.
Both Coast Guard crews arrived in the area at about 11:50 a.m. and began searching for the Dawn Trader in heavy fog.
Visibility varied from 30 feet to 100 feet, Geraghty said.
The Dawn Trader life raft’s onboard GPS malfunctioned and the man’s flares did not fire correctly, further complicating the search.
The air crew used the signal from the man’s handheld marine radio and the direction-finding capabilities of the Dolphin helicopter to locate the life raft.
Also helping was the civilian vessel’s foghorn as they zeroed in on the man’s location.
Geraghty said he could tell that from the sound of the man’s voice as he spoke to rescuers, he was in poor condition.
The crew found the man, clinging to the partially inflated life raft, with his head and shoulders partially submerged in water.
“He wasn’t wearing the survival suit when we found him, but he was wearing a life vest,” Geraghty said.
With little time to spare, the Coast Guard crew’s rescue swimmer — on his first rescue — jumped from the helicopter in what Geraghty said was a rare exercise for swimmers.
The crew then hoisted the hypothermic man into the Dolphin copter, and flew him to Olympic Medical Center for treatment for severe hypothermia.
“The fact that the survivor had a raft and handheld radio most likely saved his life,” Geraghty said.
“The extensive search area and difficult conditions we encountered would have made locating him nearly impossible had we not been able to hone in on his radio transmission with the helicopter’s direction-finding system.”
During the rescue, the Dawn Trader was engulfed in flames, he said, and the boat crew recorded the event as it later exploded, split in half and sank.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
