Excerpt…
the Caribbean
July 2007
Cal adjusted his binoculars and zeroed in on the tattered flag fluttering off the freighter’s stern. A crew member had bent it on just moments before. “Haitian.”
“Yeah.”
“So they say.”
“Yeah.”
Over his shoulder Cal said, “Where are we, BMC?”
“Forty-two miles south of Providenciales Island, captain,” Bosun’s Mate Chief Guilmartin said promptly, without looking down at the radar. “About a hundred and fifty miles north of Haiti.”
Cal exchanged a brief glance with the XO. They had yet to take a migrant on board and already the crew was figuring out how long it would take to get them back to their country of origin and, more importantly, off Munro. Cal didn’t blame them. Freighters smuggling migrants were all about the transportation and not at all about the hygiene.
Taffy muffled a curse.
“What?” Cal raised his glasses again.
When first sighted the eighty-foot freighter had had maybe half a dozen people on deck, but when the white-hulled cutter with the orange stripe angling back down the hull bore down on them people began pouring up on deck. Like all coastal freighters encountered during Caribbean patrols, it was hard to see how this one kept her gunnels above water. She was wooden, her hull flaking paint and riddled with worm, her exhaust so black and her wake so uncertain Cal couldn’t see how she’d made it out of whatever harbor she’d sailed from, let alone managed to get twenty miles off Miami Beach.
And now her hold was emptying itself onto her deck, where the sudden weight topside created a dangerously unstable condition on a ship that was already a hazard to navigation.
Inevitably, she began to roll, a little roll at first and then, very quickly, a lot, so that she was shipping water over the sides. They could hear the screams of the frightened passengers on the cutter’s bridge. Cal bypassed Ops for the marine radio. “Unknown freighter, unknown freighter, this is US Coast Guard cutter Munro. Stop your people from packing the deck, you’re going to capsize.”
There was no discernable result and Cal went on the pipe and repeated the message, his voice booming out across the water.
“She must be taking on water,” the XO said.
“Boat in that bad of shape, probably got the pumps running all the time. Probably shut them down to go all ahead full when they spotted us.” To Terrell he said, “Tell the boats to keep their distance until things quiet down over there, they can’t do any good if they get swamped by a bunch of panicked migrants.”
Terrell gave the order. The two small boats veered off to idle on either side of the freighter. Seeing this, the people on the freighter began to shout and wave with one arm, flailing for something to hold onto with the other as the freighter’s wallows increased in angle and velocity. The crowd on deck continued to increase as more people clawed their way up from below.
They were close enough now that Cal could hear the shouts and screams. Inevitably, a man fell overboard, screaming, followed by a second, then a little girl. Three people jumped in after her, and then a rain of bodies overboard, too many to count.
The freighter rolled heavily to port and swamped the deck. The rushing water swept half the remaining people topside overboard. Relieved of their weight, the dilapidated little freighter swung even more rapidly to starboard, probably further impelled by water rolling back and forth below decks, as textbook a display of the free surface effect that Cal, watching helplessly half a mile off their starboard beam, had ever seen. She rolled again and this time she kept going, all the way over, water swamping the gunnel, lines, buckets, boathooks sliding down to the gunnels and then tipping over the side, the house disappearing beneath the waves, until at last she was keel up, there to display a soft-looking hull playing host to an entire biosphere of seaweed.
And people everywhere in the water, screaming and splashing frantically and grabbing for each other. The few who could swim struck out away from the sinking ship and tread water. Some of them were already being picked up by the small boats, who had moved in and were tossing PFDs to the people in the water.
“Son of a bitch,” Cal said. “Dead slow ahead. Pipe Doc and all EMTs and stretcher bears on deck now.”
“Dead slow ahead, aye.”
“Doc’s already on deck, sir.”
“Every free hand on deck as well.”
“Already there, sir.”
“XO, get down there and direct traffic. Ops, call the beach and bring them up to speed. And call the mess deck and tell the Senior Chief that we’ve got what looks like about two hundred extra for lunch.”
“Two hundred extra for lunch, aye, sir.”
Dana sez–
I did my second ridealong with the US Coast Guard in 2007, on an Eastern Pacific (EPAC) patrol, seven weeks offshore of Central and South America doing drug interdiction and migrant mitigation. This is what migrant mitigation can look like.
As with my 2004 ridealong, the price of passage was a daily blog for friends and families back on the beach. I have collected blog posts from both ridealongs in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.
Chatter On Patrol with the US Coast Guard Prepared for Rage us coast guard