The Coast Guard’s Amver system helps save the lives of about 200 people each year
By MATT HILBURN, Associate Editor
More than year after the tragedy, the events of May 8, 2005, still bring tears to Lochlin Reidy’s eyes. Had it not been for the Coast Guard and a little-known effort called the Atlantic Merchant Vessel Emergency Reporting (Amver) System, he might not be here to share his harrowing tale.
Reidy, 59, his friend Thomas Tighe, 65, and three other crew members were on a pleasure cruise from Connecticut to Bermuda on a 45-foot ketch, the Almeisan, when they were caught in a fierce storm about 400 miles off the coast of Virginia. The raging sea already had partially turned the boat over once. It had righted itself, but was taking on water.
At about 4 a.m., Reidy and Tighe, donned life vests equipped with strobe lights and were topside trying to get a lifeboat into the water in case things got worse. That happened almost immediately. A tremendous wave washed the two men overboard.
The Almeisan and its three remaining crew members quickly drifted away, and Reidy and Tighe were left to the mercy of the sea. Reidy, who is married and has two daughters, was uninjured, but when he found his friend in the water, Tighe was coughing up bloody foam. He died a few hours later.
For nearly 24 hours, Reidy, tethered to his dead friend, was pummeled by 20-foot seas, driving rain and winds approaching 50 knots.
Luckily, the crew members left on Almeisan were able to report the incident to the Coast Guard. The boat’s Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon had also been activated before the two sailors were swept off.
After he saw a C-130 circling about 7:30 a.m., “I knew the Coast Guard was looking for us,” Reidy said. “The plane flew right at us and then banked away.”
Reidy, a retired telephone company manager from Woodbridge, Conn., who was taking his 16th trip to Bermuda, saw a plane — perhaps the same one — later, and after waving his arms felt upbeat about getting rescued. But he didn’t see any other planes for the rest of the day.
Reidy did catch a glimpse of the ship that would later rescue him, but by then he could barely see because his eyes were nearly swollen shut.
“I did everything I could to attract their attention,” he said. “But they just kept going.”
Activating his strobe lights at night, Reidy said he spent more time under water than on the surface because of the rough seas.
“When it started getting dark, it was probably the lowest point in my life,” he said. “I just didn’t know how I was going to make it.”
Occasionally, Reidy would float to the top of a wave and catch a glimpse of the ship, as a plane continued to circle overhead. But he was hallucinating at this point and thought he saw a grove of black and white palm trees in the distance.
“I thought to myself, ‘If that ship gets behind those trees, they’ll never find me,’” he said.
Then he caught a glimpse of a light he thought the Coast Guard had dropped into the water between him and the ship. As he was swam toward it, he realized he was looking at the bow of the ship.
His strobes had gone out, but the Coast Guard was dropping flares into the water. Additionally, Reidy said, there was a lot of phosphorescence in the water making the entire scene “surreal.”
“I basically said to the ocean ‘they’re here, leave us alone,’” he said. “Then a huge wave crashed over me. It pushed me down so deep, my ears hurt.”
When he came up, the lights of the ship were all out.
“‘Oh, God! They’re leaving!’ I thought,” he said. “I started screaming and yelling. They heard me. They turned all the lights back on, and I thought this was it.”
Reidy disconnected from his friend and finally made it onto a cargo net the crew had hung over the side of the ship. He made it to the deck of the ship 24 hours after he was swept overboard. Tighe’s body was recovered two hours later.
Reidy’s savior was the M/T Sakura Express, a Panamanian-flagged, 600-foot tanker en route to Boston loaded with jet fuel. The ship had been vectored to Reidy’s position thanks to Amver, a computer-based, voluntary global ship reporting system used worldwide by search-and-rescue authorities to arrange for assistance to persons in distress at sea. Amver is sponsored by the Coast Guard.
Amver, a $2 million per year program, was begun in 1958 but can trace its roots back to 1912, when the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic. During the disaster, there were several ships in the area, but after seeing Titanic’s emergency flares, they mistook them for celebratory fireworks and did not move to assist.
The crews of ships of more than 1,000 tons enroll in Amver by filling out a questionnaire detailing the size of their ship, and the communications equipment and medical facilities onboard. As each ship prepares for a voyage, its crew provides a sail plan detailing its point of origin, date and time of departure and destination. Every 48 hours, someone on the vessel sends an e-mail to the Coast Guard that states its position, speed and heading.
The information is forwarded to a team of 25 Coast Guard contractors in Martinsburg, W.Va., that validates the data and creates a map depicting the location of all ships at sea that participate in Amver. The team receives more than 4,000 e-mails a day.
Any rescue coordination center in the United States can access the surface picture created by the Amver team to determine a surface picture to see what ships are near vessels or people in distress. Those ships, like Sakura Express, can be guided to a mishap to assist in search and rescue.
The vessels of 765 shipping companies from 72 countries participate in Amver. In 2005, almost 4,500 vessels earned Amver participation awards, meaning they had been available to divert to the scene of a distress call at least 128 days during the year. Amver set a record in May 2006, with an average of 3,254 vessels available to divert every day.
Benjamin Strong, a spokesman for Amver, said 2006 has been a very busy year. He credits the system with saving 211 lives so far this year, compared to 177 in all of 2005.
The Navy League’s New York Council established an Amver award in 1997 to recognize the accomplishments of the Merchant Marine in at-sea rescues. It is awarded to a U.S.-flagged ship that participated in Amver rescue, but it is only given in years where there has been an exceptional rescue under dangerous circumstances or when great initiative is taken.
In 2006, the award went to Carnival Cruise Lines on behalf of the cruise ship Holiday, whose crew participated in the 2004 rescue at sea of five survivors of a recreational fishing boat that sank in the Yucatan Channel.
Reidy knows he’s lucky to be counted among those rescued by Amver.
“I’d never heard of Amver before,” he said, nearly choking up again. “You put a ship of that value at that risk, that’s a tremendous commitment. It’s quite a program … quite a program.”
