A "manifestly unsafe voyage" means that the vessel has been deemed an unacceptable risk to her crew or others, and the Coast Guard has the legal authority to order everyone off. Commander Brudnicki gets on the radio with District One and requests a manifestly unsafe designation for the Satori, and at 12:47 it is granted. The Tamaroa is just a couple of miles away now, within VHF range of the Satori, and Brudnicki raises Leonard on the radio and tells him he has no choice in the matter. Everyone is leaving the boat. At 12:57 in the afternoon, thirteen hours after weighing anchor, the Tamaroa plunges into view.
There's a lot of hardware circling the Satori. There's the Falcon, the H-3, the Tamaroa, and the freighter Gold Bond Conveyor, which has been cutting circles around the Satori since the first mayday call. Hardware is not the problem, though; it's time. Dark is only three hours away, and the departing H-3 pilot doesn't think the Satori will survive another night. She'll run out of fuel, start getting knocked down, and eventually break apart. The crew will be cast into the sea, and the helicopter pilot will refuse to drop his rescue swimmer because he can't be sure of getting him back. It would be up to the Tamaroa to maneuver alongside the swimmers and pull them on board, and in these seas it would be almost impossible. It's now or never.
The only way to take them off, Brudnicki decides, is to shuttle them back to the Tamaroa in one of the little Avons. The Avons are twenty-one-foot inflatable rafts with rigid hulls and outboard engines; one of them could make a run to the Satori, drop off survival suits, and then come back again to pick up the three crew. If anyone wound up in the water, at least they'd be insulated and afloat. It's not a particularly complicated maneuver, but no one has done it in conditions like this before. No one has even seen conditions like this before. At 1:23 PM the Tamaroa crew gathers at the port davits, three men climb aboard the Avon, and they lower away.
It goes badly from the start. What passes for a lull between waves is in fact a crest-to-trough change of thirty or forty feet. Chief bosun Thomas Amidon lowers the Avon halfway down, gets lifted up by the next wave, can't keep up with the trough and freefalls to the bottom of the cable. The lifting eye gets ripped out of its mount and Amidon almost pitches overboard. He struggles back into position, finishes lowering the boat, and makes way from the Tamaroa.
The seas are twice the size of the Avon raft. With excruciating slowness it fights its way to the Satori, comes up bow-to-stern, and a crew member flings the three survival suits on deck. Stimpson grabs them and hands them out, but Amidon doesn't back out in time. The sailboat rides up a sea, comes down on the Avon, and punctures one of her air bladders. Things start to happen very fast now: the Avon's bow collapses, a wave swamps her to the gunwales, the engine dies, and she falls away astern. Amidon tries desperately to get the engine going again and finally manages to, but they're up to their waists in water and the raft is crippled. There's no way they can even get themselves back onto the Tamaroa, much less save the crew of the Satori. Six people, not just three, now need to be rescued.
The H-3 crew watches all this incredulously. They're in a two o'clock hover with their jump door open, just over the tops of the waves. They can see the raft dragging heavily through the seas, and the Tamaroa heaving through ninety-degree rolls. Pilot Claude Hessel finally gets on the radio and tells Brudnicki and Amidon that he may have another way of doing this. He can't hoist the Satori crew directly off their deck, he says, because the mast is flailing too wildly and might entangle the hoist. That would drag the H-3 right down on top of the boat. But he could drop his rescue swimmer, who could take the people off the boat one at a time and bring them up on the hoist. It's the best chance they've got, and Brudnicki knows it. He consults with District One and then gives the okay.