Kosco gives the Coast Guardsman a phone number in Florida where he gets messages. (He's offshore so much that he doesn't have his own phone.) I think they may have gone shorthanded—I hope they did, he says. I don't think Billy could've found anyone else so fast. . .
It's wishful thinking. The morning Kosco left, Billy called up Adam Randall and asked him if he wanted a job. Randall said yes, and Billy told him to get up to Gloucester as fast as possible. Randall showed up with his father-in-law, checked the boat over, and got spooked like Kosco had. He walked off. So Billy called David Sullivan and happened to catch him at home. Sully reluctantly agreed to go, and arrived at the State Fish Pier an hour later with his seabag over his shoulder. The Andrea Gail went to sea with six men, a full crew. Kosco doesn't know this, though; all he knows is that a last-minute decision five weeks ago probably saved his life.
At about the same time that Kosco confesses his good luck to the Coast Guard, Adam Randall settles onto the couch in his home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to watch the evening news. It's a rain-lashed Halloween night, and Randall has just come back from taking his kids out trick-or-treating. His girlfriend, Christine Hansen, is with him. She's a pretty, highly put-together blonde who drives a sports car and works for AT&T. The local news comes on, and Channel Five reports a boat named the Andrea Gail missing somewhere east of Sable Island. Randall sits up in his seat. That was my boat, honey, he says.
What?
That's the boat I was supposed to go on. Remember when I went up to Gloucester? That's the boat. The Andrea Gail.
MEANWHILE, the worst crisis in the history of the Air National Guard has been unfolding offshore. At 2:45 that afternoon—in the midst of the Satori rescue—District One Command Center in Boston receives a distress call from a Japanese sailor named Mikado Tomizawa, who is in a sailboat 250 miles off the Jersey coast and starting to go down. The Coast Guard dispatches a C-130 and then alerts the Air National Guard, which operates a rescue group out of Suffolk Airbase in Westhampton Beach, Long Island. The Air Guard covers everything beyond maritime rescue, which is roughly defined by the fuel range of a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. Beyond that—and Tomizawa was well beyond that—an Air Guard H-60 has to be used, which can be refueled in midflight. The H-60 flies in tandem with a C-130 tanker plane, and every few hours the pilot comes up behind the tanker and nudges a probe into one of the hoses trailing off each wing. It's a preposterously difficult maneuver in bad weather, but it allows an H-60 to stay airborne almost indefinitely.
The Air Guard dispatcher is on the intercom minutes after the mayday comes in, calling for a rescue crew to gather at "ODC," the Operations Dispatch Center. Dave Ruvola, the helicopter pilot, meets his copilot and the C-130 pilots in an adjacent room and spreads an aeronautical chart of the East Coast on the table. They study the weather forecasts and decide they will execute four midair refuelings—one immediately off the coast, one before the rescue attempt, and two on the way back. While the pilots are plotting their refueling points, a rescue swimmer named John Spillane and another swimmer named Rick Smith jog down the hallway to Life Support to pick up their survival gear. A crewcut supply clerk hands them Mustang immersion suits, wetsuits, inflatable life vests, and mesh combat vests. The combat vests are worn by American airmen all over the world and contain the minimum amount of gear—radio, flare kit, knife, strobe, matches, compass—needed to survive in any environment. They put their gear in duffel bags and leave the building by a side door, where they meet the two pilots in a waiting truck. They get in, slam the doors shut, and speed off across the base.