Publisher's Synopsis
On the night of January 31st, 1998, the La Conte took on water and sank in the Fairweather fishing grounds off the coast of Sitka Alaska, in what was to be the worst storm in that state's history. Abandoning ship, the five-man crew clung desperately to life - and to each other - in ferocious 90 foot seas and freezing water. All five men would surely have perished were it not for the heroic efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard Search and Rescue teams who flew their choppers into the heart of the storm with little hope of rescuing anybody. Knocked nearly senseless by invisible williwaws (100 mph winds) that exploded out of stadium-sized wave-troughs and nearly stripped them from the sky, three separate attempts were made as the teams plunged into a meteorlogical hell. The third and last crew carried out the rescue without radio communication, all the while maneuvering in a gyrating, tar-black void in which sea and sky were seamlessly intermeshed. After reading this account, nobody will look at the Coast Guard in the same way again.
