Action. They're just really chaos on the water at this point. Danger. This is no
game we're here to do a real job. Adventure. I've been around the world
twice and I've seen everything three times. You're listening to Sea Story.
Episode Six "One For SWCC." I am Petty Officer first class Robert White
I am from Fraser Park, California and this is my Sea Story. So in my line of work
in the Special Warfare combatant teams, the SWCC teams, we do a lot of training
for Special Forces type operations. So we're off the coast of Long Beach out
near the oil rigs doing training out there. We work on small craft we work in
a detachment we'll have two crafts and a crew on each craft. So we're out training
and it's the middle of the day and suddenly an emergency call comes over
the emergency radio station which we always monitor and there's someone
screaming "Mayday" and saying their boat is sinking "Mayday, help us!"
"Mayday" isn't actually the proper term
when you're in a boat that's sinking, that's for planes that are going
down so that was incorrect but you know it gets the message out there normally
it's the Coast Guard who would render a to that type of thing but then the Coast
Guard does come over the channel and they say that they really far away, they give their
position they ask if anyone closer can render aid.
So, of course, we let them know we'll take care of it.
We pause training and we hit the gas we start heading that direction. One thing they
did good was the captain was giving his coordinates instead of just saying hey
I'm off the coast of Orange County which usually is what happens you know people
just down on boats aren't that skilled especially in a panicking crazy
situation but he gave us coordinates so we're heading to it. We are getting
pretty close to where we think we should see the craft and we don't see one so
that means it's probably under the water. By this time we throttle down to go as fast
as we can it was you know choppy and wavy so finally we get there and
basically, it was a pretty good-sized sportfishing yacht and three people had
rented it and the owner of the boat was driving it for them to go out fishing.
Something had happened with the water intake system and it had taken on water.
It took on enough water so the nose of the craft went straight up and then the
whole boat went straight down into the water.
Especially sport boats for rent
there's tons of flotation all over those things you know the cushions are made to
float so you can grab one there's usually lifejackets stashed places.
So, you have the boat with just slightly a little bit still up out of the water
you have all this stuff around that's floating but these for people who are
panicked out of their minds and probably in a lot of shock, I mean being a couple
of miles out from shore and you know your boat going down these people
probably thought they were gonna die. So they were kind of out of our minds
they're all holding onto the boat these four people are holding on to that 10
inches of boat. These are untrained civilians we don't want to put our boat
straight close to them, it can be dangerous. We start calling
out to them "swim out to us," you know grab some these things these
people are such shock they can't even speak they're just holding onto that
boat staring at us with this look of terror in their eyes. We split up and
kind of surround the craft because we were on a training thing we didn't have
a lot of people on the craft just one person driving for both my craft
basically, just the two of us and the other boat has three guys on it. So we
get as close as we can to these people and we start trying to get them up into
the boats. I grab one guy and he's like a 14-year-old kid scrawny little
guy no problem get him up out of water, the next guy grab is an older
gentleman but he's also like very small so no problem pull him up out of the water.
The other boats try and get the other two so they've got one guy out of the craft he
was also a smaller guy like I said there's three guys on that boat so one
driving two guys were available to pull people up. So one guy in the second one
is a very large guy he ends up being the owner of the boat but he was really big
I mean he was at least 300 pounds. I look at my two teammates over there
and of course these are special operatives they're in shape they're in
extremely good shape and they're struggling to get this guy up out of the
water. They cannot lift this dude being on a
boat, you're bent over at a horrible angle you
can't get leverage or anything so I tell my guy driving I say "hey they're
struggling over there so launch me over there." So I get to the back of the boat
and these craft we use are extremely maneuverable we can spin them like a top
so he spins it and sends the back end moving fast towards him so it launches
me across and I land on the other boat and so I
jump on the other two guys and we all heave this big heavy dude up onto the
boat and so we got them all up. We pull away we start making haste to meet up
with the Coast Guard to hand them off. Now, I'm trying to render first aid to
these people but still they're all in such shock that none of them could speak
or trying to like figure out they have any issues if they're hurt anywhere
none of them say a word. So we're almost to the Coast Guard and I talked to the
guy who owned the boat, the boat captain, I say "hey man you might end up on the
news or something and people are gonna ask you who came out and saved you guys
when that happens you tell him it was SWCC and he's still in kind of shocked
he's like "okay okay man all right all right"
and so we meet up with the Coast Guard. We hand them off but we finish our
training that day we go back to the place we're staying that night and we're
watching the news and there it is they're talking about what happened
they're gonna bring the boat captain on and talk about it I was like "oh here it is
here it is this is our moment this guy's gonna tell everybody who
saved him!" So they asked him what would happen yada yada and he says "uh well the
boat sank and
the Coast Guard saved us" and so yeah everyone's throwing their bottles at the
TV oh yeah he ruined it, we almost got some recognition.
I got a pat on the back for it so that was enough.
On the next episode of Sea Story, this is real-life every single time you get
called out there you're going to see something of this magnitude.
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