If, as hoary nautical tradition holds, it's bad luck to rename a ship, then the poor old SS Sea Breeze was damned and damned again.
The midsize (606 feet) cruise ship began life in 1958 as the Federico C, designed for service out of Genoa for immigrants heading to new lives in Buenos Aires and Sydney. In a later and particularly hideous configuration she was tarted up with bright red hull paint, based in Florida and rechristened the Starship Royale. A Greek company, Dolphin, then acquired the aging ship and came up with the name Sea Breeze. Premiere Cruise Lines bought out Dolphin, took over its vessels and went bankrupt.
The Sea Breeze, docked for an overnight stay in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with some 450 elderly cruisers aboard, suffered one of the more draconian repossessions in the history of the seas. The ship was seized by creditors at two in the morning, the hapless oldsters rousted from their bunks and plunked on the dock with what luggage they could handle. Get yourselves home, folks. There the pitiful vessel remained until late 2000, when new owners prepared to move her to Charleston, South Carolina, for something like a sixth refit and yet another name.
The Sea Breeze sailed out of Halifax in mid-December with her old captain in charge of an inexperienced pickup crew of 33. The Atlantic was one big gale from the Grand Banks to the Outer Banks, and the ship was in trouble within hours. East of Boston, one of her two steam turbines gave out, and the cooling condensers began taking on sea water. The crew was undrilled in the procedures for securing watertight doors. The Sea Breeze made it to a position some 230 nm east of Norfolk before the skipper put out a distress call. The ship was beyond saving. She was leaking, listing and rolling helplessly in 35-foot waves and 60-knot gusts. Evacuation via lifeboats would be out of the question. A raft inflated by the crew had blown away like a helium balloon.
Coast Guard rescue aircraft at Elizabeth City, North Carolina, got the scramble just before noon on Sunday, December 17. The date may ring a bell; it was the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, only a few miles east of the base. Extra crews were in for weekend duty, as ceremonies and a flyby were planned at Kill Devil Hill. (Normally a crew for a single helicopter launch and a companion C-130 are at work Sundays.) An Air Force four-star was due at the base to officiate at the celebration, but he had aborted his landing in a military Gulfstream due to gale-force winds across the runway. The doings at Kitty Hawk went to standby.
The Coast Guard boys were hunkered down in the TV room, hoping to avoid flying in the hellacious weather. But they knew better: get a near-perfect storm like this one and some boat will certainly get in trouble. Sure enough the bebop alarm, more in keeping with a fire station than a military ready room, sounded at 11:29 a.m.
CDR Charlie Holman, senior officer on duty and skipper of the C-130H Hercules crew, had already checked the weather. Twice, in fact, and it had only gotten worse. In the absence of a dire emergency it would have been a strict no-fly day. But the folks up the road at District Five Emergency Headquarters in Chesapeake, Virginia, had just received what dispatchers refer to as the quality call. The Greek skipper of the cruise ship Sea Breeze was on the satellite phone, and his tone of voice was not confidence inspiring. His vessel had a total of 34 souls on board, sinking was imminent, and the crew was in desperate need of helicopter rescue.
The duty Herk, one of five based at Elizabeth City along with three Sikorsky HH-60J Jayhawk helicopters, was fueled and cocked. Flight engineer Don Welch (a civilian CFI-I and de facto third pilot) had already conducted his preflight. After the remaining five crewmen (copilot, nav, radio operator and two crew chief/loadmasters) had been rounded up, the big four-engine turboprop taxied out into 65-knot gusts and a near-black ceiling. The C-130 launched precisely at noon, the GPS loaded with what would hopefully prove to be a righteous lat-long for the sinking ship. They weren't going to find it VFR.
The Herk immediately encountered absolute-zero visibility and such violent turbulence and wind shear that two of the high-time crew were soon airsick. CDR Holman remembers flying with the most intense despair and anxiety of his entire career. "I was pretty pessimistic, to put it mildly," he recalls. "I said to everybody on the intercom, 'The Coast Guard is going to make headlines today, and it ain't going to be pretty.' But we had to go. We had gotten 'cruise ship' from Portsmouth HQ, but we had not gotten the part about 34 people. Of course 34 is bad enough, but for all we knew we were going after 3,400 people. I figured we'd have airplanes thrashing around out there for a week."
