The Perfect Rescue

George Hall

Tuesday, January 01, 2002 at 10:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

The SS Sea Breeze, a cruise ship with a troubled history, became disabled and began sinking in a severe Atlantic storm, prompting a distress call from its 34 crew members.
Despite extreme weather conditions with 60-knot winds, 35-foot waves, and near-zero visibility, the U.S. Coast Guard launched a perilous rescue operation involving a C-130 support aircraft and two HH-60J Jayhawk helicopters.
Jayhawk helicopter 6031 heroically rescued 26 panicked crew members from the rapidly sinking ship, performing unprecedented double lifts and battling severe turbulence, an intermittently failing automatic flight control system, and operating with a dangerously overcrowded cabin.
All 34 souls from the SS Sea Breeze were successfully evacuated by the two Jayhawk helicopters before the ship sank, marking one of the most challenging and remarkable aerial rescues in Coast Guard history.

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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.