![]() Everyone there could hear the conversations with the divers. There were too many people topside on the salvage barge. “I am on the starboard side, at the pilothouse, looking inside through the chartroom porthole. “Red Diver this is Topside, go ahead,” came back through his headphones. He was diving the Navy’s new Mark 12 Hard Hat diving system, which was quiet compared to previous diving helmets. “Topside, this is Red Diver,” he said through his helmet’s microphone. He had been able to free the Coastie from the stern ladder well, and been taken him to the surface, but the Coastie in the chartroom was going to be a challenge. Now he had found this second Coastie, trapped in the Chartroom. He had found one of the crew, trapped in the ladder well on the stern which leads to “officers country”. Most of the twenty-three had not yet been found. Twenty-three of the fifty-person crew drowned. Within minutes the Cutter had filled with water and sank. The diver began to visualize what had happened, first the collision with the inbound freighter, the buoy tender pushed to starboard, and then pulled to port and dragged backwards with a huge hole in her side caused by the freighter’s anchor. ![]() This filing cabinet must have broken loose and landed against the door, which opens inward from the narrow passageway which leads to the bridge, blocking the only exit from the chartroom. ![]() When the Cutter sank, she had landed on her portside with the chart room door on the downward side. Slowly it became clear to the diver what must have happened. With a diameter of one foot, the porthole is too small for a person to climb through.Īs the diver’s eyes adjusted to the dimly lit chartrooms interior, he could see a filing cabinet lying against the chartrooms door. There is one porthole, on the starboard side, directly across from the door. Most of this space is taken up with filing cabinets, a chart table, radar amplifiers, and safes. Chartrooms on 180-foot Coast Guard buoy tenders are small, maybe 12 feet by 6 feet. Inside the chartroom was the body of a drowned Coastie, floating eerily in the cramped space. This was the only sound, his rhythmic inhaling and exhaling. He inhaled and exhaled, listening to his exhaust bubbles heading toward the surface 50 feet away. By Michael Carr – He braced himself against the ship’s starboard side and stared inward through the chartroom’s one porthole.
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