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Lt. George Menze and I was aircraft commander of the Coast Guard 6022 on 27 December.
Sailing vessel Arktur was out in seas that were reported by a local merchant vessel to be 4 to 5 meters and 35 knots.
It was still completely dark out. We had some illumination from the starlight and on NVGs that we were on
once we came into a hover we had the [inaudible] view of the Arktur we had enough illumination to see it clearly.
However there was enough sea spray in the water that the Arktur kind of blended in with the waves and the environment there.
And uh, we considered putting a flare in the water but as soon as we considered putting a flare in to help us orient around the Artkur there,
the captain of the vessel popped out and we decided that a flare might actually cause issues with our NVGs
and it may actually be easier with the descent illumination just to continue just like we had planned with the NVGs only.
In the nighttime conditions, obviously the NVG hoists were more demanding than the daytime hoists
but we had enough illumination to complete the hoist on NVGs without issue.
Here you see petty officer Nelson, our flight mech. is deploying Petty Officer Faulkner, our rescue swimmer,
into the water using a sling deployment. She is now swimming towards the Arktur.
We couldn’t deploy her directly to the vessel due to the large masts and the rigging on the vessel.
And here he is actually recovering via SADPU recovery, which is sling augmented double pick up.
This is the final hoist, which is the captain of the sailing vessel Arktur, he was last to come up.
The other two hoists were done before this in nighttime conditions.
Petty Officer Faulkner, this was her first deployment to the Bahamas.
She had been stationed elsewhere and had been in Clearwater for a short time before deploying
and this was her first good SAR case within the Bahamas.
And Petty Officer Nelson our flight mech. he had some excellent experience while he was in Kodiak.
So he was used to hoisting in larger seas like this.