The Perfect Storm: Into the Abyss Summary & Analysis

Early on the morning of October 30th, long before she knows anything is the matter, Chris Cotter has a nightmare about Bobby. Later that day, Susan Brown, Bob Brown’s wife, drops by her apartment. She seems uncomfortable. Finally, she tells Chris that they’re having trouble reaching the Andrea Gail. Chris is shocked, and she immediately senses that Bobby is dead. She rushes to the Crow’s Nest, where Ethel and Bobby’s sisters have already begun to assume the worst about the Andrea Gail’s fate. Everyone starts drinking heavily.

Bob Brown tries to reach his boats all day. That night, he finally gets through to the Hannah Boden; Linda Greenlaw hasn’t heard from Billy in a couple of days and is worried. Bob reports the Andrea Gail as missing to the Coast Guard in Boston. Without any kind of distress call or EPIRB signal, there’s no way to know for certain that something has gone disastrously wrong. However, the news media picks up on the situation and interviews Allison captain Tommy Barrie’s wife, Kimberly. Soon, fishermen’s wives all over the East Coast are calling Kimberly for any tidbit she can share.

That night, the sword fleet captains confer over the radio and speculate about where the Andrea Gail may have drifted. Bob Brown also alerts the Canadian Coast Guard, and soon, half a dozen vessels near Sable Island are trying to establish communications with the Andrea Gail, but no one succeeds. Adam Randall hears a news report about the missing vessel and realizes that his premonitions about the trip may have been well founded.

Meanwhile, the Air National Guard is facing a crisis. A Japanese sailboat has gone down beyond the Coast Guard’s helicopter reach, so an Air Guard H-60 helicopter—which can be refueled in midair—must intervene. Pilot Dave Ruvola, copilot Buschor, flight engineer Jim Mioli, and pararescue jumpers John Spillane and Rick Smith prepare for the attempt. Pararescue jumpers (PJs) train for more than 18 months, and the training process has a dropout rate of more than 90 percent. PJs know how to parachute, survive in various terrain, resist interrogation, and escape blindfolded from a submerged helicopter. They’ve also mastered rescue skills, military training, and how to freefall from the troposphere into combat zones. After arriving on the scene of the struggling sailboat, Ruvola and his team determine that it’s too risky to try a rescue; the stranded captain would just be imperiled further by the attempt. (He’s later saved by a Romanian ship.)

Later, it is determined that adequate weather information was not made available to Ruvola’s helicopter. If they had been in contact with New Jersey’s McGuire Air Force Base, which typically faxed weather reports to Ruvola’s headquarters at Suffolk Air Base, they would have known that a westward diversion is needed in order to avoid severe weather. But McGuire doesn’t even know that there’s a helicopter in the air. So Ruvola is flying back to base assuming that he has nothing to worry about beyond his next refueling attempt.

In fact, Ruvola is heading into a rain band 50 miles wide and 80 miles long, with 70-knot winds and zero visibility. Just before Ruvola lines up with the tanker plane for his next refueling, he hits such strong headwinds that he can scarcely control the aircraft. Soon, it feels like he’s “getting batted around the sky,” and there’s little hope of lining up on the tanker safely, though he makes 20 or 30 attempts. He can barely even see its lights ahead of him. Finally, he loses sight of the entire C-130 in the dense clouds and realizes that their best hope is to plan for an intentional ditching before they run out of fuel. Ruvola informs his crew.

Hearing this, John Spillane realizes he might be facing his own death. As a rescue jumper, he understands just how dire these conditions are. The helicopter broadcasts a mayday and contacts the Tamaroa, 15 miles northeast, for help. That’s when the Coast Guard airmen, who’d just been chatting with Karen Stimpson in Boston, prepare to embark on another rescue.

At 9:28 p.m., Ruvola emerges from the clouds and hovers 200 feet above the ocean. He and his crew go through the ditching checklist they’ve practiced many times, but things go wrong—Mioli is so busy finding the life raft he doesn’t have time to put on his survival suit, and Ruvola is too absorbed in his work to remember to eject his door. Ruvola will have to stay on the helicopter after the others jump, to make sure it doesn’t crash on top of them. At 9:30, one of the engines flames out, so Ruvola yells at his crew to bail out. Ruvola’s copilot, Buschor, Smith and Spillane work up their nerves and jump into the ocean; Mioli initially decides to take his chances aboard the helicopter. When Spillane jumps, it’s so dark that he doesn’t even know when he’s going to hit the water, and then he loses consciousness.

John Spillane grew up in New York City and joined the Air Force at 17, training as a combat diver, joining the Air National Guard, and finally going through PJ school. After a few years working for the police department and studying geology, he finally decided to work for the Guard full-time. When Spillane jumps into the Atlantic, he hits the water at about 50 mph—breaking bones in his arm, one of his legs, and several ribs. He also ruptures one of his kidneys and bruises his pancreas. When he regains consciousness, he doesn’t remember any of this happening—he just instinctively starts swimming.

When Spillane reaches the life raft pushed out by Mioli and clings to its side, memories start flooding back—as well as awareness of great pain. Moments later the raft gets flipped and pulled away by the wind, leaving Spillane stranded and grasping a nylon bag of blankets. He realizes he’s very likely about to die at sea and thinks sadly of his pregnant wife at home. It’s so dark that he can’t even see the waves that repeatedly submerge him, and the wind keeps flinging so much water that he repeatedly vomits seawater. After an hour, he sees the strobe lights from other survival suits and, in obedience to his training, makes his way painfully toward them. Eventually, after a couple hours, he reaches Ruvola and Mioli. They are roped together, and Mioli is barely conscious. Ruvola had managed to extract himself from the helicopter just after it crashed.

Minutes after the helicopter ditching is reported, rescue units all over the East Coast mobilize. A Falcon jet and H-3 helicopter are launched from Cape Cod, a Navy jet, the Tamaroa, and a Coast Guard cutter called the Spencer are all dispatched. Eventually, after hours of meticulous scanning, the Falcon pilot spots the strobes on four survival suits. He radios the position to the H-3 rescue helicopter whose pilot, despite the extreme conditions, tries lowering his rescue basket, but the basket keeps getting battered by the waves. The helicopter hovers until the Tamaroa comes into view.

The Tamaroa comes upon Ruvola’s copilot Buschor first, apart from the others, and since a rescue swimmer can’t be safely deployed, they scream at him to swim for his life. After a desperate effort, Buschor reaches the ship’s safety net and is hauled aboard. He’s been in the water for over four hours, and his body temperature has dropped to 94 degrees. This rescue alone took half an hour, but Commander Brudnicki makes the difficult decision to go after the remaining men, knowing it puts his own crew at even greater risk, and that no one would have criticized him for deciding differently.

When the Tamaroa reaches the three other survivors, it’s clear that these men won’t have the strength to swim. They catch the safety net, but a wave yanks it out of their hands. Spillane catches it on a second attempt, sensing this is his last chance, and is finally hauled aboard, in great pain. Ruvola finally catches the net and screams at Mioli, who is hypothermic and barely has any strength left, that he has to give this everything he’s got. The Tamaroa crew grip the net and any part of Ruvola and Mioli that they can grab and agonizingly pull them aboard the heaving Tamaroa.

Even with the four men safely aboard and receiving medical treatment, the mission isn’t yet over—they still need to find Rick Smith. Nine aircraft are committed to the search. Smith is one of the greatest rescue swimmers anyone has ever seen, and they’re sure he’ll pull through.