Technology
Sacrifice at Christmas : The Tragedy of Solomon Browne
In this gripping episode, we delve into the tragic events surrounding the Union Star, a cargo ship caught in a fierce storm off the coast of Cornwall in December 1981. Captain Henry Morton, on his mai...
Sacrifice at Christmas : The Tragedy of Solomon Browne
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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19th of December 1981, four minutes past six in the evening, somewhere off the coast
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of Lanzend right at the tip of Cornwall.
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Lanzend Coast Guard, Lanzend Coast Guard, Union Star, Union Star, Cornwall, Lanzend Coast Guard.
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Union Star, on the left.
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This way off.
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Approximately now, eight miles east of off-road.
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Engine set stop.
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We are on high road again, start at the moment.
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Could you please have a helicopter?
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Stay nearby.
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Force please.
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Stylian Star, on the coast of the Union.
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Stylian Star, on the coast of Lanzend Coast.
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Yes, that is correct.
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And now, ice, flavorable.
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Ice, flavorable, or is it?
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I'm not sure if it's a strong force, but it's a strong force.
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We are on high road now.
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Now, it's time to start the moment.
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We want to get to my engine started, but if we cannot get to my engine started,
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we'll have to take everybody off and get a toggle of someone to start with me.
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The voice you heard there was 32-year-old Captain Henry Morton.
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He is the master of our coaster.
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In fact, a brand new one on its maiden voyage.
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This type of ship would carry bulk cargo between mainland Europe and the United Kingdom,
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and out to Ireland and up to Scandinavia.
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It could go out into the Irish Sea and the North Sea and the English Channel,
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but it was designed for travelling in coastal waters.
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It had been heading out from the Netherlands, out round the bottom of England,
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around the South Coast, out up to Ireland.
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It was taking bulk fertilizer.
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And it was a couple of days into what should be a routine voyage.
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But in those couple of days, it had headed out into a huge storm rolling in off the Atlantic,
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coming in from the south-southwest, and in the height of that storm, the engines have failed.
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So, it's now sat there with the engines off, no lights, no power,
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a drift in monstrous seas, huge crashing waves.
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But he sounds calm.
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He's dealing with a problem, and the Coast Guard aren't alarmed.
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Engines fail all the time.
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Ships lose power, they fix things, but it's just, it's a big modern ship,
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a brand new one, out in the ocean.
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It's a problem, but it's not yet a disaster.
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So what the Coast Guard do is they arrange a conversation between the Union Star
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and a tug, an ocean-going tug, the Nord Holland.
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That tug is at anchor, out in Mounts Bay, so it's inland from where the Union Star is,
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but it's sat at anchor.
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The next day, it was planning to go around to Fulmouth to go and pick up a contract there,
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but for now, it's just riding out the storm in the shelter of Mounts Bay.
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The problem comes in that radio call between Moulton on the Union Star
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and Captain Guy Berman on the Nord Holland,
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because the tug is not there for rescue, it's there for salvage.
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And if the tug comes along and hooks onto the Union Star
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and tows them back into port or back into a place of safety, there's a cost implication.
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And because they can't get hold of the owners of the Union Star, or the owners of the cargo,
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the only thing open to them is something called the Lloyds Open Form,
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which means that, well, once the Union Star accepts a tow from the Nord Holland from the tug,
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the cargo and the ship effectively become temporary property of the owners of that tug.
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So Moulton falls out with this skipper of the tug,
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because he doesn't want to give that over straight away.
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He thinks he can fix it, he thinks what he's got is a temporary problem,
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but he is playing it safe.
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He wants to have a helicopter on standby and is looking for the tug to just come along
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and sit there just in case.
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The tug captain, quite reasonably, says,
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no, I'm not going to do that unless we have a contract on how to proceed.
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So Moulton gets back in touch with the Coast Guard.
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We don't see anything interesting today.
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Who do we request?
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We have one moment to the children in the crew.
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It's possible just a helicopter standing by to take them off.
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The Union Star is on a coastline,
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currently on the coast of the country.
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She just got a lot of feeling, so she's going to leave.
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And the Seeking helicopter being made ready,
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but on airs, photos, the humidity is at the Kellunds.
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14 and 15 is right.
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40 and 50.
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And they should kill him one moment.
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And they can't leave for the other crew.
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Yes, I'm correct.
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So this changes things entirely for the Coast Guard.
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Because now this situation isn't just merchant marine sailors
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who know how to handle engine failure,
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know how to behave in a storm, know what life at sea is like.
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This is a mother and her children.
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And that mother is Henry Morton's wife.
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And the kids are two daughters from a previous marriage of hers.
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They're not meant to be there.
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Because they're not stowaways,
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but Morton had decided to take them along on this trip.
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He had actually diverted the ship to go and pick them up from England on the way,
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without telling the owners of the cargo,
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without telling the Union shipping company.
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He was something of a rising star in this business, in this shipping company.
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He was a very young captain in charge of a brand new state-of-the-art vessel.
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He was confident that it was an easy trip.
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He was confident that he had time to go and pick them up
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and that they could spend Christmas together out sea on this trip.
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Why not?
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It would make a nice family memory.
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It would be a way of bonding this new family together.
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But now they were adrift in a storm in huge waves, waves higher than a house crashing over the side of the ship.
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So you can understand why he wants to try and get them out of this situation,
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at least return it just to professional mariners on the ship.
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And from the Coast Guard side, well this is a more serious situation.
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The lifeboat they say is anticipatory, which means they're just aware of the situation.
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He's also saying that the sea king is being made ready.
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In actual fact, what it means is that the crew of the sea king have been made aware of the situation
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and been told to come from their homes to base.
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They're not turning up the engines, spooling up the aircraft ready.
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They're just making their way to a point where they can get ready.
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So despite the confidence on both the Coast Guard side and the Skipper side on Henry Morton side there,
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this is a really serious situation that's developing, that's...
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The steps to deal with it aren't really there yet.
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Something that's not in that radio call is that the Skipper of the Tug, Captain Guy Berman,
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he's decided that as he's got to go to Fulmouth tomorrow anyway,
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he's going to raise the anchor and head out towards the rough position of the Union star.
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Because if he's got to head out soon anyway,
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the mayors will head out in a direction where maybe he can be useful to this situation.
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At around 7pm, the Coast Guard get back in touch with Henry Morton to see if there's any improvement to the situation with the engines.
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We're there, one of our fuel tanks is full of water.
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We're here, Mark, we're trying to use our star, but tank.
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And we're hoping that one is okay.
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Could you give us a light on the helicopter please?
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It's a penalty, now you're the air bomb, you're on the air.
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Okay, thank you very much, you'll be able to launch all of it.
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All through that afternoon, the Union star had been heading into this storm with waves crashing over her port side.
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On that port side, you have the filling valves for the main fuel tanks.
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It's not known exactly what the problem was,
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it's either going to be that one of the covers for the fuel tanks wasn't put on properly,
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or had just come off in the storm, or that the breather pipe for the fuel tank that equalizes pressure,
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the valve on that's that stop seawater getting in had failed.
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Either way, for several hours seawater had been pouring in by the gallon into one of the fuel tanks.
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Later on in that afternoon, as was standard procedure, the engineer had moved fuel from one of the main tanks into the tank
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that were running the engine from.
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And at that time, it pulled seawater through into the fuel tank, which had then made its way into the engine and the engine installed.
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It can't run on seawater, the generator that powers the electrical gear, that can't run on seawater, so everything stops.
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But you've got to think about this scene below decks in complete darkness with everything rolling,
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tipping right over onto its side and then back up right and then back the other way.
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Working by torch, working by feel in really tight spaces,
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breaking apart every single fuel pipe, every single joint trying to find out, okay, there's fuel coming to here, there's fuel getting to here.
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Why weren't the engines start?
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And they've tried starting the engines, the engines are restarted using compressed air.
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Compressed air held in huge tanks that then they run through into the engine to turn the pistons over to then draw more fuel in and start the engine.
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They can only do that so many times with the air they have in those tanks.
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And by this point, they've depleted it, they've tried so many times that the all the air's gone,
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and they have no way of refilling those tanks because they need the generator to do that.
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So, they're stuck, they can open all these brand new pipes, all this brand new engine gear,
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but they are trying to work out why they've got fuel, it's getting to the engine, why won't it work?
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Until they actually dip the tank and discover that it's half full of seawater.
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So they have other fuel on board, but that means they've got to re-divert everything, refill everything, which will take time,
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even in calm water, a harbour with an experienced crew and good lighting.
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That's going to take several hours, but they haven't got several hours because, well, they're not where they think they are.
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They thought they were miles out to sea, which sounds drastic, but really, in a storm, if you're a big ship, adrift.
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Being miles out to sea isn't a huge problem because you can't crash into anything if you're miles out to sea,
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if you're in out in empty space.
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The problem comes when you get close to shore, and the union start was coming close to shore.
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It was drifting inward, mile by mile.
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It was a hell of a lot closer than Morton thought, and the way that was confirmed was with radar.
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The Coast Guard fired up the radar, they picked up the signal where the union star was.
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It was miles and miles closer than it should have been. It was only a few miles offshore, rather than the 10-plus miles he thought he had.
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This situation is degrading the whole time. It's descending into more chaos, but the stakes are getting higher and the auctions are getting less.
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The Coast Guard and Morton between them, they come up with a wording for something called a pan call.
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This is a bit like a Mayday, except it's maybe one grade down.
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A Mayday means all hope is lost. We can't do anything. We need as much help as you can send now.
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A pan call means it's a bad situation. We need help, but we have some elements of control left in this, but we still need help.
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A pan, pan, pan call goes out, sometime just after 7pm. At this time also they contact the lifeboat at Penley, or rather the village of Mausole, just around the corner from Newlin.
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This is a tiny fishing community, and the lifeboat, like pretty much every lifeboat at the time around the UK, was staffed by volunteers drawn from a local fishing community.
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They experienced people in this case, all men, who were experiencing the sea experience in the local waters and experienced in rescue, but they were volunteers who volunteered to go out in all weather to rescue people, to come to the aid of others.
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They were the nearest boat to this problem, so they started to make ready, but people have to come from their homes.
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Sometimes they have to get to the lifeboat station, they have to make it ready to launch. This doesn't happen instantly.
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So while that's happening, rescue 80, a Seeking helicopter from Royal Naval Air Station called Droz, over on the lizard, so over on another peninsula that sticks out into the English Channel, only about 20 or so miles away, is making ready to take off.
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The pilot of that is Russell Smith. He's not a British, and American, over on an exchange visit from a think the US Navy, and he is a pilot of this aircraft that can deal with bad weather, but it's operating just at the edge of what it can deal with when it heads out into this storm.
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At about 1937, the aircraft is airborne, and it's five minutes away from the position of the Union Star.
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One woman and two children, one woman and two children, one woman and two children, one woman and two children, the crew will remain aboard until the last one.
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So if there's one woman and two children, you're the first to arrive.
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So there are five minutes out. They've got to locate this completely darkened ship out in the chaos of this rolling sea.
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And you can hear in the pilot's voice there, and Russell Smith's voice, he didn't know that he was heading out to a small family out on this coast.
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So he thought he was heading out to a commercial ship in distress, but it's not that situation. It's now a much more dire situation.
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So this changes everything for them in terms of the rescue, but they can't get there any faster. They can't do something different just because there's a woman and two children there.
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They still have to do their job. They still have to do a very technical, very dangerous job right at the edge of what they can deal with operationally.
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So around this time, the Coast Guard has calculated that they've got about an hour, hour and a quarter before the Union Star hits the shore and hits the rocks.
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And at this point, they request the immediate launch of the Pemney Life Boats. They were already getting ready, but then they have to get out now and have to get out into the water.
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And they issue a second pound notice with an updated location for the Union Star.
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It's difficult to imagine now what that sea now to sea would look like.
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Helicopters are big, particularly rescue helicopters. I've been in a sea king. It's like a block of flats hovering on its side, huge rota disc above.
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You've got these big search lights that come down from it, but even then they can only illuminate so much.
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So they're pointing out into the darkness. And somewhere out there in the darkness, you've got the 68 meter long Union Star rolling around in the waves.
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So you've got to get up to it, come in at a steady rate so you can predict where it's going to be and meet it whilst maneuvering in Gailforce winds, Gailforce ten at this point.
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So you've got to maneuver an aircraft in, basically, Hurricane Force winds to a point that you can barely see.
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But that ship isn't just static on the ocean. It's drifting and it's riding up and down on the waves.
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These waves are about 9 meters high, which means you can look down on the ship hovering above it for 30 feet up.
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And within seconds the ship is almost at your rota disc.
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The Union Star has a large radio mass that sits above the crew and accommodation section of the ship where everyone is.
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The antenna on top of this mass stick right up, stick a long way up above the ship.
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When it goes into port and it has to go under bridges and things like that, it can be folded down, but that's a process that takes time.
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Right now it's a massive obstacle that prevents the helicopter from getting too close.
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They throw out the winchman on a cable out of the side of the helicopter and try and dangle him down towards the ship.
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But no way he can get close enough without endangering the aircraft and at several points as the ship rolls through on the waves, the antenna on this mass come within meters of the rota disc, nearly bringing the helicopter down.
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So Russell Smith makes the decision to pull back and they're going to attempt a different technique.
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So this technique involves something called a high line, which is basically a rope that goes between the aircraft and a point on the sea or on the ground.
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And in this case they're trying to get it onto the rear deck of the Union Star where someone can hold it and then they can direct the winchman in effectively diagonally.
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From the side you would the helicopter hovers out to one side away from the ship so the ship can move in the storm and then the winchman comes down at an angle towards the Union Star.
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And they attempt this again and again and again.
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But there are two problems.
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There's one, the high line they have isn't long enough.
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They have a standard one in the aircraft that is used for all rescue operations, but it's not long enough.
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They can't get close enough to get it onto the ship.
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And another problem which seems bizarre but you can't look back in time and judge people's actions.
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The crew don't seem to know what to do with it.
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They make no efforts to grab this thing, this thing which is the only way they can get a winchman aboard the ship or get casualties off the ship into the helicopter.
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It goes within meters of them at one point, one of them sort of just grabs onto it gently but then let's go again.
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Almost immediately when a wave comes in.
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Whatever happens, however that breaks down they can't get the high line onto the ship.
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On all the while they are drifting closer and closer and closer to the coast.
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The crew of the Union Star are having some success though.
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They've been able to redirect some clean fuel into the generator and they're able to get some lights working.
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Eight minutes past eight.
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The Union Star is getting zero.
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Are you getting 70 left?
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I'm sorry, I'm really angry.
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I guess we're just going to get a generator to start.
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So we'll put some light on clear and clear.
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There we go.
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The addition of lighting and these are pretty big flood lights all the way down the side of the ship.
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That changes the situation but it doesn't necessarily make it better.
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One thing that it changes is that it means the ship is now visible from the shore but also everyone on the ship can see the situation that they're in.
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They can see these huge monstrous waves crashing over the side of the ship.
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They can see that it's not going to be possible to get the helicopter any closer.
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So they have to try again and again with a high line.
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Now rescue 80 is not the only other crew that started to arrive on the scene.
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We're at 20 minutes.
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20 minutes.
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20 minutes.
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It's like it worked.
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Yes, one mile from the coast at this time.
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You're a one mile from the coast at 5.
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I ain't talking.
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So that's Coxon Travallion Richards.
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He is an incredibly experienced man.
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He knows this coastline very, very well.
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He has spent his entire life working there, fishing there.
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And he knows that being one mile from the coast is not just a bad situation.
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It's the worst of situations.
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He's got 20 minutes to get there and he's having to battle through these storms in his 47-foot lifeboat.
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And it's not the lifeboats that we see today.
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It is, it's just been refitted as modern as it can be for that time.
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But it's still a wooden lifeboat that has to fight its way through these storms.
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He's there with his crew and you, I don't know my experience with that.
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The way he says, he repeats the call.
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He's not just saying it for the radio.
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He's saying it for the benefit of the people that he's in that cabin with.
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He's saying it for the benefit of his crew.
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He sort of says it as a statement rather than repeating what was said to him by rescue 80.
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So the fact they have 20 minutes to get there, the Union star is only a mile from the shore
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and that they still haven't been able to get anyone off.
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This situation is, it's about as bad as it can be.
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The tug-nored Holland also arrives around about this time.
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But there's not much they can do either.
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Tugs can do amazing things.
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They can do some amazing rescues and hook onto anchor chains and hook on with ropes
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and do some spectacular rescues in terrible seas.
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But they need searoon, they need space to do that.
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You can't maneuver delicately in a storm like this when you're so close to the rocks.
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And tugs are big, much bigger than the lifeboat.
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So if the lifeboat's nervous about getting into this position, the tug has no chance.
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And it's not just the tug that's starting to become concerned about their proximity to the cliff
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some the danger of the situation.
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Rescue 80 also decides that they can't do much else now.
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The Union star is just 222 number calls for rescue 80.
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As far as safety starts, we're getting very close to your path.
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We don't have a long enough pilot.
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Yeah, okay, well, very much as far as you're just.
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We're going to point anchor down.
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And do that.
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You can hear the exhaustion in Morton's voice there as well.
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He has to remain professional.
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He has to do these radio calls.
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He has to communicate clearly.
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But he has been battling for hours now.
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Not just physically and trying to keep his balance and trying to move around the ship in these storms,
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but also to deal with his stresses, to deal with the stress of dawn and the kids who aren't familiar with these situations.
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His responsibility to them, his responsibility to the crew, his responsibility to his unborn child.
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He has this huge weight on him.
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And the things he was hoping on, the tug and the helicopter, neither of them can help him.
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Whether it was the delay, whether it was something he could have changed early on.
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He has to be playing this over and over again in his mind.
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He has to be thinking back to that conversation with the Nord Holland hours before about,
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could they come out to them straight away?
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Well, no, he hasn't.
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He won't give over the ship to the Lloyds open form.
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All of this has to be running through his mind as they face these oncoming waves.
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And they do turn to face them because they put an anchor down.
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And it breaks straight away.
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The anchor just snaps off, or the chain does.
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So they put another anchor down.
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That holds, or rather, it drags on the seabed.
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So this turns the ship from being side onto the waves to being bow onto the waves.
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It changes the movement of the deck, it changes the movement of everything.
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But now it means that every time the ship goes down over a wave into the trough and faces the next wave,
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that next wave crashes over the bow.
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Now you can't go out onto the bow.
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At all, you will be killed, you will be crushed by the way to the water.
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They've got less of the deck that can move around on.
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Fewer places that they can go out onto meet a lifeboat or to meet the helicopter.
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So the situation continues to get worse.
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It feels like it couldn't possibly get any worse.
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But there it is.
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Behind them they have the searchlights from another Coast Guard team that has come out onto the top of the cliffs.
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They've set up there with big searchlights to illuminate the scene.
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They can show them how close they are getting to these rocks.
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I can't imagine what it's like for Morton in those moments,
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running everything through his head, seeing the reality of the situation.
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It's inescapable.
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And then the radio breaks into life again with at least one more hope.
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The Union Star, the Union Star, is presently in lifeboat.
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Don't you read it?
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The family lifeboat, the Union Star, yes, about it too.
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I'm out of town, I'm coming over there to open the rocks here.
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The ones past the column on the side are taking the ones in the corner.
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Yes, please, yes.
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The helicopter on the bed, that's where we get into.
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So if you have a problem with the...
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Well, thank you for the moment. I'll probably be very much obliged.
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Pop out and come and take the women and children after that.
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You can still hear the exhaustion, but his note has changed then.
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There's something about the power of hope.
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There's hopelessness is such an awful feeling knowing that there's nothing that can happen.
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But that nothing that you can do to improve this situation.
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But the voice and the cornish accent of Travallian Richards and his crew coming in there
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and his tiny wooden lifeboat, they powering through the waves,
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they've powered through this storm and now they've arrived on scene right next to the Union Star.
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So hope is there.
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And this seems to sort of give a resurgence of effort to everyone involved as well.
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The turg is watching out from this about a mile away, watching the lights of this rescue,
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watching everything silhouetted against the cliff face.
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Rescue 80 there is hovering just out to one side.
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It's spotlight shining down on the scene.
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And that helicopter crew, they're all young, bold men.
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You don't choose to work in search and rescue, and particularly anything on the Atlantic coast if you're timid.
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And they try again, they've cobbled together an extra high line using literally scraps of rope
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that they can pull from the existing kit inside the helicopter.
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They tied it all together with a weight bag on the end, and then they try again.
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And then the weight bag is ripped away by a wave. That's it.
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They can't get the high line there at all, there's no other option.
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They try again with a winchman, and he nearly gets smacked into by the mast again.
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Nothing works.
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They're in danger now of hitting the cliff face with their rotor disc.
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So the only thing that can work now is the lifeboat.
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They come alongside, and they're still communicating with the Union Star.
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This is happening over just a few minutes, but you can hear the increase in the urgency in the voices that transfer back and forth between the radio calls.
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This radio call is at 2057, it's not Travallian Richards, I don't think, on the lifeboat, and the person on the other end on the Union Star, I think it's one of the mates.
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It's not Henry Morton, but you can hear the urgency in their voices.
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Yes, that's calling it, job.
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Somewhere around this time, the anchor chain rakes.
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So now the Union Star is fully adrift again, rolling side on towards the cliff face.
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The helicopter is still there hovering above, but pretty much powerless to do anything other than provide an overview and provide some extra lighting.
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And they're calling out the distance between the Union Star and the cliff face, both for everyone on the scene, for the Coast Guard back at Fulmouth, and really for the record.
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The link is at 5-1, I hear, and a lifeboat is having trouble getting alongside.
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Family lifeboat, where is the minute? 10 hours before they end the beach.
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This is 10 minutes before they tell us about 10 hours before they enter the beach. We've gone out rather late.
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All through this time, the Pendered Lifeboat has been making an attempt to get alongside the coaster, and they've made it.
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They've brought it right up to the railing, and they've thrown lines onto the deck, and they've not quite mowed themselves, but they've held themselves up against the railing.
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But for whatever reason, for the crew and the people aboard the Union Star, that last gap between them and the lifeboat, the Solomon Brown, is just too much.
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They can't make it out there. At one point, one of the Union Star crew puts a rope ladder down on the side, but no one's suicidal enough to make that attempt to get from there, one side to the other.
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And the Union Star is still moving towards the coast and pushing the lifeboat with it, so the lifeboat keeps having to circle around and try again in between the waves.
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Just the skill of timing those waves. I've done a tiny little bit with boats in rough seas, and being able to count between the waves and working out where you need to be for when the wave pushes in and pushes you along, it's tiring.
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It's really occupies all of your brains, so to be able to do that in the darkness below deck as well, because they're piloting this boat from undercover doing it through tiny windows, looking out onto this scene.
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But they know their boat, they know these waters, and they know that they're the only chance that they have for getting people off.
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Think of all the people watching this scene as well. There's a journalist and there's other people from the village overlooking from the cliff top.
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You've got the Coast Guard crew up there, shining the spotlights down, you've got the crew of the aircraft, you've got the tug out at sea, all watching this scene unfold.
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At one point they watch a wave lift the Solomon Brown, the lifeboat, up onto the deck of the Union Stars. The entire lifeboat is out of the water, just perched on top of the deck, and then it slowly slides backwards back into the water as the Union Star rolls again.
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This seems to be the moment that just everyone kicks into life on the Union Star. I think they realise that this is not something that's just going to slowly evolve.
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They have to do something now, or they're all dead.
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So they just all burst out onto the deck and make a run for it. And people there described watching orange waterproofed covered people just throwing themselves onto the Solomon Brown onto the lifeboat, and the crew there catching them as they hit the lifeboat and just pulling them in.
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It's a scene that utter chaos, but people are trying to maintain control, and Travallian riches is there as the only hope of these people.
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Ah, here we go. Here we go. Make a can to get outside of the mine.
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Okay, skip you.
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Rescue 80 is still overhead, illuminating the scene and giving commentary about what's unfolding beneath them.
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And for them, this situation is basically done. The lifeboat has done all that it can. Really, it would be too dangerous to do anything else. And they make that call.
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So that's it. The Union Star is about to hit the cliffs. The helicopter can't be there any longer, and they go.
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And all that's left now is the Solomon Brown, which should just cut its losses, take the people that it saved, and just pull out to see move away from the cliffs and do what's sensible.
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But I don't know. There was just something that was driving them onwards.
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And they were about to take them out.
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And they were about to take them out.
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And they were about to take them out.
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And they were about to take them out.
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And the rescue team up on the cliffs were able to lower somebody down in towards the site of the wreckage, because by now the Union Star had rolled over on the rocks and was visible.
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It was tipped on its side, sat there in the rocks amongst the breakers.
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And that Coast Guard officer there was able to get down into a zone, basically a big gully on the cliff face, and was able to spot, well, a very, very distinctive.
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R&LI, Royal National Lifeboat Institution, Lifejacket.
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And they're pretty distinctly seen enough of them by that point.
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And there shouldn't be one just to drift out on the sea.
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And in the hours that followed, with even more desperate searches in the coves up and down the coast, bits of wreckage started to wash ashore.
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And there's a very distinctive livery on the side of a wooden lifeboat like that.
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And once bits of it started to wash ashore, it became clear that that was the last radio call of the Solomon Brown, and the crew was lost.
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No survivors were found. The bodies of the crew of both the Solomon Brown and the Union Star were washed up along the Cornish Coast over the coming days.
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And that was it. That was the loss of eight on the Union Star and eight on the Pemle Lifeboat on the Solomon Brown.
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This is a very short section to the podcast because this is a very short telling of a story.
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People have told this story much better than I have. There are three places I urge you to go to after listening to this.
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One is to go on to weirdly enough YouTube where you can see a copy of a BBC documentary called The Cruel Sea, which really does tell this story.
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And it tells a lot of the human story of the families involved, the relatives, the surviving relatives, the build up to this story.
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There's also the Solomon Brown. It's a radio. It's not quite a documentary, but it's a radio story.
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You can get it on the BBC Sound app and we'll put a link in the show notes. That tells even more of the human story that's around this.
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And it's where we found some of these radio calls. Now these are the original radio calls from that evening.
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They were recorded by the Coast Guard as they always are for rescue situations. And the BBC had access to them and we were able to get them via those shows.
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It's not a story that it doesn't have a happy ending. And it's an important story. It's an important story to, well, the people of Mausole, the people of Cornwall, the R&LI, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
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And weirdly enough for our family, my family has become something linked with Christmas because we are a Cornish family.
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And this, for some people, the loss of the Solomon Brown was the day that Mausole changed and this tiny fishing village changed.
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And one member of my family described it as, it's the death of the old Cornwall.
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And then on into the 80s and the 90s and the culture of Cornwall changed.
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And the people who lived and worked there gradually moved out or moved to other places and the cottages down in the harbor and the village became holiday homes and second homes.
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And owned by somebody who visited maybe a couple of times a year and had a nice painted fishing boy hanging outside and newly whitewashed windows and had nothing of the people who lived and died there.
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This whole story does seem like a bit of an odd fit for a podcast series which is about outdoor safety and survival and decision making.
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But, well, really this is just, for me, it's a really good and personal story about decisions and making decisions.
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Decisions you made days ago and how they can come back to haunt you almost.
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And also about sometimes those decisions, they're not yours, they're made by something outside of you a different force, made by the sea, made by some other thing.
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And that just that day it decided this was going to be the outcome.
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The main source we had for the content for this episode was a book.
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It's a penalty, a loss of a lifeboat by Michael Segar Fenton and that has the whole story in there.
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And if you are interested in learning more about this then listen to that radio show, listen to that or watch that documentary but go and pick up a copy of the book.
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It really lays out all aspects of this and it's a fascinating story but also it's a really important story I think as well.
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So I know that's not particularly jolly Christmas tale but...
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For some people that is Christmas.
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No matter what you're doing for Christmas this year, think about the people you have around you, think about the people you no longer have around you.
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And focus on the things that you can make positive change in and realize that there are some things that are just outside of you but...
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There are some things that you can do and you can make for progress with even if it's something small.
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So Merry Christmas, Nadalek Loen and we'll be back in the new year.
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A Board the Union Star that night.
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Master Henry Mick Morton.
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Mate James Whitaker.
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Engineer George Sedrick.
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And the crew.
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Agostino Veracimo.
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And Manuel Lopez.
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Dawn Morton.
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Sharon Brown.
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Diane Brown.
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The crew of the Solomon Brown.
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Coxon Travallian Richards.
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Second Cox mechanic.
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Stephen Madron.
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Second mechanic. Nigel Brockman.
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And the crew.
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John Bluitt.
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Charles Greenow.
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Kevin Smith.
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Barry Torrey.
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Gary Wallace.
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And if during your Christmas,
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Merry-Mont, you pass the donation box for a volunteer search and rescue team.
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Throw some money in.
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Because they might be out tonight.
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And I'll go out and do the work.
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