When Rick Rodriguez’s sailboat collided with a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean earlier this month, it sank in about 15 minutes. But not before he and his three fellow sailors escaped with essential supplies and state-of-the-art communication equipment.
One was a pocket-sized satellite device that allowed Rodríguez to call his brother, who was thousands of miles away on land, from a life raft. That call would jump-start a successful rescue effort by other sailors in the area who had access to satellite internet on their ships.
“Technology saved our lives,” Rodríguez later wrote in an account he wrote on his iPhone from the sailboat that rescued him and his crew.
People involved in the roughly nine-hour rescue say it illustrates how newer satellite technologies, especially starlink internet systemsoperated by the rocket company SpaceX since 2019have dramatically improved emergency communication options for sailors stranded at sea and people trying to find them.
“All the sailors want to help,” said Tommy Joyce, a friend of Rodríguez who helped organize the rescue effort from his own sailboat. “But this makes it much easier to coordinate and assist boaters in distress.”
Starlink’s service gives ships access to satellite signals that reach oceans and seas around the world, according to the company. The paid connection allows sailors to communicate with other vessels on their own, rather than solely relying on sending distress signals to government rescue agencies using older satellite communication technologies.
But the quick rescue would not have been possible without the battery-powered satellite device that Mr. Rodríguez used to call his brother. Such devices have only been used by recreational boaters for about a decade, according to the US Coast Guard. Its maker, Iridium, said in a statement that the device is “incredibly popular with the boating community.”
“The recent adoption of more capable satellite systems now means boaters can broadcast distress to a public or closed chat group, sometimes online, and get an instant response,” said Paul Tetlow, managing director of the World Cruising Club, a navigation organization whose members participated in the rescue.
A sinking feeling
Whales don’t normally crash into ships. In a famous exception, one rammed the whaler Essex while crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1820, an accident that was one of the inspirations for Herman Melville’s 1851 novel “dick moby.”
In the case of Mr. Rodríguez, a whale interrupted a three-week voyage on his 44-foot sailboat, rain dancer, from the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador to French Polynesia. At the time of impact, on March 13, the vessel was traveling at about seven miles per hour and the crew was busy eating homemade pizza.
Mr. Rodriguez would later write that making contact with the whale, just as he dunked a slice into the ranch dressing, felt like hitting a concrete wall.
Even as the ship sank, “I felt like it was just a scene from a movie,” Alana Litz, a friend of Mr. Rodriguez and one of Raindancer’s sailors, he told NBC’s “Today” show last week. The rescue story had been previously reported by The Washington Post.
Raindancer’s hull was reinforced to withstand an impact with something as large and heavy as a cargo container. But the collision created multiple cracks near the stern, Rodriguez said later. wroteand the water was up to the floorboards in about 30 seconds.
Minutes later, he and his friends had escaped from the boat with food, water, and other essential supplies. When he looked back, he saw that the last 10 feet of the mast was sinking rapidly. When a rope that had been tying the raft to the boat began to go taut, he cut it with a knife.
That left the Raindancer crew floating in the open sea, about 2,400 miles west of Lima, Peru, and 1,800 miles southeast of Tahiti.
“The sun began to set and soon it was pitch black,” Rodríguez, who was not available for an interview, wrote in a story of the trip that he shared with other sailors. “And we were floating right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a boat and a life raft. I hope they rescue us soon.”
‘Not a drill’
Before the Raindancer sank, Mr. Rodríguez activated a satellite radio beacon that instantly sent a distress alert to coast guard authorities in Peru, the country with search and rescue authority in that part of the Pacific, and United States, where your vessel was registered.
In 2009, a US Coast Guard helicopter rescued the crew of a sailing ship whose boat had collided with a whale and sank about 70 miles off the coast of Mexico. But Raindancer’s remote location made a rescue like that impossible. So, in the hour after the sinking, US Coast Guard officers used decades-old satellite communications technology to communicate with commercial vessels near the crash site.
One vessel replied that it was about 10 hours away and willing to make a detour. But, in the end, that was not necessary because Mr. Rodríguez’s satellite phone call to his brother Roger had already launched a separate successful rescue effort.
Mr. Rodríguez’s brother contacted Mr. Joyce, whose own ship, the Southern Cross, had left the Galapagos at about the same time and was about 200 miles behind the Raindancer when it sank. Because the Southern Cross had a Starlink internet connection, it became a hub for a rescue effort that Mr Joyce, 40, coordinated with other boats using WhatsApp, Facebook and various speed-tracking smartphone apps. of the wind, the tides and the positions of the boats.
“Not a drill,” Joyce, who works in the biotech industry, often from her ship, wrote on WhatsApp to other sailors in the area. “We are in the Pacific in that direction, but there are closer boats.”
After a burst of communication, several ships began sailing as fast as possible towards Raindancer’s last known coordinates.
SpaceX did not respond to a query about the system’s coverage in the Pacific. But Douglas Samp, who oversees the Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue operations in the Pacific, said in a phone interview that the ships only started using Starlink Internet service on the open sea this year.
Mr Joyce said satellite internet had been key in finding ships that were close to the stranded crew.
“Everyone was using Starlink,” he said, speaking in a video interview from his ship as it sailed to Tahiti. “Can you imagine if we didn’t have access?”
Of course, there was a sailboat captain with no Starlink signal during the rescue: Mr. Rodriguez. After night fell over the Pacific, he and his fellow sailors resorted to the age-old method of sitting in a life raft and hoping for the best.
In the dark, the wind picked up and the flying fish jumped into their boat, according to Rodríguez’s account. About every hour, they would make an emergency call on a portable radio, hoping that a ship would pass within range.
None did. But after a few more hours of anxious waiting, they saw the lights of a catamaran and heard the voice of their American captain crackling on their radio. It was then that they cried out in relief.
