Alaska Ship Rescue Left No Time to Spare

"Mayday. Mayday. This is the Alaska Ranger ... . We are flooding, taking on water in our rudder room."

Within minutes, two Coast Guard helicopters and a search plane lifted off and a cutter with a third helicopter headed out. They departed from different parts of Alaska, moving toward an isolated location 120 miles west of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands.

It would take rescuers nearly 2 1/2 hours to reach the crew members, who had abandoned ship.

Forty-seven crew members were clinging to life in an ice-cold sea, battered by 20-foot water swells. Ultimately 42 of them were rescued by the Coast Guard and the Ranger's sister ship, the Alaska Warrior.

Five were not.

The bodies of three crew members and the captain, were recovered. Alaska State Troopers say they were in the water for about six hours, and died of hypothermia. One man's body was lost at sea.

The lost crew member may have been a survivor who fell out of the rescue basket as it was being hoisted up to a helicopter, but no one knows for sure.

A Jayhawk helicopter was the first to arrive.

"As we approached the scene, we saw three strobe lights and we assumed those were rafts," flight commander Lt. Brian McLaughlin said. "The scene was very grim.