The Coast Guard rescue swimmer gripped the starboard side of the sinking sailboat in the dark as the waves beat against him. He called out to the man standing on the boat as a helicopter hovered overhead.
“You’re going to jump,” Miles LeComer shouted over the sound of the wind and rotor wash and waves. “And I’m going to grab you.”
David Haight had a briefcase and a knapsack ready with some of the few valuable possessions he took with him on what was supposed to be a journey from Newport to Santa Barbara. LeComer, barely able to hold onto the sailboat as it rolled up and down on the waves more than 90 miles offshore, told Haight he could only take what was in his pockets. He gave him one minute to prepare.
Haight, his sailboat disappearing beneath him, didn’t need the minute. He jumped, crashing into the frigid Pacific Ocean, engulfed, immediately knocked about by 15-foot-tall waves. He went under.
A hand grabbed him and held on.
‘There wasn’t anything to feel’
Sitting in an Elmer’s Restaurant in Clackamas about a month after his rescue, Haight, 69, flashed a sly grin that hinted at the other wild stories in his past — and possibly in his future, too.
There was the arrest, when he was 24, when he and four others were caught by federal officials trying to smuggle 40,000 pounds of marijuana from Colombia to Florida by ship. And the time he and his girlfriend at the time found a dinghy abandoned in a Florida swamp, restored it and sailed it on both the East and West coasts.
But the misadventure in July that cost him his beloved sailboat, the Windswept II, hit him hard. After all, it wasn’t until Haight’s 60s that he was able to fully live the dream that he had cooked up as a child.
One of three sons, Haight grew up in Depoe Bay in a family of strict Jehovah’s Witnesses. Before he was even a teenager, he realized he believed none of what he was being told and yearned to escape his parents’ restrictive household. Sailing was one outlet. A local resident owned a small boat that he let the kids in town sail on, and Haight took every opportunity he had, between school and working in his parents’ restaurant.
Owning his own sailboat and exploring the world became his “secret wish,” the one he’d whisper to himself when blowing out his birthday candles, he said.
“You never run out of fuel,” Haight said. “You can go as far as you want.”
Haight came close to that dream in his early 20s, when he and a girlfriend briefly owned a sailboat in California and lived on it. But the dream collapsed when, working as a commercial fisherman, Haight was asked if he wanted to smuggle marijuana from Colombia into Florida. He needed the money, so he said OK.
It was his first attempt to smuggle drugs, Haight said. When the boat reached Tampa Bay, U.S. Customs Service agents boarded it, their guns drawn, and found about $14 million worth of marijuana, according to news articles at the time. Four of the five arrested men “appeared weathered from several weeks at sea,” The Tampa Times wrote on May 23, 1978.
Haight and his girlfriend sold the sailboat, and he served two years in federal prison, getting out in 1982. In the decades since, he worked mostly in construction and waited tables. He scuba-dived most of his life, and picked up hang-gliding in the early 1990s.
“I was just a regular guy,” he said.
After his mother died in 2013, Haight and his brothers sold her house, which dropped $66,000 into Haight’s lap. With that cash infusion, he bought the Windswept II, a 38-foot, 1999 fiberglass sailboat, in 2018. After outfitting it for a long trip, he sailed to Mexico in 2022. In July 2023, he sailed to Hawaii, then to Newport, in preparation for his next trip south.
He set sail from Newport on June 29, planning to stop in Santa Barbara to finish preparing the boat for a longer trip to Mexico. He headed out to sea around 1:30 p.m. under a clear, cloudless sky. The forecast called for storms south of his location, but nothing he couldn’t handle.
Haight sailed into a storm that was worse than expected, however. Winds nearly 60 miles per hour pushed his sailboat around for two days straight.
Unable to sail in those conditions, Haight decided to “hove to,” essentially putting his boat in park, while it drifted southeast.
He was in his bunk on July 2 when he heard a strange sound — the rattle of the sailboat’s automatic bilge pump. Designed to turn on if water seeped into the boat and reached a certain level, it had never activated before in the six years he’d sailed on the boat. Haight pulled up the floorboard and saw water in the bilge.
Oh, I’m sinking, Haight thought.
But he wasn’t afraid.
“There wasn’t anything to feel,” he added. “There was just to do.”
When he realized the pump wasn’t keeping up with the rising water, he concluded he urgently needed help.
“Mayday, mayday. This is sailing vessel Windswept II,” Haight said into the radio, to anyone who might hear him, then gave his location and said his boat was taking on water.
The Coast Guard took the call, and offered to bring him a larger pump. A ship nearby listened in to the conversation and diverted course to stand by in case Haight needed extra help.
Haight thought this response would solve the problem. But then his bilge pump broke — and a back-up pump shorted out. Haight now knew he was really in trouble.
“That was when I got concerned,” Haight said.
By around 11 p.m. on July 2, he was 95 miles off shore, standing in the cabin of the boat in ankle-deep ocean water.
Then the boat’s engine broke down, too, leaving him helpless in the wind and waves as the water sloshed over Haight’s feet.
‘Are you good?’
Commander Jay Kircher was asleep in his North Bend home on July 2 when his cell phone rang. It was 10:25 p.m. There was a man in a sailboat off the coast taking on water, he was told.
Kircher got out of bed, sat down in the living room and started making calls, quickly preparing an operation to help, and potentially rescue, the man. Kircher was worried about how far the helicopter would have to fly — the man was probably too far away for a boat to reach him in time — as well as the sea conditions and the darkness. Kircher requested that a Coast Guard airplane be deployed to circle the scene and monitor the operation from above, in case there was an emergency.
It was obvious this would be a difficult operation. The distance from shore — about 83 nautical miles west of Brookings, or about 95 land-measured miles — meant they would be alone if they had a problem and needed help themselves. Because of the masts and rigging on any sailboat, it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to lift the man in distress off of the deck. And the gale-force winds and the high waves meant both the pilot and a rescue swimmer would have extreme conditions to contend with.
“It was right on our limits, basically, for range,” Kircher said.
A crew departed North Bend in an MH-65 Dolphin helicopter at 11:17 p.m., July 2, for Brookings. They were carrying with them a 105-pound pump they planned to deliver to the sailboat — with both Haight’s pump and the Coast Guard pump working at the same time, there was a chance to save the boat.
By the time they landed around midnight, Haight had told the Coast Guard via radio that his own pump had failed, meaning he needed to be rescued. The Coast Guard crew unloaded the pump, fueled up to the top, and the pilot plugged the sinking boat’s GPS coordinates into his flight computer.
There were four of them in the helicopter: the pilot-in-command, a co-pilot, a rescue swimmer and a flight mechanic; the latter would be in charge of dropping the swimmer down into the ocean and then lifting him and the survivor up into the helicopter.
Pilot-in-Command Brandon Books, 30, brought the helicopter to about 500 feet above the water, under the clouds, where it was so dark the crew flew the whole way wearing night-vision goggles.
“Are any of you guys a little bit nervous?” the flight mechanic asked.
“Yeah, man,” Books said. “I’m a little bit nervous.”
Books, originally from Whitefish, Montana, got hooked on the idea of becoming a U.S. Coast Guard pilot as a kid while watching an episode of the reality TV show “Deadliest Catch” where the Coast Guard rescued fishermen, he said. On this day, Books was in the final weeks of his first assignment as a Coast Guard pilot.
The four of them flew for about 50 minutes before Books spotted the sole light shining from the top of the Windswept II’s main mast around 1:20 a.m.
When the helicopter appeared out of the darkness, Haight became more optimistic about his chances of survival.
In most missions of this sort, rescuers want to drop the rescuer onto the surface of the boat using a cable. That’s hard, if not impossible, with a sailboat, because of all the masts and sails and ropes and cords, especially in rough weather.
LeComer, the rescue swimmer, would have to go into the ocean and swim to the boat.
That wasn’t going to be easy either.
As the helicopter hovered, Books looked down at the waves. They were large, even larger than they’d expected.
“That’s kind of big,” Books said to LeComer over the helicopter communications system. “Are you good?”
“Oh,” LeComer said, “I’m ready to go.”
LeComer, 28, scooted to the door and the mechanic hoisted him out over the ocean and lowered him into the water.
LeComer, with a snorkel in his mouth and fins on his feet, quickly detached the hook from his harness and fixed the sailboat in his line of sight. The seas were so rough that his chief concern was that he might run out of strength while trying to swim to the sailboat. It didn’t help that when he fell into a trough between waves the Windswept II would sometimes disappear from his view.
When he reached the boat he realized it was too far gone for him to be able to climb onto it safely. The boat was leaning on its side, partially submerged. LeComer grabbed a line Haight had thrown into the water and pulled himself to the right side of the boat.
Haight had a briefcase and a bag ready with his belongings — including his high-school diploma, the ship’s log, and a cigar box with family keepsakes. He asked LeComer if he could take his bag with him.
“Only what’s in your pockets,” LeComer shouted. “I’ll give you one minute.”
Haight, wearing a life jacket, a long-sleeve shirt, jacket, jeans and tennis shoes, put his passport, the keys to his storage locker in Depoe Bay and some cash in his pockets and jumped into the water. LeComer grabbed him and, swimming sideways, kicked his fins while holding onto Haight with his right arm, propping him up on his hip.
Books, who had flown the helicopter about 50 yards away so the helicopter wouldn’t drown out their voices when LeComer and Haight tried to communicate, flew back once he saw LeComer detach from the sailboat.
“It’s going to be loud and windy,” LeComer said.
That’s when he noticed that Haight seemed almost calm, “a pretty seasoned mariner.”
After he hooked Haight onto his harness, LeComer gave a thumbs up to the helicopter hovering 100 feet above them, and the mechanic dropped the cable with the hook. The heavy waves and wind bounced LeComer and Haight around, moving them off-course from the descending cable.
They needed to put the cable right on the two dots in the ocean that were LeComer and Haight, a tough feat for even the most skilled pilot and mechanic in such conditions.
“Forward and right 10,” the flight mechanic said to Books, who then maneuvered the 9,000-pound helicopter about 10 yards as directed, then overshot by another 10 yards. “Back 10.”
Finally — after about eight minutes — LeComer was able to grab the cable. He attached it to his harness, gave the flight mechanic another thumbs up and the two soon were in the air.
Once they were in the helicopter, LeComer checked over Haight and concluded he didn’t need to go to a hospital. He gave him a warming blanket, and Books turned on the autopilot, lifting the helicopter up to 500 feet and directed it back toward Brookings. It was 1:42 a.m., just 22 minutes since the Coast Guard helicopter had arrived.
They flew under the clouds in almost complete darkness until Books spied clouds that were a little thinner.
“Do you want to climb up above these clouds?” Books asked the co-pilot.
“Yeah, it looks like it’ll be nicer up there,” the co-pilot said.
They climbed to about 1,500 feet above sea level, where they could see the stars. The relief was palpable once they spotted the shore lights, Books said.
While the Coast Guard crew regularly goes out on challenging rescue missions, this one on July 3 was particularly difficult, given how far the sinking boat was from shore, the weather and the condition of the sea.
The operation, Kircher said, “was kind of in a different league.”
‘Not over yet’
When LeComer got home early on the morning of the rescue, he scarfed down a breakfast burrito and called his mom to tell her an abbreviated version of the operation.
“Thanks for putting me in swimming lessons, mom,” LeComer said to her.
Books worked another week, wrapping up his three-and-a-half year assignment in North Bend. Three weeks later, he was in New Jersey for his new assignment.
Haight never figured out why his sailboat sprung a leak. It’s possible that part of the boat had been weakened while stuck on a sandbar the previous year, then was stressed too much by the strong winds on his way to California. But it had survived plenty of strong storms before the one that sank the boat, so he’s still unsure.
He bought a car in Portland and is planning to drive to Mexico to visit friends. While he hasn’t come to terms with losing his boat, he’s grateful for the opportunity the Windswept II gave him — and for the Coast Guard crew that saved him from it.
“How often does somebody get to live their dream?” Haight said. “And I’m still living my dream. It is not over yet.”
©2024 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
