Jeb Morrow and his crew had all but given up hope. Twenty-foot breakers were tearing his ship to shreds on nearby rocks. The three men grabbed what breaths they could between the icy waves that crashed down on their heads.
The crew had abandoned the ship after its engine died in Alaska’s Bering Sea on Oct. 21, 2002, about 12 miles from Dutch Harbor.
Timothy Vincent, a Stanwood man piloting a crab fishing boat, heard the distress call. At first, he thought other vessels would reach the crew before he did.
But when the other crews decided the conditions were too risky to attempt a rescue, Vincent knew he had to do something. He awoke his crew. They were still 25 minutes away.
When Vincent and his boat, the Stormy Sea, arrived, he wondered if the three people in the water could possibly be alive in the terrible conditions. Then when one of his crew members, Tito Balisician, yelled, "There they are!"
Vincent carefully backed his boat toward the beach, using a powerful thruster to move toward the crew. Despite the harrowing conditions, 10 minutes later all three were aboard.
Vincent is one of 14 people being honored today by the Snohomish County Chapter of the American Red Cross during its eighth annual Real Heroes breakfast.
Like Vincent, many of the honorees were thrust unexpectedly into situations where others were endangered and they stepped up to help.
Among them: an Everett man, who by the strange luck of becoming lost when he got off the freeway in search of gas came upon a driver slumped over the wheel of her car from a heart attack, and a Mill Creek teenager who dove into a murky lake to help rescue a drowning man.
Vincent credits much of the rescue’s success to having a highly maneuverable boat, good equipment and "dumb luck."
"It’s not very often you get an opportunity to do something really good and it turns out so right," Vincent said.
"It’s nice to have people come up to you out of the blue and say, ‘Hey, you saved those people. ’ "
Reporter Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com.
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