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(More customer reviews)I'm almost done with a recently released book I was given for Christmas, "Ten Hours Until Dawn." I began reading it but two days ago and don't want to put it down! A great read for the winter house-bound mariners up here, or for the most uninitiated landlubber. It's one of, if not the, best sea tales I've ever read.
It's the true story of the disasterous "Great Blizzard of '78" here at Ground Zero on the North Shore of Massachusetts, the grounding of the oil tanker Global Hope about two or three miles from us, and the rescue attempt turned disaster in the worst winter storm in over 100 years.
Between the herculean and selfless efforts of our local Coast Guard out of Gloucester and pilot boat captain Frank Quirk and his volunteer crew of his Can Do, the nail-biting descriptions of the almost unbelievable conditions out there in my sailing grounds, histories of similar marine crises, and the detailed but easily comprehensible explanations, it's one of those books that keeps you awake after midnight to read "just one more chapter."
This story holds a special significance for me not only because I'm so familiar with the locale and sail it every weekend during the season. During that historic storm I was living-aboard an old wooden 46' power boat tied up to our slip on D dock at Beverly Harbor Marina. Conditions got so bad by early evening that a group of us live-aboards got together with all the lines we had among us and we could get our hands on, tied off our dock to pilings and telephone poles and buildings in the parking lot above us. Above us, until the high-tide surge, when our floating dock rose above the hinged ramp, above the stationary wharf thereby stranding us on our boats, above even the sea wall and parking lot. We watched helplessly from our "island" as the rollers swept across the parking lot to our snow-buried cars! Two of the nearby boat-laden docks broke lose! The snow was so deep that if you didn't walk carefully down the very center of the rolling dock in the howling wind, it'd tip and dump you off.
Word had passed around in our marina that an oil tanker was aground just outside Beverly Harbor and that a rescue effort was underway. We saw the Coast Guard's 41-footer make it in to the Jubilee Yacht Club just next door. But we didn't learn about the tragedy just a few miles out until a day or two later; we were too busy ourselves that night to think to turn on the VHF radio. This is the first time I've learned the details -- and they were incredible, horrific!
I probably knew a few of the Coast Guardsmen quoted throughout who were out there facing death. During the summer of 1977 the Coast Guard used to love "boarding" us. Our boat had become a magnet for some of the ladies of an all-women's college just up the coast, and we four young live-aboards usually had a contingent of them aboard. When off-duty, a few of the Coasties would sometimes come down to the boat for a visit and a few brewskies, hoping we had company aboard.
Reading the details of what happened that night is chilling even almost thirty years later. I clearly recall how bad things were that night, but had no idea how much worse they were just a couple miles out in Salem Sound, or the life-and-death drama that was taking place. That *anyone* survived out there is a miracle -- that anyone *went* out there is unimaginable.
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