3 Photos
The new book “A Speck in the Sea” tells a rare tale: one that could usually be told only by a dead man.
When, aboard his boat, the plastic handle on a large drink cooler broke while he was trying to move it, Montauk fisherman John Aldridge went tumbling backward—and instantly his life began flashing before his eyes, just like the old adage says it does when you suddenly think you are about to die.
“It was like a lifetime before I hit the water. I knew I was f---ed,” Mr. Aldridge—who didn’t die—said while standing exactly where he was that night in July 2013 when the cooler handle broke: on the deck of his lobster fishing boat, Anna Mary, 40 miles south of Montauk.
He tumbled backward for 15 or 20 feet, a tortuously long time of still being in contact with the firm steel deck of the boat, flailing to regain his balance but knowing he was about to be cast into the black water of the Atlantic, like a man forced to walk the plank in the middle of the night.
And nobody else would know it for hours.
“You know everyone is sleeping,” he said while pacing the deck of the boat, his hands unconsciously braiding a segment of rope, expertly. “You know they’re not going to hear anything. And then you just watch the boat pull away. It’s right there, but it’s gone, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do.”
In “A Speck in the Sea,” Mr. Aldridge reveals the thoughts that have run through the heads of countless ill-fated individuals who never made it back to land to share their tale: the crushing helplessness of the being cast adrift by a trivial misstep; the horror of death suddenly looming like an executioner’s ax at the apex of its arc, waiting for an unknown cue to deliver the final blow; the added fear when a shark begins circling (“What do you do?” Mr. Aldridge said of seeing the first shark. “You freak the f--- out.”); the excruciating impotency of seeing boats, including your own, and aircraft you know are looking for you trading by on the horizon, with no way of alerting them; the thoughts about how loved ones will react to your death, and the regrets of dreams not yet fulfilled and plans now seemingly deleted.
“When you’re about to die, a lot goes through your head,” Mr. Aldridge sighed.
His unlikely survival may be credited to the simple good fortune that the large rubber boots he had been wearing provided enough buoyancy—when they were turned upside down, filled with air, and one was placed under each arm—that he was able to keep his head above water.
His fishing partner, Anthony Sosinski, through the words of a ghostwriter, tells the story of that day from the other side: waking up to relieve his co-captain, and the wave of realization that washed over him and mate Michael Migliaccio that Mr. Aldridge was not aboard the boat, and the search effort that ensued almost immediately afterward.
The book traces Mr. Sosinski’s panicked but clear-headed assessment of the clues aboard the 45-foot Anna Mary as to what had happened and pieced together a startlingly accurate supposition of when it would have happened. That led to a projection of where the boat would have been at the time, which ultimately helped the U.S. Coast Guard to devise a search grid that would direct a helicopter to fly over Mr. Aldridge about 12 hours later.
“A Speck in the Sea,” from its title—lifted from the New York Times Magazine story of the same name that recounted Mr. Aldridge’s ordeal and rescue—to its postscript, labors to relate to those not familiar with being at sea just how vast the ocean is, even a tiny sliver of it when it comes to spotting an object the size of a mostly-submerged human.
For Mr. Sosinski, that understanding was instant, unavoidable and maddening.
“On the ocean, even if you know where something is and you’re looking at it, you might only see it for three seconds out of 10. It’s going up and down between waves,” Mr. Sosinski related. “It’s so hard to see something. You know you could be going right past him and easily miss seeing him. It drives you crazy.”
The two men, who fish for lobster and Jonah crabs, spent 18 months recounting the dramatic tale to the ghostwriter, who they said they chose specifically because she was entirely unfamiliar with boats, the ocean and Montauk. They wanted her, Mr. Sosinski said, to piece together the story thoroughly, not fill in gaps with her own suppositions.
Mr. Aldridge has also toured the country for most of the four years since he was plucked from the water, telling his tale in person to everyone from grade school students to intellectuals. The experience is faintly harrowing, not unlike that which precipitated it.
“It’s like reliving it every time I talk about it,” said Mr. Aldridge, who now wears a electronic satellite locating device on his belt when working on the boat’s deck alone. A steel transom also has been installed across the back of the boat, and lowered only when the crew is working together to launch or retrieve its traps.
“A Speck in the Sea” explores and explains the mechanics of a Coast Guard search, how the Guardsmen use computer programs that calculate thousands of potential paths a person or object might drift in the sea, the coordinating complications between the professional rescuers and the citizen flotilla that joined the search.
The book’s third theme, beyond the drama, is one of gratitude, of salutation to the Coast Guardsmen and members of the Montauk community who convulsed to life early one morning at word that one of its own was adrift over the horizon.
“People here, they know the water, they go to the beach they go surfing, since they were little kids they know what it’s like to lose control to the ocean, get held down by a wave,” Mr. Sosinski explained. “They can picture what it’s like to be out there, sorta, and they want to help.”
Mr. Aldridge nodded in agreement of the two men’s adopted home.
Montauk, he said with a fleeting smile: “It’s a good place to be lost from.”
on May 23, 2017