Swept overboard in a storm, Kenosha native survives with help of safety gear and devoted crew
Sarah Pederson’s first thought in hitting the water was a simple one — breathe.
“The
first thing I said to myself was ‘you have to regulate your
breathing,’” Pederson said. Slow your breathing down, she told herself,
and don’t panic.
Which, in the circumstances, was easier said than done.
Pederson was bobbing in the water about four or five miles off the Lake Michigan shore. It was about 4 a.m. It was pitch dark.
The
wind was howling and it was raining so hard that on another sailboat in
the annual HOOK race a crew member reported he could not see the mast
from his place at the tiller.
“It
was really poor weather,” said Petty Officer German Bahena Cardozo, who
was in charge of the U.S. Coast Guard rescue boat at the Sturgeon Bay
Station early Sunday.
“There
was a really thick fog and a huge rainstorm, thunder and lightning. The
air temperature was in the low 60s and the water temperature dropped to
about 57 degrees. There were four-foot swells.”
A sailing life
Pederson, 65, grew up in Kenosha and has spent most of her life sailing from the harbors of Kenosha and Racine.
Although
she and her husband moved to Florida a year ago, she had returned to
Wisconsin to take part in the HOOK Race last weekend.
On
Saturday morning she left Racine as part of an eight-person crew on a
36-foot sailboat, planning to race nearly 200 miles from Racine to
Menominee, Mich.
“I’ve done this race 23 times,” she said. She was sailing with a “very experienced crew” including her brother.
The
crew knew a storm was expected overnight Saturday, and Pederson said
they were prepared. They had reduced sail and were wearing safety gear,
including life vests with strobes, and Pederson and each of the other
crew members on deck clipped to the boat with six-foot lines attached to
safety harnesses.
But when
the storm struck, the wind suddenly shifted and the boat broached.
Pederson and the other crew members who had been on the high side of the
boat were suddenly flung backward as the boat shifted and water swept
down the deck.
When the water hit, Pederson said, the clip holding her safety harness failed. She was swept away into the darkness.
Calling the Coast GuardOn
the boat, Pederson’s fellow crew members had seen her swept into the
water and they instantly went to work trying to get the boat under
control, to drop sails, to secure lines and start the engine.
One crew member noted the coordinates where she had fallen. They called the Coast Guard for help.
“It’s
a pretty intense situation,” said Pederson’s husband, David, an
experienced sailor who had remained on shore that day. “They had to
right the boat so they didn’t lose anyone else.”
In
the darkness and the storm, Pederson and the crew immediately lost
sight of each other and she was alone in the water in the darkness.
She remained alone, drifting through the storm, for an hour.
Was
she scared? “I have a hard time answering that question, because I
surprisingly managed in my own mind to stay calm,” she said. “The first
thing I said to myself was you have to regulate your breathing. I do a
lot of swimming and I guess I would call it water awareness, that helped
me a lot.
“I
also told myself—I had a lot of self talk—I said things like ‘this
doesn’t have to be your end, you can do this … although I’m not going to
lie, there were times when I wasn’t really sure.”
As
she drifted, she tried to keep herself oriented using distant lights on
signal towers on shore. She scanned for the lights of boats. When she
caught sight of scanning search lights, she blew her whistle.
Prepared for this Pederson insists this is not a story about her, it is a story about preparedness.
When
she hit the water, she was wearing her life jacket. Not the inflatable
life jacket she would wear while sailing during the day, but a full life
jacket that allowed her to stay upright and tread water.
Attached
to the jacket she had a strobe light that acted as a signal beam, and a
whistle, a simple child’s whistle, that she could blow to bring
attention to searching boats.
“My
story is about how I was able to survive because I had a full life
jacket on. I had a strobe. I had a whistle, I had water awareness
because I know how to swim,” she said. “And I had a group of people who
worked very hard to find me.”
Throughout
the storm, the crew of Pederson’s boat was sweeping the search area
looking for her strobe and listening for her whistle. Cardozo’s crew
from the Coast Guard station quickly joined them.
Cardozo
said nighttime water rescues in stormy weather are rare. “But we were
pretty hopeful,” he said, “If she had not been wearing a life jacket
with a strobe,” he said, it would have been a different story. “That’s
part of the reason she is alive right now.”
As
the weather began to clear Pederson’s crew spotted her in the water.
They pulled her aboard, then transferred her to the Coast Guard boat.
“We
took her to the station at Sturgeon Bay, where I had EMS on standby,”
he said. Pederson said she was taken to the hospital for treatment for
hypothermia.
Pederson returned
to Kenosha Wednesday, She said she hopes to use her experience to
highlight the importance of being prepared and for using safety
equipment on the water. She also is thankful for the work of the crew
and the Coast Guard in searching for her through the storm.
“It’s not about me,” she said. “It’s about the people who worked very, very hard to bring me home.”
The original article (with pictures) can be found at: https://www.kenoshanews.com/news/local/swept-overboard-in-a-storm-kenosha-native-survives-with-help-of-safety-gear-and-devoted/article_c80ba5c7-97e8-596d-8749-a2c4244864c2.html?fbclid=IwAR1v2FbQXvLbFAdejt6A3VB3gawQMykxF5u5FPJeJwdhx92txYOj0GibIw4#tracking-source=home-top-story
The original article (with pictures) can be found at: https://www.kenoshanews.com/news/local/swept-overboard-in-a-storm-kenosha-native-survives-with-help-of-safety-gear-and-devoted/article_c80ba5c7-97e8-596d-8749-a2c4244864c2.html?fbclid=IwAR1v2FbQXvLbFAdejt6A3VB3gawQMykxF5u5FPJeJwdhx92txYOj0GibIw4#tracking-source=home-top-story
