HOURS after his rescue, Ricardo Arias Garcia was still shivering in a warm hospital bed. The last man alive among a crew of 13, he had refused to wear a lifejacket or buoyancy aid. Perhaps the knowledge of this still has him trembling, eight years later, wherever he may be, writes Lorna Siggins
When we met him in University College Hospital, Galway on a wet and windy October morning back in 2000, he had not yet been told of his comrades' fate. All 12 had been lost when the British-registered Spanish fishing vessel Arosastruck the incisor-like Skerd Rocks, west of Galway Bay.
"With every wave that came, we had to on very tight but some just couldn't. . . Then I was the only one holding on, and a huge wave came and swept me away too," Garcia told me. "In between the waves, I tried to look up, calm down and organise myself. . .
"I saw another big wave coming. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. When that wave had passed, I felt rocks beneath me. . .I looked up and I saw the light of the helicopter."
A guardian angel he ain't, but helicopter pilot Capt David Courtney seemed like one to Garcia, as did the figure reaching out to him from a rescue wire, winchman Eamonn Burns. Courtney has his own perspective on that experience, however. "Perhaps the worst moment" in his entire flying career is how he describes it.
Courtney recalls hovering before a 90-foot rock, the sea "frothing at its base". He and his crew could see the vessel, "white water foaming around it, glowing with a phosphorescent light". Then, a minute later, the man whose life they would save was standing, waving, on top of the rock.
What caught the Co Offaly pilot's eye, though, were the "many, many" lifejackets floating in the water. "In the darkness, each had a light that flashed and winked at us as the swell made them dance," he writes. "I remember thinking, just for one moment, that we had arrived there in time, that they were all alive, that we were going to save everyone. We were going to move around the sea near the rock and pick them up one by one.
"Like an amusement arcade game, with a grappling hook, some coins and patience, we could pick them all up. But before I could express that thought, that hope, that dream, as a shout, or a silent prayer of thanks, I realised that they were all empty. . ."
The Sikorsky helicopter did find a second man, the Arosa'sfishing skipper, but he did not survive the journey to Galway. Eamonn Burns and winch operator John Manning did everything they could, Courtney recalls, working desperately together throughout the flight.
Only a couple of days before, the Shannon-based team had rescued three crew from a French fishing vessel, An-Orient, which had sunk 87 miles west of Loop Head, Co Clare. Eight more on board, including Irishman Tomás Kelly of Fenit, Co Kerry, had lost their lives.
"20 men feared dead," was how Sky News put it to Courtney on a night that followed several interminably long days. At home in his kitchen, the pilot immediately regretted having taken the phone call from the television station. The focus on deaths unnerved him, though he knew the journalist was only doing his job.
"So I did mine. I ignored his questions, giving him the answers that I wanted. Four men saved. . ." Curiously, Courtney makes little or nothing of the award that he received for the Arosatasking and subsequent search. The State also conferred honours on his crew, on members of the Naval Service, Aran Island lifeboat and Costello Bay and Cleggan Coast Guard units.
In Nine Lives, his riveting account of a distinguished career with the Air Corps and Irish Coast Guard, Courtney spends most of his ink on tributes to other people.
Observing a dragonfly from a Tullamore turf bank may have ignited the flame he followed. Lying on his back as a boy, he watched as it hovered, "motionless and silent", moving methodically with total control. It came within four feet of his head before his dog barked. The insect vanished... and he heard the drone of an engine, the blade beat of a helicopter overhead.
The aircraft were to become Courtney's life some five years after his mother drove him to the Curragh Camp in her black Morris Minor in November, 1980. His first experience was in an Aerospatiale Gazelle.
Crew interdependence, the crucial importance of communication or "patter", the essential nature of constant practice are all described in his book, which gives snapshots of just some of the 300 emergency missions he has flown. Once, his aircraft's rotor blades almost sliced a hasty Government minister in two. On another occasion, while on an Air Corps "Blasket" run, he was handed three wild salmon by Inisvickillaune's late owner.
Search and rescue take their toll. Courtney knew most of the four Air Corps crew who died in the Tramore Dauphin helicopter crash of July,1999. "When I heard, I thought, there but for the grace of God go I," he says. "Whispered conversations over cups of tea revealed that others felt the same. . ." After a record flight beyond the western isles of Scotland to assist the British coastguard, Courtney retired from search and rescue in 2001. He flies now with Ryanair. His Nine Lives, dedicated to his wife, Lynda, is published by Mercier Press at €16.99.