A Japanese fisheries training vessel rescued four Americans yesterday from a dismasted sailboat 300 miles southwest of the Big Island.
"They are treating us like kings," said Carl Vanderbeek, captain of the 43-foot Goodnight Moon out of San Juan Capistrano, Calif.
Vanderbeek praised the seamanship of the crew of the Funakawa Maru, out of Akita, Japan, as "absolutely marvelous" during an "extremely hazardous" maneuver when Vanderbeek and three crew members were brought aboard the Japanese ship in 6- to 8-foot seas.
Once aboard, Vanderbeek and his crew were treated to sashimi, chicken-fried steak with cabbage, pasta salad, cake roll, soup and Japanese beer.
"They let us use the first-class bath, with a sunken saltwater tub heated by the engine cooling water," Vanderbeek said.
Vanderbeek’s son, Mark, who relayed emergency e-mail messages to the U. S. Coast Guard in setting up the rescue, said yesterday he couldn’t help but think of the Feb. 9 tragedy in which the USS Greeneville, a U.S. Navy submarine, rammed the Japanese fisheries training ship Ehime Maru off Diamond Head with the apparent loss of nine lives.
"It just seemed to me that there was some sort of irony of that Japanese training vessel out there plucking Americans out of the water shortly after this had happened to another Japanese training vessel," Mark Vanderbeek said.
He said he understood the Funakawa Maru interrupted its fishing, pulling nets up and steaming toward the rendez-vous, when it was contacted by a Coast Guard C-130 plane that had spotted the Goodnight Moon.
The fishing vessel immediately took the sailors aboard and the sailboat in tow pending a handover, probably tomorrow, to the tug American Quest out of Honolulu.
The Goodnight Moon left American Samoa Jan. 16 en route to Honolulu, but put in at Fanning Island and then at Christmas Island to attempt to repair leaking gearbox seals.
New crew members Tracy Obert of Paso Robles, Calif., Dwight Harrington of Newport Beach, Calif., and Joseph Fleming of Honolulu came aboard at Christmas Island to assist their friend Vanderbeek.
The sailboat lost engine power en route to Honolulu and was dismasted Friday night, Vanderbeek said.
"We were sailing with a double-reefed main and a small headsail, and I was below sleeping when we hit a wave that was very unusual, like hitting a wall. I found myself sliding off the sofa where I was sleeping, and I heard the crack and the crunch as the backstay parted and the mast keeled over forward," he said.
He and his crew spent the rest of the night trying to cut away rigging that had fallen overboard and threatened to pierce the hull.
The Goodnight Moon rescue was the second coordinated yesterday by the Coast Guard, which diverted the ship Pearl Venus to pick up three people in a life raft after the 45-foot fishing catamaran, Naia Lele III, sank about 97 miles southwest of Kona at 7 a.m. yesterday.
The Coast Guard was alerted by the Naia Lele III’s emergency position-indicating radar beacon at 7:16 a.m. and dispatched the Pearl Venus, a commercial vessel, to the scene.
The Coast Guard also launched a C-130 rescue plane and an H-65 Dolphin rescue helicopter from Barbers Point.
