The one item that helped save a father and son from their doomed boat
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Two boaters were rescued Thursday after their vessel began taking on water 34 miles off the coast of the mid-Atlantic, and the U.S. Coast Guard said the use of their Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) may have made the difference.
According to the agency, a father-and-son duo were aboard the 57-foot sport fishing vessel named "Turn Me Loose" when the boat began taking on water off the coast of Virginia Beach.
The boaters' EPIRB transmitted their exact position to first responders, who were able to arrive at the site less than an hour after receiving the first distress call.
Upon arrival, rescue crews said they found 30-year-old Jeffrey Hudson and 60-year-old Robert Hudson adrift in an emergency life raft.
Both men were successfully transported to the USCGC Calhoun, where they underwent medical evaluations before being taken to shore.
Us Coast Guard Unveils First Polar Icebreaker In More Than 25 Years
Following their arrival in Virginia Beach, the two men were reunited with relieved family members.
Coast Guard leadership praised the quick response, which involved at least half a dozen boats and aviation units from around the region.
"This successful rescue highlights the importance of preparedness and the effectiveness of coordinated efforts between multiple agencies and assets," Daniel Butierries, a chief warrant officer with the U.S. Coast Guard, said in a statement. "The quick response and the mariners' preparedness significantly contributed to the rescue."
The agency highlighted the use of the EPIRB and other lifesaving equipment, which all marine vessels should have while venturing offshore.
The Coast Guard did not say what caused the vessel to start taking on water or if weather played a role.
World's Largest Iceberg On Possible Collision Course With Island In South Atlantic Ocean
The boat remains partially submerged more than 30 miles offshore, which could be hazardous to unalert mariners.
The Coast Guard said it is broadcasting alerts to boaters in the area in an effort to help them stay clear of the debris and prevent a collision.
It remains unclear if the boat's owner will attempt a salvage operation or if the vessel will simply sink to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean before such an effort commences.Original article source: The one item that helped save a father and son from their doomed boat
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

USA Today
3 days ago
- USA Today
What details have been released in the Titan submersible implosion?
What details have been released in the Titan submersible implosion? Show Caption Hide Caption What is a catastrophic implosion? What we know about Titan submersible Officials believe a "catastrophic implosion" killed the five people in a missing Titanic submersible. Here's what that means. Just the FAQs, USA TODAY Two years after its tragic end that captured the attention of the nation and the world, details continue to emerge about the OceanGate Titan submersible and its final mission. In June 2023, five people hoping to catch an up-close and personal glimpse of the Titanic shipwreck descended in a 22-foot-long, 25,000-pound submersible made of titanium and carbon fiber. The craft was designed to dive up to 13,123 feet, according to OceanGate, meaning it should have been capable of safely reaching the wreckage site 12,500 feet below the surface. About 1 hour and 45 minutes into the dive, however, contact with Titan was lost, sparking a multi-day search and rescue mission that culminated in the discovery of debris scattered about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic. In the years since, ongoing investigations have unveiled new pieces of evidence, including audio and video of Titan's fateful final moments. What happened to the OceanGate Titan submersible? On June 18, 2023, OceanGate submerged its tourist submersible, Titan, in the North Atlantic Ocean on a voyage to explore the Titanic wreckage. The submersible is believed to have imploded about 1 hour and 45 minutes after its trip began, resulting in the deaths of its five passengers. Wreckage of the vessel was later found scattered across the ocean floor, 330 yards away from the bow of the Titanic, the infamous liner that sank in 1912. The U.S. Coast Guard is continuing to investigate what caused the implosion. What caused the implosion? The U.S. Coast Guard is still investigating the accident to formally determine the cause of the Titan's implosion. In the years following the disaster, however, details about the submersible's handling have captured national attention. A series of hearings held by the Coast Guard last year brought many pieces of evidence and testimony to light, from claims that Titan was being navigated using an altered gaming controller to testimony about warnings OceanGate was reportedly given about the quality and safety of the submersible before its final descent. Public consensus thus far has primarily placed blame on the experimental design of the craft, which was ultimately unable to withstand the extreme pressures of its deep-sea dive. The state of the discovered debris was "consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said in the days after the accident. Who died in the OceanGate Titan submersible disaster? OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush, 61, was piloting the Titan submersible at the time of the disaster. He oversaw financial and engineering strategies at the company and left behind a wife and two adult children. Hamish Harding, 58, was a British billionaire explorer who was chairman of Action Aviation, a global sales company in business aviation. He is survived by his wife and four children. A look at the victims: Who died in the OceanGate Titan submersible disaster? Paul-Henry Nargeolet, 77, was a French Navy veteran, maritime and Titanic expert and director of Underwater Research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic, Inc. He is survived by his wife, three children, stepson and grandchildren. Shahzada Dawood, 48, hailed from one of Pakistan's wealthiest families and served on the board of trustees for the Dawood Foundation, an education nonprofit based in Pakistan. Dawood is survived by a wife and daughter. Shahzada Dawood's son, Suleman Dawood, 19, was a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and had planned to join his father in working for Engro after graduating from college. Newly released footage captured moment of implosion In the wake of the Coast Gaurd hearings, a lawsuit filed by the family of one of the victims and the release of two documentaries, the BBC's "Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster" and Netflix's "Titan: The OceanGate Disaster," additional, sometimes sordid details, have emerged in the two years since the accident. Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Coast Guard released a 23-second-long clip in February that reportedly captured the moment of implosion. Officials called the static, followed by a boom and then silence, the "suspected acoustic signature" of the implosion. Listen: New audio of Titan submersible moments before implosion The Coast Guard has released new audio of Titan submersible's final moments before implosion. The sounds were recorded by a monitor moored approximately 900 miles from the Titan's implosion site, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Additional footage provided to the Coast Guard by OceanGate showed the moment from the perspective of the submersible's tracking and communications team, which included Wendy Rush, CEO Stockton Rush's wife. In the clip, the team is seen monitoring data and text communications. With about 400 meters to go, a muffled thump can be heard from the Titan, prompting Rush to ask, "What was that bang?" Newly released footage captures sound of Titan submersible imploding Newly released video appeared to capture the sound of the Titan submersible imploding on its way to visit the Titanic wreck in June 2023. That sound, the Coast Guard said, "later correlated with the loss of communication and tracking," and "is believed to be the sound of the Titan's implosion reaching the surface of the ocean." The Coast Guard has yet to release the findings of its investigation. However, the hearings revealed the eerie final messages sent from the crew before it was crushed by the pressure of the ocean: "All good here." Contributing: Saman Shafiq, Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY


Atlantic
3 days ago
- Atlantic
The Master of the White-Knuckle Narrative
William Langewiesche, whose extraordinary body of white-knuckle narrative reporting from all parts of the globe appeared in these pages over a period of decades, died earlier this week at the age of 70. He had been living with a debilitating cancer for several years but continued to plan new projects and to write. His straightforward optimism and ambition, in the face of long odds, are what brought him to The Atlantic in the first place. In the spring of 1991, he sent to our offices a two-part, 20,000-word account of his experiences in the Sahara—a blend of natural history, travelogue, black humor, and adventure story, rendered in deceptively simple prose that possessed an irresistible force. The envelope from Langewiesche arrived out of the blue, along with a cover letter reading 'Enclosed are two pieces on Algeria.' Within a few months, that submission, virtually unchanged, became an Atlantic cover story, 'The World in Its Extreme.' Over the next 15 years, Langewiesche contributed a score of major articles to The Atlantic: On Pakistan's development of atomic weapons. On tensions along the U.S.-Mexico border. On a catastrophic ferry sinking in the Baltic. On the anything-goes legal regime governing ships on the high seas. One particular specialty was flying. His father, Wolfgang, had been a legendary pilot—he was the author of the classic book Stick and Rudder —and Langewiesche flew small planes professionally (air taxis, air ambulances, cargo planes) while in college at Stanford and afterward, supporting himself while he began writing for aviation magazines. For many years, he supplemented his income by teaching pilots how to fly in the worst possible weather, taking off with one of his students only when the radar had lit up with danger. One of Langewiesche's gifts was the ability to translate technical minutiae into a gripping yarn. He could recount the arcane details of how an airplane makes a turn in a way that evoked the raptures of dance. His description of the job of air traffic controller may have encouraged many readers to start taking the train. Langewiesche investigated aviation disasters of every kind, whether the nosedive of Valujet 592 or the incineration of the space shuttle Columbia. He won a National Magazine Award for one of his aviation investigations—into the crash of EgyptAir 990—during an extraordinary run that saw him named as a finalist for the award virtually every year for a decade. He would win another National Magazine Award for his reconstruction of a massacre at the hands of American forces in Haditha, Iraq. Langewiesche's access to the world of expertise—engineers, historians, nuclear scientists, forensic investigators, other pilots—ran deep, but he was no armchair analyst or globe-spinning litterateur. After 9/11, he spent six months among the workers at Ground Zero to report on the grim, complex task of finding remains and removing debris, on most days venturing deep into the smoldering pile. (His three sequential Atlantic cover stories on the subject in 2002 became the book American Ground.) Langewiesche made many trips to Iraq for the magazine, covering all aspects of the war and producing a cover story about the surreal, hothouse American world inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. For his much later cover story about the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370—the magazine's most-read article in 2019—he traveled along the rim of the Indian Ocean, stopping wherever he heard that fragments of wreckage had washed ashore. Fluent in French, he embedded with the French Foreign Legion on a mission to Guyana. A single day on such an assignment would exhaust most people. He was with them for a month. Langewiesche had no taste for manufactured drama. Real drama, he believed, could be found almost anywhere, in any story, if you looked deeply and patiently enough. Similarly, there was nothing overwrought about his prose. His sentences relied on ordinary words, but for all that possessed a pure and crystalline character that turned reading into compulsion. He rarely injected the first person into what he wrote, but the reader was treated to a seemingly omniscient perspective from right behind his eyes. And that perspective was earned. To ask Langewiesche how he knew a particular fact or how he knew what someone thought—the kind of thing fact-checkers and editors ask all the time—was to embark on an explanatory excursion that underscored how hard he worked for every morsel of insight. A certain cast of mind characterizes Langewiesche's work for The Atlantic as well as for Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. He was skeptical about most political and social institutions, not because they weren't needed but because they were fragile and self-serving. But he was not skeptical about knowledge and expertise, nor about the capacity of ordinary people to transcend circumstances and institutions with humanity and ingenuity. Those people peer out from between the lines of everything he wrote.


Newsweek
5 days ago
- Newsweek
US and NATO Ally Patrol Waters Near China
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The United States teamed up with the United Kingdom—a major NATO ally—to conduct patrols in the East China Sea, where China has carried out controversial maritime activities. Newsweek has contacted the Chinese defense and foreign ministries for comment by email. Why It Matters The East China Sea lies between China and the First Island Chain—an island defense line formed by Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines as part of a U.S. containment strategy aimed at restricting China's naval activities through America-aligned territories in the event of war. China asserts its sovereignty in the East China Sea by maintaining a coast guard presence near a disputed, Japan-administered group of islets and by installing fossil fuel facilities in the region—raising Japan's concerns that it is attempting to alter the status quo in its favor. What To Know Official photos released on Saturday show USCGC Stratton—a U.S. Coast Guard national security cutter deployed in the western Pacific since mid-May—sailing alongside the Royal Navy patrol vessel HMS Spey at an undisclosed location in the East China Sea on June 1. In a news release on June 11, the Royal Navy said that the Spey joined the Stratton in the Korea Strait—a 120-mile-wide waterway north of the East China Sea that separates South Korea and Japan. The two ships conducted close maneuvering and communications training. The United States Coast Guard cutter USCGC Stratton, left, conducts an exercise with the Royal Navy patrol vessel HMS Spey, right, in the East China Sea on June 1, 2025. The United States Coast Guard cutter USCGC Stratton, left, conducts an exercise with the Royal Navy patrol vessel HMS Spey, right, in the East China Sea on June 1, 2025. Petty Officer 3rd Class William Kirk/U.S. Coast Guard The Spey is also deployed in the Indo-Pacific region. The British aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales is expected to arrive in the area soon with a task group as part of an eight-month deployment. Following the joint operation, the British patrol vessel—which had been monitoring illicit activities by North Korean ships in waters surrounding Japan—visited Sasebo in Kyushu, Japan's southernmost main island, on June 5. The ship was spotted departing on Sunday. Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter conducted an exercise with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in waters south of Honshu—Japan's main island—on June 8. The ship made a port call in Kagoshima, Kyushu, on Monday, according to a local ship spotter. The Stratton is also scheduled to participate in a trilateral exercise with the Japanese and Philippine coast guards in waters off Kagoshima from Monday to Friday. BRP Teresa Magbanua, a Philippine Coast Guard patrol vessel, docked in Kagoshima on June 12. What People Are Saying The U.S. Coast Guard Pacific Area said on Saturday: "U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Stratton is deployed to the Indo-Pacific to advance relationships with ally and partner nations to build a more secure and prosperous region with unrestricted, lawful access to the maritime commons." The Royal Navy said in a news release on June 11 about the Spey and the Stratton: "To enhance the understanding between the two traded places with their opposite numbers." The Philippine Coast Guard said in a Facebook post on Saturday: "A joint search and rescue drill will be conducted as part of the [trilateral coast guard exercise] to highlight operational readiness, coordinated response, and reinforce regional cooperation in addressing maritime challenges." What Happens Next It remains to be seen how the U.S. and its allies will further enhance their naval or coast guard presence in disputed waters near China—including the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea—amid China's expanding maritime activities.