A crew aboard a rescue boat off the New Jersey coast lived through heart-stopping moments over the holiday weekend when their vessel was struck by what was believed to be a whale and sank in a matter of moments. All three crew members were pulled to safety, in an incident that officials described as a sudden and frightening turn on the water.
The crew was on its way back from an assignment when the strike happened. According to Fire Chief Eric Wall, he and his crew were coming back from a Fourth of July security detail on Saturday when their boat was suddenly struck by what was believed to be a surfacing humpback whale off the coast.
The damage became clear almost immediately. Wall said that when he opened up the engine and looked below, he found a big hole in the back wall of the boat, with seawater pouring into the vessel at a quick pace, leaving the crew only seconds to react to the flooding that was rapidly taking hold.
With water rushing in, the crew moved fast to call for help. According to the account, they grabbed what they could and sounded their distress signals, sending out an alert as the boat began to founder and their situation on the water grew more precarious by the second.
Another boater, Cody Binkley, raced his boat toward the scene after hearing the call for help. He recounted that by the time he reached them, the situation had gone from the crew standing on deck and leaning toward the rear of the boat to the men having to bail out and jump into the water as the vessel gave way.
The sinking was extraordinarily quick. According to the reporting, the boat sank within a minute, and the three crew members ended up in the water in their life jackets before Binkley was able to reach them and get them on board his own boat, arriving only about 30 seconds to a minute after they had gone in.
Those involved said whales were active in the area at the time. According to the account, the crew had actually been watching a pod of whales surface nearby, and Binkley captured video of a whale swimming in the same waters, a reminder of how close the marine giants were as the events unfolded.