A ninety-foot schooner went down off Maryland. An American fishing boat was lost with all hands off Nova Scotia. They had run into what many meteorologists consider to be the storm of the century: In late October 1991, a hurricane named Grace collided with a freak low-pressure cell over the North Atlantic and created a meteorological maelstrom that turned the East Coast of the United States into a single storm zone. Otherwise, they’d just fall out of the sky.ĭave Ruvola dropped the nose of the helicopter and started racing his fuel gauge down to the sea. They were five thousand feet in the air with no visibility and roughly twenty minutes of fuel left if he started now, he might be able to make it down to sea level before the engines quit. After twenty or thirty attempts-a monstrous feat of concentration-Ruvola radioed the tanker pilot that he was giving up. It was something he’d done hundreds of times in his life, but now it was like trying to throw a dart down a gun barrel. They had run into what many meteorologists consider to be the storm of the century.įor forty-five minutes, Dave Ruvola tried, and failed, to hit the funnel. Dave Ruvola swung his helicopter for home. The man was eventually picked up by a Romania-bound merchant ship. A hoist basket could never be maneuvered onto the deck of the man’s small sailboat, and rescue swimmers didn’t stand a chance jumping into such huge seas. When they’d arrived, though, it was clear there was nothing they could do-seas were seventy feet and the winds were beyond hurricane force. That afternoon, a solo yachtsman had radioed that he was going down in stormy seas and needed help, and they’d streaked out there to save him. Ruvola and his four mates were flying an Air National Guard H-60 helicopter back from a failed rescue 290 miles off the coast of Long Island when the wind hit. In zero visibility, they’d run into a wall of storm clouds ten thousand feet high, and the pilot, Dave Ruvola, hadn’t even been told it was there. Rain hammered off the windscreen like grapeshot. Flight manuals ricocheted around the cabin, and the five crewmen were thrown against the ceiling and then back down into their seats. One minute, they were pounding home through the darkness the next, they’d been blown practically to a stop. It was as if their helicopter had slammed into a mountainside. You can find every story we've ever published at Esquire Classic. Adapted from Sebastian Junger’s riveting best-seller, The Perfect Storm, t his article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Esquire.

The perfect storm junger