Mike Tougias
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"In the midst of the Blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals in Salem Sound off the Massachusetts coast. When the Coast Guard heard the Mayday calls, they immediately dispatched a patrol rescue boat. But within an hour, the Coast Guard rescue boat was in as much trouble as the tanker--both paralyzed in unrelenting seas. Enter Captain Frank Quirk who was compelled to act. Gathering his crew of four, Quirk plunged his forty-nine-foot...
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"On September 12, 1942, the RMS Laconia was attacked by a German submarine five hundred miles off the coast of western Africa. What the Germans didn't know was that they had just attacked their allies: locked below decks on the British ship were nearly 1,800 Italian prisoners of war. When the Germans realized their mistake, they made the unprecedented decision to rescue all survivors regardless of their nationality, attempting to declare the waters...
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"On the night of February 18, 1952, during one of the worst winter storms that New England has ever seen, two oil tankers just off the shore of Cape Cod were torn in half by the force of the storm. This middle-grade adaptation of an adult nonfiction book tells the story of a harrowing Coast Guard rescue when four men in a tiny lifeboat overcame insurmountable odds and saved more than 30 stranded sailors. This is a fast-paced, uplifting story that...
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In early May 2005, Captain Tom Tighe and first mate, Loch Reidy, of the sailboat Almeisan welcomed three new crew members, two men and a woman, for a five-day voyage from Connecticut to Bermuda. While Tighe and Reidy had made the journey countless times, the rest of the crew were paying-passengers learning about offshore sailing and looking for adventure. Four days into their voyage, they got adventure--but not the kind they had expected or had any...
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In the winter of 1932, New England was battered by the most brutal nor'easter in years, wreaking havoc on land and creating a wind-whipped peril of the freezing Atlantic. In the early hours of Monday, February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Fort Mercer and the Pendleton, broke in two. The Coast Guard raced its cutters to the Fort Mercer to rescue the men huddled in the halves, and when the Pendleton proved to be in danger of capsizing,...
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On May 19, 1942, a U-boat in the Gulf of Mexico stalked its prey fifty miles from New Orleans. Captained by twenty nine-year-old Iron Cross and King's Cross recipient Erich Wurdemann, the submarine set its sights on the freighter Heredia with sixty-two souls on board. Most aboard were merchant seamen, but there were also a handful of civilians, including the Downs family: Ray and Ina, and their two children, eight-year-old Sonny and eleven-year-old...
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"In 1963, President Kennedy gave the commencement address at the American University in Washington, DC. The Cuban Missile Crisis had forced him to reexamine the Cold War and his onetime foe Nikita Khrushchev. Those tense thirteen days in October 1962 had brought both leaders closer together as the world itself drew perilously close to nuclear war. JFK had pushed for direct contact with his Soviet counterpart and had a special hotline installed between...
10) The finest hours
Description
In February of 1952, one of the worst storms to ever hit the East Coast struck New England, damaging an oil tanker off the coast of Cape Cod and literally ripping it in half. On a small lifeboat faced with frigid temperatures and 70-foot high waves, four members of the Coast Guard set out to rescue the more than 30 stranded sailors trapped aboard the rapidly-sinking vessel.