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| Exmouth tender taking some water. |
The captain made his point rather well when he said if we lost this tender, 150 guests would have to leave the ship.
Because we could not land at Exmouth, Oceania out of Miami gave us permission to head south early to Geraldton, our next port. We finally encountered some 8-10' swells so the ride got just a little lumpy. It was maybe after 3-4 hours of sailing southbound that the captain came on the PA system and said we had a medical emergency onboard and we needed to reverse course for 2 hours where a helicopter would pick up the patient. Regatta doesn't have a heli landing pad and besides the seas were causing some pitching. This implied to me some sort of basket would need to be lowered to remove the patient. Perhaps it was prescient that we had invited an X-POW Mel Pollack (think Hanoi Hilton) and his wife to join us for dinner in our aft stateroom.
I won't use the correct terms for the crew of the heli, but there was a pilot and copilot plus 3 EMTs.
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| First EMT leaves for Regatta |
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| Basket lowered |
Between the 1st EMT going down and the basket being lowered there was a large backpack lowered.
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| Second EMT leaves for Regatta |
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| Patient with EMT lifted to heli |
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| Patient and EMT board heli |
This entire operation took maybe 60 minutes to execute. I was amazed at the coordination shown by all. Regatta was basically dead in the water, but by using her thrusters was able to keep her diesel exhaust from interfering with recovery operations. Once during the recovery the heli broke away and flew a large circle around Regatta. Mel quickly offered that was to save fuel as hovering burns much more fuel than actual flight. Having avoided rotary winged aircraft like the plague, I had no clue about that.
Comforting to know the resources and skills out there available to support medical emergencies.
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