About this item
Soon after 2:00 A.M. on Easter morning, March 23, 2008, the fishing trawler Alaska Ranger began taking on water in the middle of the frigid Bering Sea. While the first mate broadcast Mayday calls to a remote Coast Guard station more than eight hundred miles away, the men on the ship's icy deck scrambled to inflate life rafts and activate the beacon lights, which would guide rescuers to them in the water. By 4:30 A.M., the wheelhouse of the Ranger was just barely visible above the sea's surface, and most of the forty-seven crew members were in the water, wearing the red survival suits—a number of them torn or inadequately sized—that were supposed to keep them from freezing to death. Every minute in the twenty-foot swells was a fight for survival.
About the Author
Kalee Thompson is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in a range of publications including Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Inc. , Runner's World, and The Hollywood Reporter. She is the author of Deadliest Sea: The Untold Story Behind the Greatest Rescue in Coast Guard History (HarperCollins, 2010) , and the co-author of The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear (University of Chicago Press, 2022) . Kalee currently works as a senior editor at the product-review site Wirecutter, a New York Times company. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband, Dan Koeppel, and their two young boys.
