January 2007, and the TV news bulletins are full of reports of a Whisky Galore story of high-performance motorbikes and other goods washed up on a south coast beach. Thousands of people turned up to see what they could scavenge. But what got lost in the heady free-for-all was the fate of the ship that had been the source of all the treasure: the British-registered MSC Napoli …
Rolling in across the Atlantic was the fiercest storm to rock the British Isles for decades. The European Windstorm 'Kyrill' would go on to claim nearly fifty lives by the time it blew itself out, eleven casualties in Britain alone.
Aboard the MSC Napoli a crew of twenty-six feared they might be added to that list. Their ship, holed beneath the waterline where the hull had cracked, had to be abandoned and the crew ordered into their lifeboat by the captain. There, sweltering inside their survival suits, and riding out waves rising higher than forty feet, they waited for rescue.
That was when the alert crews of 771 Naval Air Squadron were scrambled. Within minutes of receiving the distress signal, two Sea King helicopters, Rescue 193 and Rescue 194, took off from their airbase in Cornwall, turned into the wind, and battled their way through the ferocious weather towards the survivors.
Although he was supposed to have finished work for the day, Petty Officer Aircrewman Jay O'Donnell jumped on board Rescue 194 in case he could help. For O'Donnell was a graduate of one of the most arduous and demanding training programmes the British Armed Forces had to offer: he was a Royal Navy Search and Rescue Diver.
Over the hours that followed, in appalling conditions, he would be tested to the limit and beyond . . .
In Rescue 194, O'Donnell tells the extraordinary inside story of the rescue of the crew of the Napoli for the first time. It's a gripping tale of disaster at sea, the power of the elements and, above all, of the skill, courage and determination that saw the helicopter crews earn awards for their bravery that day – and for Jay O'Donnell to be decorated by the Queen for gallantry.
