For the crew of a fishing vessel, time was the enemy. A fisherman onboard the Azteca 5, a Mexican-flagged ship sailing in the Pacific, had suffered “traumatic injuries” on Monday, July 6. The Azteca 5 and its sister ship the Franz were out at sea, roughly 700 nautical miles from Cabo San Lucas in Mexico and hundreds of miles from the closest hospital or transport to one.
That day, Coast Guard District 11 picked up their distress call and alerted members of the California Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing. A team of aircraft crewmen and pararescuemen or PJs quickly organized.
The injured fisherman had been moved to the Franz, which was sailing to Socorro Island, a sparsely populated volcanic island roughly 350 miles from the Mexican coast. There was a medical facility there and transport to a hospital on the mainland, but the Franz was so far out at sea it would take the ship nearly two days to reach an island where they could transfer the crewman.
So the airmen from the 129th Rescue Wing would meet them along the way and try to stabilize the patient, a 47-year-old man. An HC-130J Combat King II took off from Moffett Air National Guard in Northern California, heading hundreds of miles south to reach the Franz.
“It’s a lot of complex planning to make this happen,” Capt. Art Eisberg, the search and rescue duty officer assigned to this mission, said in a release from the wing.
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Video shared by the wing showed the plane’s crew dropping a bundle of medical gear into the water near the ship, and then four pararescuemen from the 131st Rescue Squadron jumping out themselves. Once in the water, they swam to the Franz, boarding it and treating the fisherman. They managed to provide emergency care for his injuries, stabilizing him overnight as the Franz continued to the island. They were able to help transfer the fisherman off of the ship, onto Socorro Island.
Capt. Taylor Franklin, the pilot of the HC-130J, said that the range of the plane and the medical abilities of the PJs made the 129th the ideal group to respond to the crisis.
The 129th’s personnel are often called in to help injured or stranded sailors in the waters around California and beyond. Those missions are often time sensitive, involve rough seas or harsh conditions that make visibility poor and leaves flying or hoisting people up dangerous.
Seven years ago the Azteca 5 was one of two ships that helped the Coast Guard recover the crews of two sailing ships that had failed. The fishing ship and a commercial vessel diverted course at the request of the Coast Guard, using its own helicopter and a small boat to get three crewmembers off of the Ran Tan II sailing ship.
