Read the first chapters HERE.
May 8th, 2025
The call came over the night radio channel to prepare for rescue at 4:40am. A small fiberglass boat with about 50 people on board, according to Alarm Phone. The bridge had briefly spotted it — a pale white flash of something solid in the pre-dawn darkness, only distinguishable from the flashes of wave crests by its comparative immutability — and then lost it again in the night.
We waited on the boat deck for the spotters to find it again, all geared up and ready to launch the RHIBs. Finally, it appeared again, just a hundred or so yards away, prominent and real. It’s funny how the sea, even in daylight, can hide things so completely until they appear abruptly, fully formed, clear, and most shockingly, close.
I was standing at the edge of the ship as the deck team unlashed my RHIB when the boat drifted into view off our port side — a ghostly white hull in the blackness, a wave that didn’t break, a white horse that kept running. The cranes lowered us into the unpredictable chop of the dark sea and we felt our way through the darkness to find them.
It was just after 7am when the first rescue concluded. Before we had a chance to recover the RHIBs onto the mothership, we had a new target about 3 nautical miles away. We headed that way, bumping and slapping through the growing waves.
We found a medium-size wooden boat — 134 people on board, almost half stowed away in the bottom hold. From a few hundred yards out, it still looked like it was empty. The people were huddled down low into the gunwales toward the stern to keep away from the spray as the bow cut through the waves that had steadily increased throughout the morning to a rolling 1.5 meters.
After another three and a half hours of driving, the second rescue was complete with 190 people safely on board.
May 9th, 2025
To the people with all their layers on, everything they own soaked through to the skin, with goosebumps, now wrapped in tin foil emergency blankets, now wrapped in wool blankets, all gray, sleeping, rising and falling with resilient breath on a deck on a ship rising and falling among the swells on the Tideless Sea.
The deck is full tonight. The restless or restroom-bound pick gently over and between the sleeping — a steadying hand on a shoulder, a softness, a flicker of shadow above the shared blankets.
The heat lamps hum. The dripping clothes dry nearby, swaying with the ship: our world, our rootless land, our safety for a time.
These are the people who keep it all together, who continue the courageous tradition of humanity as much of it unravels into something unrecognizable as human.
And then there is the crew — this ragtag group of misfits who reside and work in the liminal space of life that surrounds the liminal space of militarized borders. Filled almost constantly with doubt that despite the good, we are nothing more than a bandaid.
And the doubt doesn’t go away. But something stronger and older and wiser tells it to shut the fuck up.
The electric memory of pulling someone out of the sea — a tiny head in a vast watery grave, still sucking air, still pulling up towards life.
Seeing the bravest people you’ve ever seen need a hand and having the privilege and the honor to extend yours.
To help the people carrying on the most time-honored human tradition of migration — when all the power and money in the world is bent on keeping everything the same and everyone static, stuck, rooted to the spot even as the powerful’s excesses raise water and ignite the flames and dry the clouds and extract all the life from the soil.
But The People are a wave that never breaks. They must be to be where we have found them — out here, in a desperate place, embarked on a desperate journey, instilled fully with defiance and love and ferocious self-worth.
Part V: Holding It Together
May 10th, 2025
Sometimes it makes me sad that I haven’t broken down and cried on this mission. Sometimes I’m impressed by the same thing. Strangely proud that I can push it all down to stay focused, to do a good job—but how far down am I pushing it? Is it sinking too far down, settling with all the sediment that lies beyond what I know how to dredge?
I think about those visceral moments in the RHIB: A woman just pulled into the boat on her knees in the bow, ejecting a steady wheezing sob as her eyes stared out starboard across the wavetops at the empty sea—or maybe at nothing in particular. Maybe not even seeing anything at all.
Barely noticing baby after baby passed hand to hand past me to the mothers, barely noticing their cries bandying about the periphery of my attention. Because now they were on my boat, a relatively safe place. And there were still people yet to arrive on my boat who were in more danger.
Or the woman who sat next to me on my port side sponson and leaned into the boat as far from the sea as she could, unconsciously gripping onto my leg as we dipped into wave troughs and rose out of them, a heavy sea spray sweeping over us on the way to the mothership.
Though intense, those were slow moments in the operation — when my emotions managed to sneak in and break the surface of my concentration, little lightning bolts of reality and scope. But it wasn’t the time, so I shoved them back down and shook out my clenched hands clawed onto the throttle and around the wheel and moved onto the next thing.
May 11th, 2025
I’ll say I’ll never forget the scream of betrayal of the person during the last rescue who drifted past our bow. Since he already had one of our horseshoe buoys, I decided to go to the two people in the water further away who were struggling to swim.
I looked directly into his face, filled with fear, and turned the boat away from him — and he screamed.
I know I did what I was supposed to do. I followed standard operating procedures. He had more flotation and was therefore probably safer, so I went to the others first. Everyone ended up safe and dry in the end.
But that scream was something I felt.
I’ll say I’ll never forget it, but I probably will. In the end, I’ll probably just remember how it felt when I heard it. Or how I feel now when I recall the idea of it.
In the end, everyone is at the center of their own universe. And maybe it’s foolish to think anything else is possible.
May 12th, 2025
It’s really hard to understand what happens in stressful situations on the RHIB. Life slows down and things become simple only because my boat can only go in one direction. The hard decisions take seconds at most, because it becomes about adapting — to mistakes, to the wind, to the power and height of the waves.
The stress is deferred because there are just too many things to do.
It manifests later when I’m exhausted after six hours behind the wheel in choppy conditions and I crawl into my bunk to try to take a nap and I just keep driving my boat in barely unconscious fever dreams.
I navigate through bodies of water filled with thrashing and reaching bodies.
I wake after a couple minutes and remind my clenched hands that they are in bed and not on a throttle or a wheel. I fall back asleep and my engine stops working and someone is clinging onto my propeller. I wake.
The slow roll of the ship rocks me back to sleep but drops me right back onto the helm of my RHIB surrounded by people floating in the water. It’s not even a nightmare. It just is. And there are things to be done. Throttles to be moved. Wheels to be spun so that I arrive where I am hopefully helpful.
And I wake up again. My hands blistered. My skin sunburnt. But everyone around me safe — for the time being.
I tell my crewmates about my dreams and they express concern. They call it trauma.
But it seems like the only reasonable response to an unreasonable situation in a fucked up world. So I just shrug.
May 13th, 2025
Apparently Jannis had asked me one of the first couple days on the ship why I was doing this. Why I was here on this ship in Europe. Apparently I had answered: “’Cuz I can’t do it at home.”
Apparently he thought that was really funny.
Main photo: Opening pic of rescue at sunrise by Stefano Belacchi
A Brief Guide for Context
What Is Sea-Watch?
Sea-Watch is a German nonprofit humanitarian organization founded in 2014 by a group of civilians who could no longer watch migrants drown in the Mediterranean without taking action. Since 2015, they have operated civil search-and-rescue (SAR) missions between North Africa and Southern Europe, primarily along the dangerous Central Mediterranean route between Libya and Italy.
Their fleet currently includes multiple ships, including the Sea-Watch 5, a 58-meter German-flagged offshore support vessel that joined active service in December 2023. Crewed by international volunteers like Richmond’s Mark Pryor, Sea-Watch 5 and her sister ships have collectively rescued tens of thousands of people fleeing war, poverty, and persecution.
Sea-Watch is politically and religiously independent and relies entirely on private donations. In addition to rescues, the group advocates for safe and legal routes to Europe and openly challenges the criminalization of rescue operations by EU member states. Their work is regularly obstructed by bureaucratic delays, detentions, and port closures—especially in Italy, where political hostility toward refugee arrivals has intensified.
Despite this, Sea-Watch continues its mission with the belief that no one should drown at Europe’s doorstep.
Learn more: sea-watch.org
What Is a RHIB Team?
A RHIB — or Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat — is a fast, lightweight rescue craft used in maritime search and rescue. On missions like Sea-Watch 5’s, RHIB teams are the frontline responders: launching from the mothership to reach boats in distress, distributing life jackets, and helping transfer people to safety. Each RHIB team usually includes a trained driver, rescue personnel, and sometimes a medic or translator. They’re the first human contact many refugees have after days or weeks at sea — often operating in rough, high-stakes conditions where every second counts.
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