Army Spc. Jace Spivey, left, and Sgt. Daniel Koster tow a disabled sailboat to its pier off the coast of Honolulu, Hawaii, Sept. 26, 2024. The mariners are assigned to 8th Special Troops Battalion, 8th Theater Sustainment Command. (U.S. Army)
Three off-duty Navy sailors stranded in a ramshackle sailboat off Hawaii’s coast last month got help from an improbable source: three soldiers in an Army speed boat.
The fluky role-reversal came after the Army crew responded to a Coast Guard call for assistance to a distress call Sept. 26 from a vessel a few miles off Honolulu.
As it happened, Sgt. Daniel Koster, the vessel master, and his crew of two were training aboard a 30-foot high-speed boat that can be operated remotely while pulling targets during live-fire drills.
The Army crew had stopped to tinker with an engine problem when they heard the Coast Guard’s radio message about a disabled vessel, Koster said by phone Monday.
“I decided to ask for the coordinates, and I put them into our GPS, and it turned out it was like three miles away,” said Koster, who is assigned to the 8th Special Troops Battalion, 8th Theater Sustainment Command, and works out of Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
The Army is not generally associated with seafaring, but the service has maintained fleets of various sizes since World War II. It now has about 70 watercraft for transporting equipment and troops for exercises and disaster relief.
Koster said he and his crew felt some initial hesitation to take on the distress call. He had only a week earlier completed the Army course qualifying him to command a small boat.
“So, it was my first time actually taking a crew out on the water on these boats,” he said.
“We kind of looked at each other, like, yeah, I guess we’re trained for this. You know, there’s an impulse to think, oh, I can’t help in a real emergency. I just do training stuff. But then we thought to ourselves, yeah, we can do things; we’re capable. So, we answered the Coast Guard and said we would go and try to help,” Koster said.
Arriving at the scene, the soldiers found a “rickety old sailboat with a torn sail,” he said. Its engine had either failed or lacked the power to handle the considerable sea chop that day.
Four men were aboard, one of whom was likely the owner, and “three Navy guys” in tight blue T-shirts, Koster said.
“That’s the de facto uniform for off-duty Navy,” he said with a laugh.
Exactly what the sailors were doing on the shaky sailboat wasn’t clear, but Koster suspects the trio was considering a purchase.
The soldiers tethered a line to the disabled sailboat and headed for the harbor “nice and slow and easy,” Koster said.
“The sea was quite rough – big waves – so we just took it real easy and dragged them into Ala Wai Harbor,” he said. The harbor abuts Waikiki Beach and Magic Island.
Koster credits his crew for their finesse during the “tense situation” of guiding the sailboat hulk “right between two rows of million-dollar yachts” in the harbor.
Spc. Nathanial Breaux, an Army watercraft operator with 8th Battalion, maneuvered the crippled boat into its berth.
“Coming through the marina with that much wind was nerve wracking,” Breaux said in an Oct. 2 Army article about the rescue.
“The whole time it was just constant adjusting the throttle trying to tug them back in line with us to miss the boats on either side,” he said.
As it turned out, the sailors were senior chief petty officers in the Navy, Koster said.
“You help because it’s the right thing to do,” Koster said. “But then, also, you never know who you might be helping.”
