TEN HOURS UNTIL DAWN
By Michael Tougias
St. Martin’s Press (NYP)

Mike Tougias’ TEN HOURS UNTIL DAWN is an astonishing character-driven story of heroism and an unforgettable portrait of the determination of the human spirit. During the height of the Blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals in Salem Sound, off the Massachusetts coast.  The Coast Guard immediately dispatched a patrol boat.  Within an hour the Coast Guard boat, battered by 20-foot seas, was in as much trouble as the tanker.  Pilot boat captain Frank Quirk was monitoring the Coast Guard efforts by radio and decided to act.  He gathered his crew of four, readied his 49-foot steel boat, the Can Do, and entered the maelstrom of the blizzard.  While the Blizzard of ’78 became known as the “Storm of the Century,” with hurricane force winds and record snowfall, the harrowing rescue mission of the Can Do has been all but forgotten.  But Quirk and his crew encountered some of the most monstrous seas ever recorded, and during that terrible night they went from being potential rescuers to the ones who needed rescuing.  At 1 a.m. the Can Do’s main radio died, and Quirk maintained radio contact with a local ham radio operator using his hand-held battery-powered radio.  We know that the Can Do stayed afloat past 3 a.m.  Then there was silence.  When dawn broke – with snow still falling at an inch an hour and winds clocked at 80 mph – the Can Do was gone.   (All of these events were recorded on a 5-hour tape of the radio communications, which Tougias has used in his research.)  

Tougias makes the reader care about the people involved and then builds the story as the blizzard is building in intensity.   He has interviewed all the key surviving players.  With the aid of the crew’s own words on the tape, this book will be a terrifying and compelling read in the tradition of such best-selling sea stories as Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, Linda Greenlaw’s  The Hungry Ocean, Nathaniel Philbrick’s In The Heart of the Sea, Peter Maas’s The Terrible Hours, and Spike Walker’s Coming Back Alive.  

Mike Tougias is the author of 15 books and a syndicated newspaper columnist, whose latest book The Blizzard of ’78 reached the Boston Globe’s bestseller list.  He is also the co-author of King Philip’s War, a perennial best seller for Countryman Press/W.W. Norton, and the host of “Exploring New England” on New England Cable News. Tougias’s There’s a Porcupine in My Outhouse won Best Nature Book of 2003 (Independent Publishers Association).

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