Crews of HH-65-A Dolphin helicopters train for a variety of types of rescues at sea. Crews include specialists whose job it is to go into the water, even in heavy storms at night, and swim through the seas to secure victims to the rescue cable. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard.

Lt. Commander Tim Denby readily admits that life had been pretty easy as a member of the crew of a U.S. Coast Guard rescue helicopter -- before the fall of 2000.

Denby had been posted in Hawaii, and he said that search-and-rescue operations (SARs) had been "few and far between."

Then, he was transferred to the Coast Guard air station in Charleston, South Carolina.

And on Sept. 19, 2000, his life changed forever.

That night, around 10:30, the crew of his HH-65-A Dolphin helicopter was called to search for two fishermen who at that point had been missing for close to 36 hours, unaccounted for after a day's fishing off North Carolina's Cape Fear and its treacherous Frying Pan Shoals south of Wilmington -- made even more treacherous by the fact that remnants of Tropical Storm Dennis were pushing through the area.

After a 110-mile flight from his home base, Denby, who was a lieutenant at the time and was flying co-pilot on a four-man crew, was involved in an air-and-sea rescue that earned the entire crew commendation medals for heroism.

Eleven days later, another Coast Guard helicopter crew was called on to rescue the survivors of another offshore boating accident, this time hauling to safety three fishermen whose boat had been hit and sunk at night by a passing freighter. The members of that crew, led by Lt. Lance Belben, the pilot, and rescue swimmer Petty Officer Jason Mathers, received one of the Coast Guard's highest award, the Air Medal. The second rescue took place scant miles from the site of the first one.

"I'd been in Hawaii before I moved, and SAR flights out of Hawaii were few and far between," Denby said. "But there are a lot of them out of Savannah and Charleston. There is a lot more fishing -- a lot more commercial guys going out in bad weather.

"Since then, I've been on multiple SAR flights, but that was the first one of my career when I could really say that we had saved someone's life. It was pretty exciting. It was a pretty good SAR."

Michael Peeler of Randleman, North Carolina, felt pretty excited when he and his fishing buddy, Carl Kennedy of Asheboro, North Carolina, saw a blue light coming over the horizon toward the spot where they were clinging to the hull of Peeler's 19-foot fishing boat. In fact, they had been clinging to it for 36 hours, ever since it inexplicably began to fill with water while they were headed out toward Frying Pan Tower the previous morning to fish for king mackerel.

"It was about midnight, and it wasn't really cold, but we were sun-burned, and we had pulled our shirts up over our heads to keep the warmth in our bodies," said Peeler, who had bought his boat brand-new only a few weeks before. "We looked out and saw a blue light, and I thought it might be a tower or something, but we knew there was no tower around, and then we could see it moving.

"We had three flares on the boat, and we were down to our last flare, and we shot it. I didn't think they saw us, because it looked like they were going the other way, but they turned and started toward us. It was really great. When they sent that guy down out of the helicopter, he looked like Spiderman swinging along. We were thrilled to see 'em."

Denby, who is district avionics research manager for the Coast Guard in Miami, was just as thrilled when his crew noticed the bright, red flare coursing through the night sky.