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On March 22, 1990, local fishermen Hokey Hokanson and his teenage son, Billy, set sail for Cape Cod in the Sol e Mar. When disaster struck three days later, Billy transmitted a brief, heavily garbled radio distress call. A hoax call immediately followed Billy's cry for help, and believing that the two were connected, the U.S. Coast Guard did not launch rescue units for several days. The Hokansons' deaths prompted a new anti-hoax law and changed United States Coast Guard search and rescue procedures. Historian Captain W. Russ Webster, U.S. Coast Guard (Ret.), and journalist Elizabeth B. Webster chronicle the fascinating story of the Sol e Mar and its crew and explain the psychology of hoax callers and Coast Guard technological advancements since the tragedy.
About the author
Captain W. Russell Webster, USCG (Retired), is the former Coast Guard Group Woods Hole commander and a coast guard historian who writes and lectures on historical and contemporary rescue cases. This is his third book. He has co-authored The Pendleton Disaster off Cape Cod: The Greatest Small Boat Rescue in Coast Guard History, and the children's version of that iconic 1952 mission: The Daring Coast Guard Rescue of the Pendleton Crew, with Theresa Mitchell Barbo. Elizabeth Webster has been a freelance journalist for more than thirty years for Maine's three major newspapers: the Bangor Daily News, the Lewiston Sun Journal and the Portland Press Herald. This book is her first book.
