Ten Hours until Dawn: The True Story of Heroism and Tragedy aboard the Can Do
About this audiobook
During the height of the blizzard of 1978, a tanker foundered on the shoals off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard dispatched a patrol boat that was soon in trouble, too.
A pilot-boat captain, Frank Quirk, heard of the Coast Guard’s plight on his radio. He gathered his crew of four, readied his forty-nine-foot steel boat, the Can Do, and entered the maelstrom of the blizzard soon to be known as the Storm of the Century.
Encountering one of the most monstrous seas ever recorded, Quirk struggled through the night to keep his boat from sinking, maintaining contact through his hand-held battery-powered radio. The Can Do stayed afloat past three a.m. Then there was silence.
Through dozens of interviews as well as recordings of the radio communications exchanged between Quirk and the Coast Guard—actual recordings included here in this audiobook—Michael J. Tougias provides us a devastating, true account of bravery and death at sea.
About the author
Michael J. Tougias is the author of many true rescue stories for young readers and adults, including the New York Times bestselling The Finest Hours: The True Story of a Heroic Sea Rescue; A Storm Too Soon: A Remarkable True Survival Story in 80-Foot Seas; and Into the Blizzard: Heroism at Sea During the Great Blizzard of 1978. A frequent lecturer at schools, colleges, and libraries, Tougias divides his time between Massachusetts and Florida.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto... with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.
