Not Without Hope (17 page)

The Coast Guard cutter
Tornado
had been on routine patrol in the Florida Straits, off the coast of Cuba, operating on one engine in quiet seas, nothing pressing on a Sunday afternoon. Its primary mission generally involved law enforcement: restricting the flow of illegal aliens and drugs and preventing illegal fishing, while also checking commercial and recreational vessels for safety compliance. At 2:40 in the afternoon on March 1, though, Lieutenant Commander Patrick Peschka received a change of orders. The
Tornado
was to divert 230 miles northward to assist in a search-and-rescue operation off the coast of Tampa–St. Petersburg.

Many in the crew learned of the new mission from the Internet, said Adam Best, a gunner’s mate third class who also served as the
Tornado
’s emergency medical technician.

“We had been diverted to St. Pete; that’s all we knew,” Best said. “Then, on the Internet, we saw that the Coast Guard was looking for four missing football players. That’s
where we were headed, so we figured that must be what we were going to do.”

Three of the
Tornado
’s four engines were operational, and the cutter picked up speed to twenty-three or twenty-four knots, heading east of the Dry Tortugas. Lieutenant Commander Peschka knew there was bad weather up in the Gulf. He checked the forecast and knew it was a matter of time before the
Tornado
started feeling the affects of the storm. After about ninety minutes, the winds had increased from ten to fifteen miles an hour. By late Sunday afternoon, the wind was blowing twenty to twenty-five miles an hour and the seas were starting to build. Swells rose from three feet to eight feet and the
Tornado
was forced to reduce its speed to ten to twelve knots.

Between midnight and two on Monday morning, the weather got worse. The
Tornado
had to back off its speed a little more. Maximum winds built to thirty-five miles an hour, with twelve-foot swells. Even aboard a ship that was 179 feet long, some of the crew began to get seasick, said Michael Briner, the chief boatswain’s mate. “You are literally holding on so you don’t get thrown around,” Briner said.

Some of the crew had a trick for trying to sleep in rough seas. They placed their boots under their mattresses, forming an incline on their twenty-four-inch-wide beds. The incline rolled them toward the walls of the narrow bunks.

David Earles, a boatswain’s mate second class, awakened at one point to the sound of a fire hose rolling around the deck. The waves had become so powerful that an ammunition box three feet high and three feet wide was ripped away from the twelve half-inch bolts that anchored
it to the bow. Best, the gunner’s mate, awakened Monday morning to find the box missing.

“It tore pieces of the boat apart,” Briner, the chief boatswain’s mate, said of the storm. “Some of the metal parts on board were bent from the waves coming on. There were things we had to weld together afterward.”

By three or four on Monday morning, the weather began to improve. By seven o’clock, the
Tornado
had come through the bulk of the storm. Swells still rose to six feet, though, as the cutter began its initial search at 7:45. The search opened in a westerly direction for eight to ten miles, took a northerly turn of a quarter mile to a mile for spacing. and then proceeded in a straight line creep in an easterly direction. It was the equivalent of starting in the end zone of a football field, moving up to the five-yard line, going all the way across to the sideline, edging up to the ten and then going back across the field in the opposite direction.

Usually, there were three lookouts on the bridge, scanning forward, starboard, and port. It would not be easy to spot the hull of a capsized twenty-one-foot boat or a person who sat on the boat or floated in the water. Whitecaps could be indistinguishable from the hull. And plenty of debris floated in open water, everything from milk jugs to old rafts to refrigerators, which could complicate a search. It wasn’t the same as standing on flat land and looking into the distance, or peering from a car on the Interstate. On a ship, both the terrain and the vessel were moving. Searching on the water could feel like searching in an off-road vehicle, everything bucking and shaking and the horizon unsteady.

On a flat, calm day, a beach ball might be visible on
the water miles and miles away, Lieutenant Commander Peschka said. But that same beach ball may not be visible one hundred yards off the ship if it kept disappearing in the trough of a wave or the light was too harsh or flat or the ball’s color became indistinguishable from the color of the sea.

The Coast Guard was not really afraid that Marquis Cooper’s boat would sink entirely if it had overturned, said Captain Timothy Close, commander of the St. Petersburg Coast Guard sector. Everglades model boats were built with a system called the Rapid Molded Core Assembly Process, or RAMCAP. This process bonded the hull, deck, and structural core together under extreme pressure in a way meant to keep the boat afloat even in the harshest seas. On conventional fiberglass boats, foam was injected or sprayed between the deck and hull to create buoyancy. In the RAMCAP system, a premolded, high-density, closed-cell urethane core was chemically bonded to the hull. The chemical bonding formed pockets, or cells, of air that were like closed bubbles. Think of it like Styrofoam, Captain Close said, a closed-cell product that does not absorb water, compared with a sponge or a foamy seat cushion, open-celled items that do absorb water. Even if Cooper’s boat was still afloat though, it could be extremely difficult to spot.

While peering through binoculars, Coast Guard crewmen were taught to move their eyes in a repeating S shape, over and down, over and down. Without binoculars, they also moved their eyes back and forth, like the carriage of a typewriter. Lookouts generally started from the horizon and worked their way toward the boat. They were taught to vary their methods, sometimes starting at the
bow and working toward the horizon so their eyes wouldn’t become tired and strained.

“That old saying about seeing the forest for the trees, well, in a search on the water, the detail you’re trying to get down to is seeing an individual branch,” said Lieutenant Commander Peschka, who was thirty-seven. “Trying to find Nick was not like looking at a tree but at a branch.”

Chief Boatswain’s Mate Michael Briner, who was thirty-nine, used the dozen windows on the bridge of the
Tornado
to help frame his searches. He started at the waterline, or just above or below it, divided a window into sections, and began his scan, sweeping his eyes left to right. Even with sophisticated technology, there was no more valuable equipment in the Coast Guard than the human eye.

“What I’ve always been taught is, electronics fail when you need them,” Briner said. “That’s why we need the people out there. They make the difference.”

He knew from his sixteen years in the Coast Guard that objects were more quickly located with peripheral vision than direct staring. Twice Briner had been involved in rescues. Eleven or twelve years earlier, off of Florida’s Atlantic coast, he had spotted two divers who had been in the water, away from their boat, for three days. In 2006 a family on a small boat ran out of gas fifty yards from the shoreline of Lake Superior, only to be blown back out into the lake. After an initial search failed to locate the family, Briner and Coast Guard colleagues initiated a second search and found the boaters after they had been stranded for eight hours.

On this Monday morning, he had stood watch on the
Tornado
from midnight to four, gone to sleep, and awakened
at nine thirty. In late morning, he went up to the bridge with a cup of coffee to see the daylight and stretch his legs. Three lookouts were on duty, and Briner joined them in scanning the water. Coast Guardsmen are taught that anytime they are on the bridge, they are to look out the windows, whether they are on duty or not. Even on a cigarette break, they are expected to lend an extra set of eyes.

At 11:43 in the morning, about thirty-eight miles west of Tampa, Briner saw a speck of orange and a white wave that didn’t go away. The water was rough and the waves would come and go, but this one did not break and disappear. That’s an odd place for a buoy, Briner thought to himself. And then he realized that there were no buoys out here.

“I’ve got something,” Briner said to the others on the bridge.

Briner hurried to the window, locking on the object, which was about five hundred yards off the starboard side. If anyone got in his path, he was prepared to shove them out of the way.

“A basketball in the water, that’s about as much as you saw,” he said.

He leaned into the window, steadying himself, and kept his eyes locked while feeling around for a pair of binoculars.

“Hey, I’ve got a person,” Briner said.

Everything got quiet and others on the bridge scrambled for binoculars, confirming what he had seen: “We’ve got someone alive.”

Everything was in motion now on the
Tornado
with a sense of excitement and urgency.

“I find it very amazing we found him,” Lieutenant Commander Peschka said. “But Nick did the right thing, wearing bright colors, sitting on the back of the boat.”

Even so, Briner said, “If he would have been on a different crest of a wave, we would have gone right by him.”

A general alarm sounded, along with instructions to prepare the cutter’s twenty-three-foot rescue boat for launch. The boat was a hybrid, with a rigid, fiberglass hull and an inflatable collar. David Earles, the
Tornado
’s rescue swimmer, was in the mess hall, having just finished lunch. He hurried to the bridge and was told that a person had been found in the water. He went aft and slipped into a short-sleeved wetsuit and a harness with a rope attached. Within a couple of minutes, two stern doors opened on the
Tornado
, and its rescue boat slid down a ramp into the water.

As a four-man crew sped toward the overturned boat, the man on the hull kept disappearing behind a wave, then reappearing. The coxswain, crew members, and rescue swimmer stood as tall as they could to keep the man in their sights. The man was sitting with his head down, shoulders slouched, holding on to the motor. He wore gloves, an orange life jacket, an orange winter jacket, and a sweatshirt, its hood pulled over his head.

Earles, who was twenty-five, had been in the Coast Guard less than two years and had never been called upon to make a water rescue. He never expected to on this search-and-rescue mission, either. Surely, he thought, the missing boaters would be spotted and hoisted out of the water by a helicopter.

The rescuers pulled alongside the man with the intent of grabbing him off the capsized boat. But the seas were six feet, whitecapped, and rough, and the rescuers backed off.

“Are you all right?” Earles asked.

The man said he was.

“Anybody with you?”

There were three others, the man said. They were gone.

The Coast Guard was searching for four men and a twenty-one-foot boat. This had to be one of those four. Earles looked at the man’s feet. He had a wrinkled look, like he had been in the bathtub way too long.

Before jumping in the water, Earles told the man, “Don’t move, I’m coming to you.”

He was ten yards away from the man.

“Can I swim to you?” the man asked.

“No,” Earles said. “I’m coming to you.”

The man started to move, so Earles said, “Lower yourself in the water.”

He reached the man, handed him a flotation device, and told him to float on his back. A crew member on the rescue boat began to reel them in using the rope attached to Earles’s harness.

“Relax,” Earles said. “I’ve got you.”

Twelve minutes had elapsed from the time the man was spotted by Briner until he was aboard the rescue boat.

O
h my God, thank you,” I kept saying when I saw the life raft coming toward me. I could barely keep my eyes open. But I started to get more feeling back in my body, like I was coming back to life. I started feeling cold again, and my butt was hurting. The guy yelled, “Stay right there, we’ll come to you,” but I was thinking hell no, I’m not waiting. I pretended not to hear. I didn’t care. I had been sitting on that boat so long, I was getting in the damn water. They would have had to hit me with a stun gun to keep me from going in. I was getting ready to swim to the big boat.

The guy reached me and I said “Thank you.” If I said it once, I said it a hundred times. He handed me a red float like you see on
Baywatch.

His left arm was under my left armpit and around my chest. He was swimming for both of us. I had nothing. They were reeling us in like fish. He asked if I had any injuries.

“My ass,” I told him.

I kept saying, “Thank you.” I could barely talk.

They grabbed my life jacket and pulled me out of the water. Once they got me higher up, they grabbed my swimsuit. I didn’t
think I could be in any more pain than I had already been in. But the guy gave me the world’s worst wedgie. I flopped in the boat and screamed. They kept asking, “What’s wrong with your butt?”

“I don’t know,” I kept telling them.

They asked me about the others.

“They’re gone,” I said. “There are no others.”

My eyes were pretty much shut. I had experienced so many different feelings in those forty-three hours in the water. Now I had a different feeling, relief and guilt at the same time. Why am I alive? Why am I going to make it out of this? Why was I found and saved and my best friend and two other friends didn’t make it? I kept wishing there was at least another person in the rescue boat with me.

It seemed like we got back to the big boat in two minutes. I was laying on my back. “You’re going to be okay,” one guy said. “You’re strong. It’s a miracle.”

I was so weak, I could hardly walk. Two guys held up 90 percent of my body weight. My feet were swollen. It felt like I was walking on clogs, an inch of rubber. They told me to hold on to the railing. We walked toward the middle of the boat. “We’re going to get you inside,” someone said. The boat was rocking so far up and down. Two guys held me. I looked down and there was blood on my feet and ankles.

“I’m so cold,” I kept saying.

“We’re gonna get you inside into some warm clothes,” the guy said.

My legs were useless. I had to take little strides. It felt like the muscles were just hanging off my hamstrings and my butt cheeks.

“I’m so thirsty,” I kept saying.