got lost at sea Saturday night. Two of the men are current NFL players. The other two also played football at USF. The two NFLers are Corey Smith and Marquis Cooper. One of the two, not sure which, has a wife and small child. Both played at some point for the Bucs and still have roots in the area. Both of the USF guys are from the area.
They went out on Saturday on a 21 foot Everglades craft (that’s a brand name). It’s a center console fishing boat, not made for rough seas. Apparently Saturday started out beautiful, then quickly got treacherous. 2-4 seas became 5-7 foot seas and now I’m reading that they had 15 foot waves overnight. Not a good thing in that small a boat.
I’ve been out in the Gulf when the seas got rougher than we expected, and the engine died on our small diveboat. Not at all a fun situation. We survived it, getting a tow in from sight of shore.
It’s still not clear what happened in this case. Smith is an experienced boater and fisherman.
The “good news” is that they found the craft fairly recently; the bad news is that they only found one of the boaters, Nick Schuyler. William Bleakley, the other USF alumnus is still missing, as are Smith and Cooper as of this writing.
Not sure if this story has made much of a splash in national news, since none of these guys is a household name. Still a sad story, regardless of their background. I didn’t even know we got waves that big around here without a hurricane. Note that I’m out of town on a long business trip so didn’t get to experience the weather. I think it was tied to some of the weather blasting through the rest of the country.
One of the updates I read said that the craft had life preservers on board. I guess once Schuyler can give an account we’ll know if they had them on. Hanging onto an overturned boat in high seas for hours is a feat of endurance I hope none of us has to ever endure, with or without life vest.
It was a beautiful day Saturday but it was windy, all the news reports were warning that Sunday was going to be miserable. But I’m not near the beach so I don’t know what the water looked like.
It was Cooper’s boat, not Smith’s as I had earlier indicated. Also should add that one of my brothers in law is a retired Coastie. I have nothing but respect for those guys; they go out in conditions to save others that most sane people stay the hell away from.
I saw this as a small news article last night in the local paper (east coast of FL) online, it seems now CNN has been a bit more timely in the updates.
Just saw some more from Schuyler. Said he was wearing a vest and they’d been in the water since Saturday afternoon. They’d left Seminole boat ramp (which is between Clearwater and Dunedin, not in Seminole) about 6:30 am on Saturday.
I don’t know about the currents in that area, but I assume the water is warm (well, compared to Boston, anyway). “Big” and “small” take on a whole new meaning when you’re searching for a person in an ocean, but as long as there’s hope, you keep looking.
sadly the coast guard has called off the search. the one person they did rescue is not in the best state to interview, and has said that the 4 had separated sometime early in the morning on monday.
I’m eager to hear more of what happened. The circumstances seem very strange and very hushed so far. They went out and were anchored and supposedly capsized when they were trying to lift the anchor, that seems a little unusual to me. Also, I’m not really sure how they were separated. The fact that the survivor has been rescued for a couple days now and there still seems little clarity on how the other 3 guys ended up elsewhere. The whole thing seems quite odd.
From everything I’ve read it sounds like a mistake was made to stay out and tough it out. I’d have been puking my guts out in water that rough in such a small boat. If you’re not powering all the time you might also be pitching with the wave instead of headed perpendicular to them. Once they were flipped it seems that they did stay together for quite a while. I wouldn’t be surprised that their strength was sapped by the onset of hypothermia and dehydration, and they just sort of surrendered to the sea. They would have also been pretty much sleep deprived at that point and not necessarily making the most rational decisions.
Isn’t one of the common effects of hypothermia that people start taking off their lifejackets and clothes? Even if they were somewhat lucid, swimming in a lifejacket is cumbersome and I can easily understand someone scared thinking it would be easier to swim for it without one on. It’s a bad decision, but not really a strange one.
Anchoring in heavy seas will get you swamped or capsized. Very sad.
(I once had the worst nightmare of my life when I dreamed my husband died in a boating accident. Took me days to shake the horrible sadness and loss of that dream.)
WAG: They were going cuckoo due to the results of hypothermia. Remember that Asian motorist a couple of years ago in (WA? OR? CA?), who had started taking off his clothes while he was surrounded by snow. That was the speculation on why he had started stripping. His wife and child (children?) were later found reasonably OK still at their car.
Agreed. Some folks out there seem to making more of this case than meets the eye, but the lone survivor’s story is completely plausible. Given the conditions and water temperatures they were in, you can lose consciousness in as little as two hours. If the lone survivor was the only one on top of the hull as was pictured when rescued, the story makes perfect sense. If you stay in the water trying to hold on to the boat, you lose body heat about 30 times faster than the guy on top of the hull. Plus, if you don’t understand the above fact about heat loss, you may actually prefer to stay in the water if the air temperature is colder than the water. This storm was caused by a passing cold front, so nighttime air temps may have been pretty cold.
It’s a sad case, but there’s nothing strange about it.
In a few hours? In water that was about 70 degrees? The guys who was pulled out after 46 hours only had moderate hypothermia with a core temp of 89 degrees. If that story is accurate there’s no way it could have been a result of hypothermia.
