If it was an accident, their cardinal sin appears to have been not staying with the boat. Hard to know why even at 14 they didn’t know to do that?
“If it was an accident, their cardinal sin appears to have been not staying with the boat. Hard to know why even at 14 they didn’t know to do that?”
If they were thrown out of the boat in a storm it may have been impossible for them to get back to the boat.
When they capsized the seas were incredible plus they couldn’t barely see their hands in front of their face due to the stinging rain.
The boat overturned and they probably didn’t have a chance to grab on to a slippery surface before the current took them.
Not like your on a lake and some idiot stands up on the edge of the boat and all of a sudden your in the water, but all’s calm and there isn’t a problem
They were daredevils and that was a sick storm, the temp dropped and the winds picked up like crazy, I was working on my car, sunny and calm one minute and the next all hell broke loose.
Wrong place, wrong time.
What happened to these kids is horrible, but their fate will serve as a lesson to others and will save lives in the future.
In the gulf stream current if you get even a few yards apart you may not be able to swim back. The boat and the swimmers would be affected differently.
They did know that. Anyone that does boating in that environment knows that.
I took it as immediate evidence that we would not be hearing from them again.
“...their cardinal sin appears to have been not staying with the boat. Hard to know why even at 14 they didn’t know to do that?”
From what I’ve learned that was likely not possible. They went into a thunderstorm in an open-bow, low freeboard vessel. Their vessel swamped, rolled and broke. They apparently did not even have the opportunity, or foresight, to don their life jackets.
Their cardinal sin was going into a strong thunderstorm in a low-freeboard, open boat ensuring they’d be swamped. That is suicide in my book.
FL thunderstorms can be quite violent with 7’+ chop and gale force winds. Without a cabin a swamped vessel in such conditions is lethal to anyone around it. Keyword: swamped. A swamped boat is a totally different animal.