Posted on 03/04/2009 10:46:36 AM PST by Zakeet
As the Coast Guard ended its search for three missing football players whose boat tipped over in high Florida seas, the lone survivor said two of those lost gave up after hours in the frigid water and the third tried to swim to safety.
South Florida player Nick Schuyler told investigators that all four of the friends on a fishing excursion were initially wearing life vests and clinging to the 21-foot boat belonging to Oakland Raiders linebacker Marquis Cooper.
But two to four hours after the boat capsized, one of the NFL players removed his life jacket and let himself be swept out to sea, the St. Petersburg Times reported. A few hours later, the other one followed suit.
"We were told that Nick said the two NFL players took their life jackets off and drifted out to sea," said Bob Bleakley, whose son Will Bleakley, 25, is also still missing.
After Cooper, 26, and Corey Smith, 29, were carried away, Bleakley and Schuyler hung on until morning — but then Bleakley decided to swim to get help when he thought he saw a distant light, the paper said.
He, too, took his life vest off, 24-year-old Schuyler told the families.
"I think he was delusional to think he could swim someplace," the Times quoted Bob Bleakley as saying.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
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Bud Bundy, did you mean to pluralize "time"?
I haven’t read all the details but it sounded like their
problems started when trying to weigh anchor, they probably
did not have an anchor ball to raise it with.
One summer I was up in Peekskill NY. It was a very hot day, a friend and I went to this creek that is extremely cold in one spot. I went in. It was freezing. As I was in the water, I tried to acclimatize to it. It felt being warm and cold at the same time. I must have been in the water for about 15 mins and had no intentions of coming out. It's as if I wanted to conquer the feeling of being cold. I wasn't aware that I was mentally lowering my body temperature.
All of a sudden I hear my friend yelling at me to come out of the water. He sounded urgent. I thought that maybe the cops were arriving because I was in a fishing area. So I reluctantly came out. My friend told me that I was turning blue, it scared him.
If it weren't for him, I would have stayed in the water much longer. It took me a long time to defrost, get the chills out.
One can never assume what one would do when in extremely cold water. The mind works differently. I was very surprised how irrational I was. At least I could have walked to shore, while the three that lost their lives, couldn't. :(
I hate quitters.
Actually, not so much. I'm just not an ocean kind of guy. I generally try to stay away from places where I'm not at the top of the food chain. I think in the ocean, if you stop moving long enough even the little fish feed on you.
BTW, I took my wife out on Monterey Bay in a nice big Boston Whaler about 27 years ago. I figured "How hard can it be if the Squids can do it"? Then the tide came up, and brought in some (seemingly) big swells, and while I'm sure now that it was no big deal, at the time I was certain we were going to die.
I'm admittedly not a boat guy. Still, 21' seems a bit small. I think I'd rather select a boat that would withstand atypical non-glass smooth water than assume it's typically like glass. I don't care if my boat is unsinkable - I'm not.
I walked around on the Midway once and had the sense that even as big as it is, it's still just a hole in the water. I guess that's why, when all my friends joined the Navy, I joined the Army. I'm fine in the forest/desert/city with a gun, but out on the water..........
I was thinking the same thing, Especially with 4 large guys on it.
They needed a deep-V hull which that one doesn’t look like it has.
On Fox this morning they said the water temperature where the boat capsized was about 60F. OK for air temperature, but in water it will cause hypothermia.
Even the survivors of the USS Indianapolis, swimming for five days in tropical water, suffered from hypothermia. Of course, dehydration was a much bigger problem for them.
I fell through some ice once in very cold weather as well. Didn’t have that far to go to get to shelter and warm clothes, but it was still no fun. The worst part was when I tried to get back on the ice I fell from it started breaking. Somehow I was able to distribute enough of my weight over a large enough surface that I could get out of that water. I think I learned something from that little experience.
You can buy them for $500-$1200 depending on features.
That boat is not designed for that type of offshore use. A nice day of 2-3 footers would be reasonable for that platform. If there were a law requiring it (which I am against) this boat would probably not be included.
Well, I was in school for 8 years.
Don't be so fast to judge. If they were poor swimmers and drank a quart of seawater getting themselves on top of the overturned hull.... I'd say 4-6 hours would be about right for the insanity effects from ingesting saltwater to manifest itself.
See how easy that was? And you weren't even in cold water. :-)
Just kidding. Of course you fight. Never give up. But be careful before judging those who fight and fail. Everybody does have their breaking point. Everybody. IMHO.
I'm not a sea-faring guy by any stretch, but I've found myself in a couple of pretty dicey situations while hiking/camping in poor weather. One such situation wasn't in a terribly remote area, but involved a fellow hiker with a broken leg late on a winter afternoon in rapidly-falling temperatures. There were only two of us when the accident occurred, and we were on our way to meet another group of three hikers at a rendezvous point.
The forecast was for single-digit temperatures (air temperature, not wind chill!) that night, and the rescue took more than four hours . . . including the last half-mile when two of us dragged him across a frozen lake in the dark to a parking area where an ambulance picked him up.
I agree with everyone here about the importance of having the right mental attitude in a situation like this. Nobody among us panicked, though I came close at first when it was only the two of us . . . I almost kissed the feet of the other three hikers who came and found us an hour after we had failed to meet them at the rendezvous point.
But I'll tell y'all something else . . . Nothing makes your hair stand up more than the sense of urgency in the voice of a well-trained, seasoned forest ranger who (calmly) assesses a situation like this and informs everyone: "The sun's been down for two hours and it's going to be 8 degrees up here in these hills tonight, folks . . . we are all going to die if we don't get out of here quickly."
Holy sh!t.
“Continuously check the weather reports and stay home on snotty days.”
So true. Don’t know how many times I’ve canceled long planned trips at 10:00pm with supplies packed and loaded to head out at 4:00am because the weather forecast turned ugly.
Through tragedies, needs are met. there’s no way to mandate it but it would be a nice feature to install hand holds along the centerline of the hull. In situations like this, it would give those that made it back to the boat something real to hang onto while help, hopefully, arrives. Could save a few more lives.
Messages come delivered in strange wrappers sometimes. A story of challenge, extreme adversity to those considered the strongest. The results: two give up and succumb, another persists and persists but then foolishly swims away without a lifevest and the fourth, having seen the two give up to death, the third foolishly swim into certain death, hangs on and hangs on, never giving up. Heroism takes a strange shape, but he is a hero.
Your parallel to the current situation with our leaders is apt, and frightening.
Hang tough!
Swimming burns calories and maintains body heat much better than sitting in the water in a life vest.
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