Posted on 05/01/2005 5:53:56 PM PDT by nuconvert
Teenagers Survive Six Days Lost at Sea
May 01, 2005
SOUTHPORT, N.C. — Two teenagers who had survived nearly a week at sea, clinging to a 14-foot Sunfish (search), prayed to go peacefully in the hours before they were discovered.
"I asked God to take me," 15-year-old Troy Driscoll (search) told The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier on Saturday night as he lay in the emergency room of Dosher Memorial Hospital (search). "You're out there fighting for your life. We didn't want to fight anymore."
Driscoll and 18-year-old Josh Long (search) were spotted by fishermen aboard the Renegade about 4:30 p.m. Saturday. The boys were about seven miles off Cape Fear — six days and more than 100 miles from where they had put in off Sullivans Island (search), S.C., on April 24.
The boys were sunburned, dehydrated, exhausted and beat up by their six days at sea on the small sailboat, but Coast Guard and other officials said they were in pretty good shape considering what they had been through.
"We were praying for a miracle and we got one," Charleston Coast Guard Cmdr. June Ryan said. "Everybody on the East Coast has been looking for these boys."
Their families had never lost hope of finding the two best friends.
"This is unreal," Long's older brother Jonathan Goerling told The Post and Courier as he drove toward North Carolina late Saturday to reunite with his brother.
Shane Coker said first he would hug his little brother Troy. "Then I'm gonna hit him and let him know how much he made us worry."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Your profile page is exactly right.
An exciting story. Yet I didn't even know they were missing.
Folks are reacting to the emotional appeal of the story, not the facts.
Very few people knew they were missing because the media was concentrating all its efforts on that dingbat from Duluth, Georgia.
Orange vests? radio/beacon/cell? flare? smoke? mirror/lasersignal? line? candy/water? sunshield?
You can buy vests that HOLD all that stuff, and more, totally waterproofed, adding a couple of pounds (less water) of weight, for decent prices.
Ignoring a NWS advisory? Out on the ocean?
Idiots.
Gotta agree, follow the glow at night and keep the rising sun at your back; paddling with hands should get both within the vicinity of landfall well short of 6 days. City kids; lucky as hell to be alive.
Ask Teddy, he knows the tides.
I guess you know that there is terrific tide flow between Chappaquidick and Martha's Vineyard in the spot where he is purported to have swam accross. And then waited until morning to notify the police, apparently.
One thing is for sure, if it wasn't slack tide, he ended up way downstream from where he started, short distance though it was.
The reports I heard stated they didn't bother to take their sail, just a couple of paddles -- they were just going fishing. And, there was a small craft wind advisory -- that small boat should have never been in the water with that alert. Very, very, very lucky.
These kids were lucky in more ways than one. The article at foxnews says they drank seawater to quench their thirst. They're lucky their kidneys didn't fail.
You are sh*tt*ng us, right? Those kids survived the sea in that?
Even with it being unsinkable, their survival is a major miracle.
Thank God for watching over them.
A family snapshot shows Troy Driscoll (left) and Josh Long after a less memorable fishing trip. (AP photo)
Manatees can swim against the tide-Theodore could have came ashore anywhere he chose to.
I guess the kids could have swam the boat ashore, and should have. I gather from the article that they were disoriented as to direction and distance, though, since they thought they were off the coast of Africa.
I was wondering if they were near an inlet or river mouth when they first were carried out to sea. No way to swim against those kinds of tides, but yeah, once they were north of it, swimming should have worked.
In the response about the manatee being able to swim against the current,I wasn't implying the kids should have been able to do that. I was calling Ted Kennedy a manatee in response to a post referring to his swimming abilities.
A picture in living, with Ted and a manatee side by side, would look like identical rwins.
Oh sorry to be so dense!
Yeah, Teddy does look like a manatee, only not as good.
LOL! No problem. Dense is relative....why I have relatives that are so dense, that.....Never mind, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging.
Just kidding-my relatives know who their dense relative is.
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