Not Without Hope

by Nick Schuyler

  Marquis got away a couple times, and Corey grabbed his life jacket to keep him from going under. He was very wild with his arms, his head lolling. He looked like a person who had been drinking for days—very incoherent, his eyes every which way, randomly dry-heaving. His mouth was kind of foaming. I was only a foot or two from him. He would turn around, and when I saw his face, I knew it wasn’t him.

  As Marquis deteriorated, we lost the cooler. We had it on the hull, and then it slipped and filled with water. “Do we need this cooler?” I asked. It was rough and hard to hold on to. Will said, “No, let it go.”

  Would the cooler help us if we lost the boat? Maybe, but it was too much work to keep it. It disappeared into the waves.

  Whenever I could, I called 9-1-1 on Corey’s iPhone. Still the same as before. CONNECTING…CONNECTING…CONNECTING…. It would just go on forever: dot, dot, dot. Then I got wiped out again and lost the Ziploc bag with Marquis’s and Corey’s phones inside. Now we had no way to try to communicate with our families or rescuers. But we had a bigger concern.

  I kept checking the front of the boat.

  “Still up,” Will would say. I don’t know if this was wishful thinking or what. Neither of us could see all the way to the front, just the highest point of the hull.

  We weren’t entirely confident. It seemed like it was getting a little lower in the water as the night went on.

  “Please stay up, please stay up,” we said. But I kept thinking about shipwrecks, and I wondered, “Why would this boat stay up?”

  Will and I started saying, “Let’s talk about this. We’ve got to start preparing for what happens if the boat goes under.”

  Corey got pissed. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said in a fierce voice, yelling above the hammering of the waves. “Once that boat goes under, we’re gone!”

  We kept talking. We had to have a plan. I said to Will: “No matter what, we need to stay on our backs, float with our heads in the air, and hold on to one another’s life jackets.”

  We didn’t have any other options, really. In these stormy waters, we could only cling to the boat like fleas on a rabid dog.

  I thought to myself that Corey was right. If this boat goes under, we’re done.

  MARQUIS WAS STILL, and mostly silent, in the water at the back of the boat, near Corey. Then he got this rowdy energy and started trying again to go where his feverish mind was telling him—under the boat to cut the anchor. I had climbed onto the hull now and held on to Marquis’s life jacket as he tried to pull away.

  Corey grabbed his jacket, too.

  “Don’t let go of that jacket,” I screamed at Corey. “Don’t let him get away.”

  Corey yelled, “Coop, what are you doing?”

  We tried to explain to him: We cut the anchor already. We cut the rope. I had thrown my leg over the outboard and straddled it. I was facing away from the bow now, the propeller jutting up near my face. We struggled with Marquis, me pulling him and Corey pushing, and finally we hoisted him out of the water and into my lap. I put my feet under a trim tab or the swim platform. That way I could brace myself while I held Marquis.

  He kept fighting and fighting, slurring his words, making random sounds. He would gag and cough and dry-heave. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to hold him, but he was using his strength against me. I had to use every muscle in my body, from my toes to my back to my arms, to keep him under control.

  I knew this wasn’t Marquis. Uhhhh, ohhhh, was all he could manage to say. We were yelling, “Get it together, Coop. Come on. You’re gonna see Rebekah soon. You’ll see Delaney soon.”

  I was straddling the motor and he was laying perpendicular to me, his head under my left armpit, his lower back under my right arm. I bear-hugged him, clamping on him like the shoulder restraints on a roller coaster. We were stomach to stomach, almost navel to navel. The harder he fought to do whatever he thought he had to do, the harder I squeezed down on him. He would calm down for a time. Then a bad wave would hit and slam his back against the motor, and that would set him off again.

  This seemed to go on for an hour. By now it was clear that Marquis was hallucinating. He must have said it twenty times: “I’ve got to get under the boat, got to get the anchor, got to cut the line.” He wriggled and struggled against my grip, trying to get away. If he fell off the boat, all of us grabbed him and flipped him back on.

  Marquis also kept trying to take off his life jacket. It was hiked up tight around his neck from the way I was pushing against him. It must have felt like it was choking him. He would get it halfway off, and we would pull it back on and make it tighter.

  Will was at the back of the boat, to the right of the motor, holding on to it with his left hand while holding on to Marquis’s life jacket with his right. Marquis continued to let out a random moan every couple of minutes, five seconds at a time, low pitch to high. He would fight for ten or fifteen seconds and then lay there. The more he fought, the more I clamped down. At times he would wriggle away for a few seconds. He was strong as hell. I slapped him across the face a half dozen times, saying “Coop, Coop—get it together!” trying to wake him up, trying to make him aware.

  Will and I kept working together. We noticed that Corey had begun to slump a little, too. He was wearing his black wind jacket and wind pants, but he was sinking lower off the back of the boat, down and down until he was in the water up to his chest. Earlier, he had been out of the water, standing on a trim tab. Now he was sinking, still holding on to the back of the boat, but floundering, getting quieter, shivering. He would mutter, and then he would let out a loud, random scream. I jumped a couple of times.

  Earlier, Corey was more vocal and impatient with Marquis. At one point he yelled, “Come on, Coop, why are you doing this?”

  “It’s not him,” I said. “Stop.”

  Corey thought Marquis had lost it mentally, but it was so far past that. I was beginning to think he was in God’s hands.

  I had short white socks and sneakers on, but my feet were hurting so bad, a sharp, sharp pain. I had kept doing my little calisthenics, trying to move my arms and legs to keep the blood flowing, but now my feet were killing me. My big toes were flexed upward, straining under the trim tab or the swim platform, trying to balance myself while I clutched Marquis in my lap. They were frozen numb.

  Oh my God, I’ve got frostbite, I kept telling myself.

  I’ve had numb feet from icing my ankles in football and basketball, but this was much worse. Because my big toes were pointed up and all the blood was in one spot, and they were so cold. It was a mixture of a dead numbness and sharp pain. I could barely move them. I kept thinking, If I get out of this, I’m going to lose my frickin’ toes or both my feet.

  A couple times, Marquis came off the boat. It just couldn’t be helped. A wave would crash on the bow, but since I was facing the other way I couldn’t see it coming, and I would smash my balls against the motor. Everything was tender in the salt water. My skin was pruny. I could feel that my legs were cut up, tender and sore. So many times we screamed out in pain as we were bashed against the boat or slammed up against the motor. Will cut his hands. I had on cotton gloves—they were too small; I think they were my mother’s—and the fingers were starting to rip. I gashed my hand on the propeller.

  As I held Marquis, I kept my right leg up in the air a little higher so I could press his legs closer to my body. I was holding 215 pounds, and my shoulders, lower abs, groin, and hip flexor were on fire. It felt like I had a hernia; my leg felt locked and useless.

  I kept telling Will, “You gotta help me, he’s frickin’ strong. I don’t know how long I can do this.”

  It was one of the worst workouts I had been through times a hundred. We had been awake for twenty-four hours and in the water for almost twelve hours. It was like we had gone through a twelve-hour workout without anything to eat or drink, just nonstop. There weren’t two minutes to relax. Will and I were working together, our conversations shorter, most all of them f
ocused on Marquis.

  After an hour of fighting for ten or fifteen or twenty seconds at a time, Marquis began to slow down. It was close to five o’clock in the morning. Now the struggle would be short, one short strain, a moan, and that was it. He wasn’t trying to move or wriggle so hard anymore. I was able to save some energy. And holding him so close, I became warmer—or at least I didn’t get any colder. I was sitting mostly out of the water, and my winter jacket, sweatshirt, and sweatpants were soaked. But the clothes kind of suctioned to my skin and seemed to give me a little warmth. Which was lucky. The water was the roughest it had been—the cold front was whipping up a storm. The waves were pounding, and it was getting windier. Will and I kept shaking Marquis, saying, “Hold on, hold on, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be light soon. They’ll find us.”

  For the most part, we were able to stay on the boat. Will stood to the right of the motor where he could hold himself up on the swim platform and the trim tab and the little ladder. Corey, though, had begun to struggle more and more. He was completely in the water now, dangling from the back of the boat, his life jacket holding his head and upper body above water. When I could hear him, it sounded like he was blowing bubbles. He was quiet, just, brrrrrr, and then it was like he got a big chill: all of a sudden he’d let out a scream, and it would be amplified times a thousand. The waves were nailing him against the boat. When he lost his grip, he would struggle to swim back to the stern or he’d grab my foot or Will’s hand, and we’d pull him back. It was agony.

  Marquis was growing limp. He would slide down from my grasp, and I had to keep adjusting him. I was trying to lean back a little and keep him pressed against me so that his back wouldn’t hit against the motor. I held him as my legs were cramping and my shins were burning. Holding on with my toes put constant pressure on my shins, like a real bad shin splint.

  Waves continued blind-siding us from behind, pitching us forward and into the motor. Marquis would revive and try to get away. His eyes were moving side to side, rolling back in his head. He continued to foam at the mouth. It was almost completely dark, but there was enough light to see his face. He wasn’t responding, but I kept trying to reassure him, even if I wasn’t sure I believed it myself: “Marquis, don’t worry. You’re gonna see Rebekah and Delaney soon. You’re gonna be fine. The girls called the Coast Guard. They’ll be here soon.”

  Paula Oliveira, Nick Schuyler’s girlfriend, was away at a dance competition all day Saturday in Lakeland, Florida. She got home about nine thirty or ten at night, fell asleep, and woke up about 12:30 or 1:00 A.M. It was now Sunday, March 1. Nick wasn’t home. Mildly concerned, Paula called his cell phone number. It went right to voice mail. Next she tried Will’s phone. It rang once and then also went to voice mail.

  At 1:27 the Coast Guard station in St. Petersburg, Florida, received notification that a twenty-one-foot Everglades model fishing boat was overdue. The caller was Brian Miller, a friend of Marquis Cooper’s. Miller had spoken to Rebekah Cooper, Marquis’s wife. He told the Coast Guard that the boat had departed the Seminole Boat Ramp in Clearwater, apparently headed to fish at a dive wreck fifty nautical miles west of Clearwater Pass. Cooper, the owner, had just rebuilt the motor, the caller said. And he had very little maritime experience. The caller said mistakenly that there were two other passengers on board, and that they had no maritime experience.

  Cooper’s vehicle was described as a 2004 silver Chevrolet Silverado with a lifted suspension and a twenty-one-foot, double-axle trailer. The Coast Guard station made multiple calls on VHF Channel Sixteen—the international distress frequency—for the overdue vessel but got negative results. That far offshore, Cooper’s boat was outside of the range of the Coast Guard’s communications towers.

  The St. Petersburg Coast Guard station handles thirteen hundred to fourteen hundred search-and-rescue cases each year. Its sector extends along Florida’s Gulf Coast from seventy miles southeast of Tallahassee to the Everglades. A call that someone was overdue did not immediately result in the sending out of rescue craft. There was a checklist of questions that must first be asked and answered:

  Where were the boaters headed? When were they expected back? What was their normal routine? Did they go far offshore? Stay close?

  “It’s not unusual for us to go to the boat ramp, and they could be back having dinner or having a couple drinks in a bar somewhere and having never bothered to call the wife and say, ‘We’re stopping off,’” said Captain Timothy M. Close, commander of the St. Petersburg Coast Guard sector.

  Four officers were on watch in the Coast Guard station, one monitoring communications, three in the adjacent command center that contained television screens and maps of the Gulf Coast. The St. Petersburg station contacted the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department. It requested that a deputy be sent to the Seminole Boat Ramp to see if Cooper’s Silverado was still parked there. The sheriff’s department contacted the Clearwater Police Department. At 1:58 a police officer arrived at the ramp, found the truck and trailer, and forwarded the license tag: U565ED. He was asked to leave a note for Cooper, asking him to call the Coast Guard office in St. Petersburg.

  Every fifteen minutes, the Coast Guard kept making calls on the international distress frequency. Each call brought no reply. Coast Guard officials began to obtain cell phone numbers for the men reportedly on the overdue boat. The corresponding phone companies were contacted. One number belonged to a Sprint caller. The Coast Guard asked Sprint for the phone’s GPS position. A check was made and it was determined that the number belonged to a land line, not a cell phone.

  A request was made for a Coast Guard C-130 Hercules turboprop aircraft. It would fly directly over the dive wreck area where the boat was supposed to be fishing. It was to make a search along a series of parallel tracks that would cover an area twenty miles by thirty miles.

  It was also recommended that a forty-seven-foot motor lifeboat be sent due west of Clearwater Pass. The motor lifeboats were designed originally for heavy surf on the West Coast, Captain Close said, and were self-righting, meaning they could roll over and pop back upright. They were meant to handle gale force seas in daylight or darkness and were the safest boat the Coast Guard had for such conditions. Two coxswains were requested to navigate the boat in such roiling waters.

  At 2:37, seventy minutes after the Everglades boat had been declared overdue, the case was upgraded from alert to distress.

  “The weather was bad and that ratcheted it up from the start,” Captain Close said. “They had never been this late before. Sometimes they fished near shore at dark, but they had never stayed out after dark that far before. At that point, no one had come in contact with these guys since they left. It was coming up on twenty hours. They always called. They had cell phones. They had gone out fifty miles before and now it was windy, with rough seas. The water temperature was sixty-fourish. We were very concerned about that.”

  If the overdue boaters had been tossed into the Gulf, they would have become susceptible to swallowing large amounts of seawater. This could lead to a poisonous imbalance of sodium in the blood, the leaching of water from cells, and eventually delirium, seizures, a heart attack, and ultimately death from dehydration.

  In the water, the boaters would also have quickly become susceptible to hypothermia as their body temperatures dropped below 95 degrees. Blood vessels in the arms and legs would begin constricting, rerouting blood to the body’s core to protect the heart, lungs, and brain with sufficient heat. Shivering would progress to clumsiness of the hands, quick and shallow breathing, blue lips, confusion, slurred speech, and irrational and confrontational behavior.

  Ironically, the younger and fitter a person was, the more he might be vulnerable to hypothermia, with less body fat to provide insulation from the cold. According to a military survival guide, an average twenty-five-year-old man, immersed in water that was 65 degrees, could be expected to remain functional for 9.9 hours and to survive for 15 hours. By contrast, a fifty-year-old ma
n, likely with more body fat for insulation, could be expected to remain functional for 11.6 hours and to survive for 17.6 hours.

  “Someone in their twenties is probably going to be in the best shape of their life,” said Lieutenant Bruno Baltazar, chief of the command center at the St. Petersburg Coast Guard station. “But having more muscle is going to weigh you down. You’re going to have less flotation, which means you’re going to have to tread water a lot harder to stay afloat. Someone older is going to have a little more insulation. Not only are you conserving some of that heat, but you’re also able to float a little better.

  “That’s one of the downsides of being in great shape. Especially with someone who plays football, endurance isn’t your best bet. It’s a sport where you have short stints of rapid movement and then you come to a stop. When you have to tread water for hours on end, that’s where having stamina and longevity would come in.”

  In some cases, incoherent victims of hypothermia began removing their clothes. The phenomenon was not precisely understood. According to one theory, paralysis of nerves in the blood vessels led them to dilate and begin to fill, thus creating a sense of warmth in victims. According to another theory, as the muscles that constricted the blood vessels began to tire, the vessels relaxed and widened, again creating a sense of warmth. Victims then began to shed their clothes, a phenomenon known as paradoxical undressing, which only hastened the dropping of the core body temperature.

  “It represents the last effort of the victim and is followed almost immediately by unconsciousness and death,” according to a 1979 study published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

  German scientists, writing in the International Journal of Legal Medicine in 1995, had also detected a phenomenon in which victims in the final stages of hypothermia exhibited a primitive burrowing-type behavior in order to protect themselves. The behavior was similar to that of hibernating animals, and could lead victims to crawl under beds or into closets indoors or to tunnel into piles of leaves or culverts outdoors. The behavior was known as terminal burrowing.