Not Without Hope

by Nick Schuyler

  “No way in hell I’m falling off this boat now,” I said.

  I didn’t know that stuff was in the Gulf. I knew they were in deep water. I knew that when we were fishing the water was 150 feet deep, but here I had no idea: 200-plus feet? 75 feet? I figured it was deep, because I knew the deeper the water, the bigger the waves.

  “How do they eat?” I asked Will. “Can they kill us?”

  “I think they have beaks,” he said.

  “Do they sting like jellyfish?” I wanted to know.

  It must have stayed under the boat two hours. We bear-hugged each other on the motor, but we did fall off a few times. The squid was behind us, more toward the front of the boat. It was freaky. I would fall in and get right back up. Before, we would sometimes sit in the water to regroup. Now I was scrambling to get right back on the boat. If Will lingered in the water, I would scream at him, “What are you doing? Get out of there!”

  At one point, it came within about five feet of us.

  “What can it possibly be doing under there?” I asked Will. “Is it getting the fish we caught? Our bait? Is it in the cooler? Is it waiting for us to fall in?”

  Sometimes we wouldn’t see it. We thought it was gone and then it would come back again.

  “I can’t believe that thing is still here,” I said.

  The waves were still kicking. A little less than fifteen feet, about thirteen. The random stuff was gone. They were consistent swells now. And, finally, the squid was gone, too. We never saw it again.

  ONCE WE WERE sure it was no longer beneath the boat, Will took off his life jacket and dived under, looking for cell phones, food—anything that might help us. I told him to be careful. We were bleeding a lot. He would hold on as best he could, wait until the waves were right, take a deep breath, and dive under the boat. Sometimes he judged the wave wrong, got nailed, and came right back up, his mouth full of water. Then he made it under and opened the storage bin, now above the steering wheel. He came up holding my backpack, which contained our cell phones and a pair of my sandals.

  I grabbed Will’s cell phone, but it was waterlogged and didn’t work. I had a water-resistant and shock-resistant phone, a construction type, because I had been through so many of them. I thought it had zero chance of working, but it turned on right away.

  Here’s another shot, I thought to myself. I got no reception bars, but I dialed 9-1-1 anyway. connecting, it read. connecting and dot, dot, dot. Same as before.

  “I don’t fucking get it,” I said. So much for 9-1-1. A little bit of hope had been shot right back down again.

  I sent out a text to Paula, my mother, and my sister: “We’re alive, find us.”

  no service. send when service available? it said. I clicked yes.

  I would put it away and try again a few minutes later. Still no service. Nothing.

  THE NIKE BACKPACK was black, a LeBron James model, L23. He and I were the same age, from the same state. He was from Akron, I was from Chardon. In high school, he was first team All-State; I was third team. We had that in common. We both graduated in 2003. I didn’t so much look up to him as keep watch on him. Just small talk, like, “You see what LeBron put up last night?” Every week, they would run the scoring averages of the top players in the state, and he would be near the top or at the top, and I would be in the middle of the list somewhere. You always saw his name on TV and in the paper. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. It was cool because he was an hour away. I remember one big newspaper article, a whole page, and it had some of his features. He was 6 feet 7 inches, 220 or 230, with freak-of-nature speed, strong hands, a muscular build. I knew he was awesome. They talked about him being the next Michael Jordan. He was good in football, too. He was like an All-State receiver as a sophomore. We wanted to play them, but it never worked out.

  When he got drafted by the Cavaliers, I became a big fan. He’s a humble guy. His idol was his mother. We were alike in that way, too. She worked extra hours or extra jobs just to make sure food was on the table. His mother was his best friend. She always put him first. She never missed a game. She reminded me of my mom.

  THE BOAT SEEMED a little lower in the water, and we kept wondering whether there was anything we could use for flotation if it eventually sank. I remembered the week before, when Corey asked Marquis if he had any life jackets on the boat. “Yeah, we got life jackets,” Marquis had said. “This entire boat is a life jacket.”

  The sides of the boat were cushioned. You could lean your thighs against the sides when you fished. It wasn’t soft like a pillow, but it was soft leather. Marquis also said the cushions came off the two seats in the back of the boat. Will went under again, but came up empty-handed.

  “It’s not coming off,” he said.

  He tried a second time, and after he seemed to be under a good ten seconds, he kind of ripped off one of the seat cushions. He swam to the back of the boat and handed it to me. The cushion had little grooved panels on it.

  “This’ll work,” I said.

  Will seemed exhausted. He had been holding his breath, fighting the waves and the current to get under the boat. He seemed to use all his strength to get that cushion loose. When he came up, I could hear him gasping for breath. It was like he was seconds away from drowning or had run a bunch of sprints. He was spitting water from his mouth. We hadn’t talked about taking turns under the boat. He was the better swimmer, and he had been under the day before, so he knew what everything looked like.

  I found an immediate use for the cushion. I put it between my crotch and the motor. I would take a hit from a wave and slam forward, and there was almost no pain. It was like having a protective cup in football. When I smashed up against the engine, at least now it was tolerable.

  “God, that’s so much better,” I told Will. He was so amazing to think of others ahead of himself.

  IN EARLY AFTERNOON, a giant Coast Guard plane flew directly over us. It was orange and white and seemed bigger and fatter than a 747. And it seemed to be flying slow. It came from behind us and it seemed so close that I could almost throw a baseball that high. If I had a flare, I felt like I would have hit the plane.

  We swung our life jackets again. We knew the plane couldn’t stop like a helicopter and hover. We knew that it wouldn’t drop anything for us. But we were excited: “We got it, we got it!” we hollered. “They found us! This is it!”

  We yelled, “Thank you, God!” We were just hoping they had marked our exact location, our precise longitude and latitude. We knew they saw us. Or we hoped they did. Surely, they would send someone back to pick us up. Then we saw nothing for probably two hours. That was a complete buzzkill. Here was our chance to get out of it. Two out of four of us, anyway. And now, nothing.

  “They had to see us,” I said to Will. “There’s no way they couldn’t see us.”

  The plane had flown straight for a long distance. It didn’t change directions. Maybe the pilots were distracted at that particular moment they flew over us, I thought grimly. Maybe one of the Coast Guards was going to the bathroom or not looking down. They’ll probably head back to shore now to refuel, I thought. I was pissed.

  We had been in the water almost twenty-four hours. At this point, we were both feeling defenseless, feeling like we were just waiting to die. Neither of us said it out loud, but we both felt like there was nothing more for us to do. We really just had to sit there and wait.

  “Please, God,” I said. “I’ll do anything. Please, God.”

  A while later, as we crested a wave, Will said, “Is that land over there?”

  We went back and forth.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We kept talking. We had been awake for almost thirty-six hours. We were cold and starving. Were we hallucinating, too?

  “I don’t know if I’m frickin’ losing it or what,” I said to Will.

  “Dude,” he said. “I think that’s land.”

  It was about midafternoon. We kept looking, trying to convince ourselves th
at we weren’t imagining this. We went back and forth for ten minutes. We rode up one wave, then another, trying to stand slightly off the hull to get a view from higher up. It looked like some taller buildings, maybe off of a beach. They appeared to be seven or eight miles away. They were tall, rectangular buildings, or almost like big drums or a water tower. Cylinder-shaped.

  The Coast Guard would later say that it was highly unlikely that we saw land. Maybe it was a passing freighter or cargo ship. At that moment, though, desperate for hope, after ten minutes of going back and forth, we decided it was land. Now, what were we going to do about it?

  “Dude, do we take a chance on it?” Will said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how far that is.”

  “Well, it’s at least five miles,” he said. “If we’re drifting toward that way, if we can swim a couple miles per hour, we’ll be there before it’s dark.”

  I wasn’t concerned that Will was too tired after diving under the boat again. He was a terrific swimmer. And we were desperate.

  For another half hour we debated whether to swim for it. We hadn’t seen a plane in a while. The sun never really poked out. If we stayed with the boat, maybe things would get worse than they already were. The waves were straight swells, one after another. We were able to stay on the boat for the most part. Every twenty minutes or so, a random wave would come and knock us off. But it was much better than before.

  Finally, Will said, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I asked again about sharks.

  “Do you think sharks can get us?” I asked Will.

  “I don’t think so, no,” he said.

  I knew there were sharks out there. We had caught some on our trip. Small ones, but they were still sharks.

  I asked him about the blood from our legs. We were bleeding from being tossed around so much and banging ourselves on the motor. I could see blood on the boat. Will only had his swimsuit on and a T-shirt under his life jacket. His legs were bleeding. I knew it was a possibility that could attract sharks. You always hear about that stuff.

  “It’s too rough,” Will said. “They’re not going to come up this high.”

  That made sense. I dropped it from my mind.

  But there was something else to worry about. If we tried to swim, how would we stay together in the water?

  I got an idea. There was a black wire connected to the motor. The steering cable, I guessed. I thought it connected to the helm. I started pulling it. It took all my strength, but I yanked it through the keel six inches at a time and tore one end free. Then I cut the other end off, slicing it on the propeller. It had lots of little wires inside. It seemed similar to the wire used for cable TV.

  The cable was stiff. You could tie a knot, but it wasn’t very tight. The wire was probably ten feet long, about as thick as a pen or a pretzel rod.

  We could tie the cable between us, I told Will.

  “That way we won’t lose each other,” I said.

  We decided to make a run for it.

  I tied one end of the wire to my life jacket, and Will tied the other end to his. We kind of slid into the water and started to go. I grabbed the cushion that was shielding me from the motor and asked Will, “Do I bring this thing?”

  Sure, he said. I tried it under my stomach for a few minutes, riding it like a Boogie board, but it wasn’t buoyant enough. Waves would hit me from behind and I would go under. Or I couldn’t hold my head up.

  “Should I get rid of this?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Will said. “It’s up to you.”

  I didn’t really have a choice. It was holding me back. I couldn’t hold it, swim, and kick at the same time. I let go of the cushion and it slowly floated away. We kind of floated on our backs in our life jackets, but I was still feeling sluggish.

  We were pretty close to each other, about five feet, kind of kicking, but not moving at all. We would go all the way up the wave and all the way back down, but we weren’t going forward.

  “Hold on a sec,” I said.

  My sneakers were weighing me down. I took them off. They were Nike Shoxx, with copper-colored heels. The week before, I had worn my good sneakers on Marquis’s boat, but we hauled up so many fish on deck, my shoes got all bloody. I was pissed. I had just gotten them the month before for my birthday. I got the stains out, but I wasn’t risking it again. This time, I wore an old pair. I kind of leaned back in the water and took one shoe off, then the other. One floated on top for a few moments, the other hovered just under the surface.

  I took off my sweatpants, too. That was a mistake. Immediately I felt colder. I still had my orange winter jacket and sweatshirt on, but all I had on my legs now were my swim trunks. They were bright yellow, with a tropical print, a white-and-yellow flower.

  In the open water, it was impossible to judge whether we were making any leeway. It didn’t seem so. We continued to swim on our backs for a good five or ten minutes, but we weren’t more than fifty yards from the boat. We weren’t moving closer to anything, especially to the land I couldn’t see anymore, or what we thought was land.

  “Will, this isn’t working,” I said, frustrated.

  “No, it’s not,” Will said.

  I was hoping we could almost ride the waves toward shore, but the current seemed to be pulling us farther out to sea. The boat was kind of following us. We were big guys, and the life jackets weren’t holding us up real well. They were rising up, almost choking us. It was uncomfortable. And the steering wire wasn’t working, either. If we got more than a few feet from each other, one guy would get pulled back or ripped down or his life jacket would get yanked up.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked Will.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Neither one of us wanted to abandon the plan, but we didn’t have much of a choice.

  “We need to go back to the boat,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  It took us a good ten minutes or so to get back to the boat. We kicked and kicked but hardly seemed to move. Eventually, finally, we climbed back onto the hull. We were exhausted and mad. We had just had the worst swim ever, and now I didn’t have my shoes or sweatpants. I was barefoot. My feet were white and pruned. With no shoes, I had to watch were I was stepping now. Trying to climb back onto the boat, I cut my foot on a piece of metal. I grabbed my sandals from my backpack and put them on.

  I looked at the inside of my legs. They were brittle and had gashes. Blood was dripping down. Everything on my legs felt like an exposed nerve. All my bones hurt. My knees were killing me. My shins were bad, my ankles were bad. My lower back was shot. My right hip still hurt so bad from holding Marquis. I could use it, but I knew something was wrong.

  We thought we had a good opportunity by swimming for it. We didn’t want to sit there and wait and die on that boat. We weren’t going to give up, even if we had to swim ten miles to get discovered. But in that amount of water, with those waves, you can get turned around real quick. I got in place next to the motor and for a few minutes, I didn’t think about the cushion that I had let float away. Then a wave nailed us, and my crotch took another hit. I was in excruciating pain and thought, Why did I let that cushion go? For what?

  Will bear-hugged me from behind. It was midafternoon. I could feel him shaking.

  Three cutters had been docked at the St. Petersburg Coast Guard station. Not all were operational. The Hawk’s engines were stripped down in the middle of a scheduled maintenance period. The Alligator was still being outfitted and had not yet been commissioned. The Crocodile, an eighty-seven-foot coastal patrol boat, was dispatched early on Sunday morning, but it had no more luck finding the missing Everglades boat than did the motor lifeboat, the C-130s, and the Jayhawk helicopters.

  “It was a lousy ride” in whitecapped seas that reached fourteen feet, Captain Timothy Close, commander of the St. Petersburg Coast Guard station, said of the Crocodile. “By the end of the day
on Sunday, the senior officer said, ‘We’re good for a two-hundred-yard-wide swath. Beyond that we’re not effective. You can’t really see anything.’ We were like, ‘You’re done. Come back in.’”

  All told, the Coast Guard would have two hundred personnel involved in forty-eight separate search patterns for the missing boaters by planes, jets, helicopters, and ships. No more than a period of twenty minutes passed without someone actively searching, Captain Close said. Eventually, the searches would total 24,000 square miles. Many of the searches were overlapping tracks that concentrated on a grid 60 miles offshore and 100 miles north and south of the original spot where the boaters were believed to have gone fishing.

  At one thirty on Sunday afternoon, Captain Close had called his boss in Miami and said, “The weather’s bad; I need a bigger cutter.”

  The Tornado, a 179-foot cutter, was patrolling the Florida Straits between Key West and Cuba. Its normal mission was to disrupt illegal immigration and drug trafficking. Since it was already under way, the Tornado could get north to Tampa faster than a cutter that was tied up in Key West and might be thirty hours from reaching the search area.

  “We weren’t going to send the motor lifeboat out again,” Captain Close said. “It was terrible weather. We needed larger stuff.”

  As Marcia and Kristen Schuyler traveled toward St. Petersburg from Fort Myers, they crossed the enormous Sunshine Skyway Bridge that stands more than four hundred feet tall and traverses Tampa Bay. Usually, the view was spectacular for miles, but it had begun to rain and there were whitecaps in the bay.

  “Oh my God, look at those waves,” Marcia Schuyler said to her daughter, who had begun to get extremely scared. Through the afternoon, Marcia kept crying and saying, “I can’t lose your brother.”