Lost at sea (almost): Why five anglers will never see a summer storm the same way again
One of mankind's greatest mysteries is knowing when or where this great ride we call life will come to an end.
For many of us, we have no control over when our time is actually up. Often we don't see it coming.
No one gets out of here alive. That much is certain.
I was in one of those situations on June 17. Fishing offshore Stuart, I had a front row seat to one of the most valuable lessons anyone can learn: The sea does not care about you.
A weekend fishing trip turned into a moment where five of us questioned our survival. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it makes for a better story.
Mac Stuckey of Stuart invited Alex Gillen of Palm City, Richard Ratigan of Port St. Lucie and me to join him aboard Off the Chain fishing charters out of Sailfish Marina in Stuart. Stuckey entered us into a kingfish-dolphin-wahoo tournament hosted by the ARC of the Treasure Coast.
We had a good morning of action with Capt. Victor Ferrota, a young Palm City skipper and student at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Ferrota is making extra money running Capt. Scott Fawcett's second boat during the summer.
Ratigan had a kingfish, Gillen his first sailfish release and I added a sandbar shark release. By noon, we had added three undersized red grouper and released a trio of red snapper because NOAA Fisheries said we don't have enough of them in the Atlantic Ocean.
What happened next, you had to see to believe.
It was a little after noon, hot, calm and windless. But as Stuckey reeled in our third red grouper, it looked as if the sky had birthed a monster that was bearing right down on us.
Ferrota knew our options were limited. The storm crawled off the land 10 miles to our west and began to expand upward and outward as it pushed over warm water. Other storms around us prevented Ferrota from running away.
He steered the 31-foot Contender bow-first into the freshening wind — and told us to hang on. Within seconds, the air temperature went from 100 to 58 degrees. The wind, coming from the top of the storm some 60,000 feet above us, went from zero to 25 knots. The wall of rain was so dark and thick, we had a hard time telling where rain ended and the ocean began. The raindrops stung when they hit us. Cloud-to-water lightning snapped all around us.
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We wondered if the storm had a name or an eye. We wondered if these were the faces of the men with whom we were going to die. We wondered if Gillen, a parent for all of 10 weeks, would be able to celebrate his first Father's Day.
We only kind of half-joked about that one.
All kidding aside, Ferrota did a masterful job of keeping us safe during the maelstrom. The boat also had an EPIRB emergency locator beacon, so if anything went really wrong, we had that insurance.
It was all over in 20 minutes, but to watch the sea change the way it did gave me a healthy respect for how profoundly weather events affect mariners. We also benefited from being in a seaworthy boat. Calm summer days coax much smaller boats offshore into the potential danger zone.
We caught a few more fish for dinner after the storm. Then we high-tailed it back to Pirate's Cove to weigh Ratigan's kingfish. It won the category and $800.
My uncle, Bob Pelosi of Palm City, has a saying when he returns from a day of offshore fishing and is inside the St. Lucie Inlet's jetties. We laughed when I repeated it: "We survived another day in the Bermuda Triangle."
Ed Killer is a columnist with TCPalm. This is his opinion. Email him at ed.killer@tcpalm.com.
This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Lost at sea (almost): Storm scares boaters fishing offshore Stuart
