Not Without Hope (3 page)

We played on a couple of rec softball teams together, and we won every year. Will would go four for five with four home runs. In high school, he once hit a four-hundred-foot grand slam in a playoff game. The ball lodged in a pine tree and they started calling it Bleakley’s Tree. “He didn’t get named Will for nothing,” Brent Hall, his high school coach, said. “He had the most will out of anybody I’ve ever met.”

We played in a couple of volleyball leagues together and won a title in one of those, too. We got big into tailgating after football was done. We’d get to the stadium at eleven in the morning for a night game and play this game called cornhole, tossing bean bags through a hole cut into rectangular boxes—sort of like parking lot horseshoes. Will was unbeatable at that, too.

Friday night, as we got ready for the fishing trip, Will was like a kid on Christmas Eve. We made a dozen peanut-butter-and-jelly and turkey-and-cheese sandwiches on white bread, and wrapped them in foil. We had peanuts, pretzels, chips, water, thirty beers each for me, Will, and Marquis.

I had texted Marquis on Friday: “It’s your last weekend. Don’t worry. Corey doesn’t drink. If worse comes to worst, he can drive the boat. We’re bringing it all. We’re gonna get rowdy.”

“Make sure you buy me at least six Coronas,” he replied.

I guess it was something about Corona and bottles and the beach and the water. He also wanted six crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

“We’ll see,” Marquis said about letting Corey drive the boat. He didn’t sound too convinced that it was a good idea.

Friday night, Will sat on his couch in my living room, making his sandwiches on the coffee table.

“Who do Marquis and Corey play for?” he wanted to know. “What positions do they play? Are they cool?”

Sure, I told him.

“How far out we going?”

This was really our first time fishing together.

“Seventy miles,” I said.

“I’ve never been out that far.”

“It’s great,” I told him. “You literally drop the hook and yank it a couple of times and you catch a fish.”

Will had fished mostly inland or near the coastline. As he told stories about what he had caught, he seemed to Paula to be speaking a different language.

She kept joking with him.

“It’s going to be so boring, so cold,” she told Will.

He wasn’t buying it.

“Paula, you just don’t get it,” he said. “I haven’t done this in such a long time.”

I went to bed at ten. Will still had the TV on. He was too geared up to turn in. He drank a rum and Coke and thought that might help him shut his eyes.

My sister, Kristen, also stayed at my house Friday night. She was running a 5K race Saturday morning and had driven up from Fort Myers. She took Will’s room, and Will took a sofa in the living room. She got up at two in the morning to go to the bathroom, and Will still had the TV on.

“You should go to bed,” Kristen told him.

“I can’t,” Will said. “I’m so excited.”

W
E AWOKE AT
four—I had cereal and a protein bar—and we headed out the door fifteen or twenty minutes later. We loaded Will’s truck with our gear, a cooler, grocery bags, and beer, and headed out for Marquis’s house a half hour away.

Kristen got up at about the same time for her race. As we headed out the door, Kristen said, “Have fun, see you later. Love you.” She told me that if she did well in her race, I’d have to go see her run the next one.

Corey arrived at Marquis’s house five minutes before we did. I introduced Will to everyone. We were all tired, pretty quiet. Marquis had already hitched the boat and trailer to his Chevy Silverado pickup with its lifted suspension and oversize tires.

Marquis must have had fifty fishing rods, and from his garage he chose ten of them as carefully as a chef chooses his carving knives. He stood in the boat as we handed him the beer, food, and drinks. There was a pair of twenty-gallon coolers aboard, one in front of the center console, which held mostly beer, drinking water, and ice. A second cooler, located under the bench-shaped captain’s chair, was filled with water, Gatorade, sandwiches, and protein bars. Both coolers were secured by bungee cords.

Into a storage area in the center console, we loaded a case of beer, paper towels, toilet paper, chips, and pretzels. Will handed me his cell phone and his wallet. I placed them in my backpack along with my phone and wallet, and tossed the backpack into the storage compartment where the life jackets were kept.

Before six, we were on our way. Marquis played rap music in his truck, not too loud, but loud enough that we had to talk over it. We stopped to gas up the boat. Marquis got a breakfast burrito, or something just as nasty, took a couple bites, and threw it away. By six twenty-one, we were at the Seminole Boat Ramp in Clearwater.

The weather was cool, and we were bundled up. I had my jacket, sweatshirt, and sweatpants on. Will wore a green wind jacket and wind pants from USF’s appearance in the PapaJohns.com Bowl in 2006. Corey had on a black wind jacket and wind pants. Marquis wore purple wind pants from the University of Washington and a heavier black winter jacket.

Marquis had been monitoring the weather. A couple days ear
lier he had said that a cold front was approaching and that the water might get rough. If it did, we might cut our trip short. He said it again this morning: “I’m not sure if we’ll go all the way out.”

Everyone went to the bathroom at the marina. Will asked what we would do if we felt the urge while at sea. I told him what Marquis had told me a week earlier: “Hang over the side and hope the sharks don’t bite your ass.”

Corey and Marquis put their wallets, cell phones, and keys into a Ziploc bag. Marquis stored the bag in a compartment in the roof of the canopy, near the radio. He had a digital camera in the bag, too, which contained pictures from our previous trip. I showed them to Will and told Marquis for a second time to send me the pictures. We had become good friends, but I had no photos of him and me together.

A couple of minutes after we set off, Marquis, Will, and I cracked the first beer of the day. “Let’s get this party rolling,” I said.

Stu Schuyler, Nick’s father, had awakened early in nearby Tarpon Springs, where he owned a painting business. He had gone back to sleep, then climbed out of bed again at seven. He turned on the television and saw that a forceful upper air disturbance was approaching the southeastern United States from the northwest. He had seen Corey and Nick two days earlier at the gym and they told him they were headed to the same spot they had fished the previous weekend.

About seven fifteen, Stu grabbed his cell phone.

“Nick, if you get this message, head back early,” Stu said. “A big storm’s coming in.”

His call went directly to voice mail.

O
beying no-wake zones along the Intracoastal Waterway, we made our way slowly under the four-lane Causeway Bridge and the Gulf Boulevard Bridge into Clearwater Pass, which separates Clearwater Beach from the barrier island of Sand Key. To our right rose a series of white, pink, and coral residential towers. We could also see the blue-gray façade of Shephard’s Beach Resort, with its beach bar and all-you-can-eat crab buffet. A vacant area was the former site of the Spyglass Hotel. Seven months earlier, Criss Angel had performed the illusion of surviving the hotel’s implosion while shackled to a balcony. To our left was a ninety-five-acre park and beach along Sand Key. About a thousand yards ahead lay the open Gulf.

Before heading into open water, we stopped near a buoy to load up on bait fish. This was one of Marquis’s hot spots. We dropped lures with five hooks, and within a few moments the lures seemed to be quivering with fish. It was windy; you could smell the salt air. Pelicans and seagulls hovered around the boat. “Who’s winning the fish race now?” I bragged, as I kept count of the bait fish.

In a half hour, I had caught more than thirty of the tiny fish
that would be the lure for much larger grouper, snapper, and amberjacks.

“I’m fine here,” I joked. “Why do we have to leave?”

Everyone was laughing and having a good time.

About seven thirty, with our bait tank stocked, we entered the Gulf. A week earlier, Marquis drove about thirty-five miles an hour to the shipwreck site. Today it was choppy, and he had to slow down. We kept switching spots on the boat, trying to get comfortable as we bounced up and down. Will and I sat on the front cooler, but it felt like my brain was slapping against the top of my head. I tried to drink the beer I’d popped open, but the water was too rough: it foamed and spilled everywhere. We moved to the back of the boat, sitting on chairs on either side of the outboard motor, but water from the bait well splashed us, so we had to cover it with a towel. I felt the pounding in my butt and my back. I decided it would be better to stand and absorb the hammering with my legs.

We stopped five or six times on the way to the wreck site to drop a line or pee or grab a sandwich or just to take a break from the pounding. The sky looked like puffs of gray cotton balls. The seas ran about five or six feet, and the waves seemed to come randomly from all directions. You constantly had to grab on to something. If you weren’t careful, you’d probably fly off. We struggled with the anchor. It wouldn’t catch, or we wouldn’t drop it properly, so we drifted downwind, and Marquis grew frustrated trying to position the boat near the schools that appeared on his fish finder.

Someone had warned me to take Dramamine to prevent sea-sickness, saying, “Once you get sick, you don’t get better.” Since I hadn’t gotten sick the week before, I ignored them. Today was another story. Oh, shit, I thought to myself. I started feeling dizzy and warm, and my mouth got dry. I stopped eating the salted sunflower seeds we had brought along. I poured out my second beer. We had cases of the stuff, but nobody would be doing much drinking in
this weather. I began spitting a lot. My stomach was turning. I knew it was going to be a long day. Marquis had already warned us, “If you get sick, too bad, I ain’t turning around.”

About eleven thirty in the morning, we reached our primary fishing spot, seventy-five miles west of Clearwater. The water was 150 feet deep at this point. Supposedly there was a shipwreck that served as an alluring artificial reef.

Will caught the first fish, a red snapper. He and Marquis seemed to attract snapper, grouper, and amberjack like a magnet attracts iron filings. We caught a few small lemon sharks. Marquis cut two of them open—I guess it was a way to preserve them for the trip home—and both times baby sharks spilled out.

W
ILL AND
I told Marquis and Corey that we wanted to take them camping at some point. We explained how you go hunting and wake up with beer and eggs in front of the fire, clean up, and drink some more. Marquis started laughing.

“Okay, all right, I’m good,” he said, though he didn’t think that his wife, Rebekah, would come along.

Corey had his doubts about sleeping in the woods.

“I like my bed,” he said. “I don’t like bugs.”

The waves began to settle in—still choppy, but not as random. They struck the boat with quick jolts, and it rocked from side to side. I took a wide stance—there was cushioning along the sides of the boat to help brace myself. But I kept having to take a break from fishing. I got more and more nauseous. The guys began to tease me.

“Suck it up.”

“You better not be getting sick.”

And when their admonitions failed, they said, “Dude, you don’t look good.”

Then I vomited. Everything came up: cereal and peanut butter and jelly and bread and pretzels—it was orange, thick, and sandy. Will began laughing hysterically.

We would drop two lines each. One pole, the bigger one, we dropped all the way to the bottom and let it sit five feet above the sea floor. The other line, we would drop to the bottom, reel it twice and yank it, reel it twice and yank it. We probably caught seventy or eighty fish; sometimes, you’d have four or five fish flopping on the deck, and Marquis warned us to put our shoes on to protect our feet. Once, I threw up with a fish on my line and had to hand my rod to Will so he could haul it in. I lay down on the deck, across the bow.

“Nick, get up and fish, bitch,” Marquis said. “Don’t be a pussy!”

I was too sick to respond.

Later I sat on the captain’s bench, shaded by the canopy. It started to get windy, and I put my sweatshirt on, then looked for my orange winter jacket. Someone had moved it from the front cooler; it sat in a puddle of water, so I tried to dry it out by draping it over the cooler. I kept trying to eat because I was really hungry and thought that getting food in my stomach might help my headache. I munched on some peanuts and a sandwich, but I couldn’t hold anything down, not even water.

“You look like shit,” Corey said.

About four o’clock I put my jacket on, even though it was still damp. Already I had on sweatpants, gloves, a skullcap, my Nike Shoxx, everything I had brought. The chop had turned to seven-foot swells. I felt dry but very sick. We were beaten up, ready to call it a day, and started groaning about how long it would take to get back to shore. It had taken four hours, with stops, to reach the site. Now the seas were bigger. At four fifteen, Marquis told Will, “Reel your line in, that’s the last fish. It’s getting bad. We should head in. It’s gonna take a long time to get back.”

M
ARQUIS WAS DRIVING
. I was sitting next to him on the captain’s bench. We were probably a hundred yards downwind from the spot where the anchor sat. Marquis maneuvered the boat over the anchor, and Will began to pull up on the line. The anchor didn’t budge, though. It stayed put on the bottom. Corey went to the bow and began to help. But even a 265-pound defensive end could not budge the anchor. Marquis shifted the boat to various positions for a half hour, circling the anchor as Will and Corey pulled the line from one direction, then another. They kept yanking, two big, strong, fit men, but the anchor remained stuck.

Marquis grew frustrated. The same thing had happened on our trip the week before—we couldn’t raise the anchor. Finally, a friend of Marquis’s who was fishing with us decided to cut the line. Then Marquis spent two hundred bucks buying a new anchor and rope. Now he was pissed.

“I’m not losing another fucking anchor,” he said.

I sat with my head down, feeling awful, in no condition to help anybody. Will had an idea. We could tie the line to the back of the boat, gun the motor, and try to yank the anchor out that way. No one else had a better suggestion, so Will undid the one-inch line from the bow and tied it to a cleat on the stern. The anchor would come loose or the line would snap, Will told Marquis. If worse came to worst, we could drag whatever snagged the anchor until it came free.

Who knows what it was caught on: the shipwreck, a cable, some sort of debris. It could have been anything. There was no way to tell. Maybe it was stuck in the muck 150 feet along the bottom.

It wasn’t like anyone had been pounding beers all day—not in this weather. Corey didn’t drink. I had a beer and a half but had puked it all up. Will had had seven or eight; Marquis, five or six, in a period of ten hours. Everyone seemed pretty clearheaded.

“Might as well try,” Marquis said of Will’s idea.

As the boat rocked, Corey stood just behind me at the center console, in a wide stance, holding on to the canopy. Will stood at the back, where he had tied the anchor line. Marquis pulled the line tight and gunned the motor. It made this high-pitched sound, like a motorcycle taking off, and then a low rumbling sound, like the engine had flooded or stalled.

“Whoa!” Will said two or three times to Marquis, cautioning him not to push too hard on the throttle. He didn’t get to say it again.

The blades of the anchor must have dug in more instead of coming loose. The stern squatted down, and water began to pour in; the bow raised toward the sky, and the boat began to list toward the port side.

“Get to the top!” Marquis yelled. We tried to run to the starboard side but it was too late. It all happened so quickly. There was no chance to make a Mayday call on the radio. I was sitting on the captain’s bench, and I took one step and grabbed the hand railing on the starboard side of the boat. As it rolled upward, I catapulted myself into the water.

All I saw was open sea just before I went under. It was so cold. I was a little afraid, but I also felt the urge to laugh. For a moment, it seemed funny, the same feeling I used to get when I fell off a Jet Ski. Like “Oh shit!” and you kind of laugh and swim to it and flip it over and get back on. But this wasn’t a Jet Ski. It was a 3,400-pound boat, more than a ton and a half. The last time I had flipped a Jet Ski, I was in high school, riding near the shoreline of Lake Erie. I wasn’t in seven-foot swells in the Gulf of Mexico.

I had finally gotten dry on the boat, and now I was in the water—and it was so cold it was shocking. I was weak and tired, having thrown up my breakfast and everything else I had eaten and drunk, but my endorphins kicked in. Now I didn’t seem so
nauseous anymore. I was wide awake, frightened, and very alert.

We all came up to the surface at the left of the boat, within a few feet of one another. No one had a life jacket on. Our first reaction was to swim to the boat, which was completely upside down, the white hull and the propeller sticking out of the water. Hundreds—thousands—of bubbles were coming up to the surface with the release of air from below. It was like someone had dropped a giant Alka-Seltzer into the Gulf.

Corey moved toward the back of the boat and said, “We gotta flip this right away. We gotta flip it.”

Marquis said, “Oh my God, oh my God.” He spoke in a very serious, afraid voice. I saw the look on his face. I had never seen any of these three guys frightened before. That initial light, humorous feeling I had when I went into the water was gone. I could see that Marquis was scared. And I got scared, too.

We knew we had to try to flip the boat right away. We were afraid it would lose its air pocket underneath and sink. Immediately, we began working together. We were all athletes; we had relied on teamwork since we were kids. Maybe together we could get out of this mess. Corey swam back toward the motor, which had stopped running. I swam with him through the swells. Will and Marquis moved toward the front of the boat, on the left side.

We counted down, one-two-three, so that we would be working in unison, not pushing and pulling against one another. We tried to grip the little ridges along the hull and use our body weight to flip the boat. We tried to time it so maybe a wave would roll underneath and help us turn it upright, but we couldn’t get any leverage.

The waves were smashing us against the boat, and it was hard to grip anything. Everything we could grab on to was now underwater. We would try to grab hold, but we would slide off the hull
in slow motion. My heart was jumping out of my chest. “Are you fucking kidding me?” we kept saying.

We had started out the day to celebrate, and now we were in the water with no life jackets, trying to prevent a tragedy.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” I kept saying.

After we flailed about for about five minutes, Will noticed the anchor line was still attached to the back of the boat. “We’ve got to cut the line,” he said. “It’ll flip when we cut the anchor loose.”

We thought the boat was being held down because the line was still supertight. We drifted the boat over to get a teeny bit of slack on the line, and then Will and Marquis cut the rope on the propeller, which was sticking out of the water. Floating at the stern, they grabbed the rope and shaved it back and forth like they were cutting wood with a saw.

It took them five minutes. Once the line was cut, the back end of the boat came up a little bit. We started drifting immediately, but my first reaction was, We’re gonna be able to flip this boat now that it’s not tied down. It’ll be fine.

It wasn’t fine. It was déjà vu from a few minutes earlier. Corey and I basically lay across the stern, kicking down with our feet and trying to yank the boat toward us with our arms, hoping a wave would roll underneath and help us flip it. Marquis and Will tried to yank the boat from near the front, then they got in the water and tried to push upward from the starboard side. There was no way. Physics made it impossible. No one could get any leverage. The more Will and Marquis pushed upward, the deeper they plunged underwater. And the center console was now below the surface acting as a giant, resistant rudder. It wasn’t like we barely missed flipping the boat over or like we might have done it with a little more strength or one more guy. As strong as all of us were—and together we could bench press a ton and shove aside or block or tackle even the biggest human impediment on the foot
ball field—that boat didn’t come within 5 percent of flipping back over.

“I can’t believe we can’t fucking flip this thing,” Corey said.