For anyone who has the desire to read this, it is a true story of what happened to me at age 17.
Zulu
The Nancy
A short narrative of a grand adventure.
It was the Summer of 1970. The Summer between my Junior and Senior years of high school. I was 17 years old. We were living in New Jersey having recently moved there from Jacksonville, Florida.
I received a call from a gentleman named Tom Ray who was one of our neighbors in Jacksonville. I had previously helped him out on weekends working on a 37’ boat he had that he was fixing up. Mostly, scraping barnacles off the hull while the boat was in drydock.
Tom told me he had purchased another boat and needed some help. I had a chance to get away from home for the Summer so I took the job right away. He flew me to Jacksonville and I took up residence on his new boat.
It was a 50' Cape Hatteras made in 1948. It had a wood hull and a 225 H.P Detroit 671 diesel engine. It was also outfitted with a diesel, 6 cylinder generator power plant. Tom had paid $5,000 for it.
My job was to be working on the boat for the Summer.
When I say I was working on the boat, I mean I was helping the Captain prepare it for fishing. His name was Smokey Watson.
The boat was named "Nancy". She was in the water somewhere near Saint Augustine, Florida, docked near a boatyard close to the Inter-coastal Waterway. I did a lot of carpenter work under Smokey's direction building fish boxes and painting.
It was his intention to try to do some commercial offshore snapper fishing and make a lot of money for himself and the owner. I was making the rich sum of $10 a day. I was quite happy about that.
A number of weeks of hard labor put the boat in top shape ready for test runs. A couple of trips offshore proved things worked and a plan was made.
We would move the boat down the Inter-coastal Waterway to Pompano Beach where Smokey lived. That took him and me three days.
We found a marina to dock in and I spent a few more weeks of the Summer happily living on the boat. That was a grand time for this 17 year old. Smokey went home every night and planned a big fishing excursion to the Bahamas. I had the boat to myself. It was tied to the dock of course but that didn't deter me from playing Captain of my own ship and meeting new friends. I did all the stuff a 17 year old would do living by himself on a 50’ boat in the Summer. AHH the memories!!!
Since most of the work was done, my $10 a day stopped. I barely had enough money for food and ate a lot of fish that I managed to catch. I called my Dad and he sent me $20. That helped a lot!
The distance we had to travel across open ocean was 90 miles. Smokey was going to bring his Wife, Beth along, so it would be just the three of us.
The day came for departure. The weather looked promising. We left at dawn on our grand adventure expecting to be in the Bahamas by dark.
Toward late afternoon we picked up some wind. The water got rougher. I don't remember much rain but I do remember the waves. They beat the boat pretty hard as we pushed on. I could see the concern on my Captain's face.
The wave action got bigger. I think about 8' to 12' seas. The 21 year old wooden hull took a beating and we started taking on some water. I was sent down below decks to start the 3 horsepower bilge pump motor.
It did okay for a while but was gradually starting to lose the race. As the hold filled with water, we became sluggish but kept plowing on.
Smokey got on the ship to shore marine radio and started sending “MAYDAYS” over and over again. We never heard back from anyone.
The water got high enough in the hold to drown the engine on the water pump. In a bit of a panic, he had me open the rear hold door that gave access to the generator. It had a water intake hose through the hull for cooling the engine that discharged out the stern of the boat. He had me squeeze off the intake hose with clamps and then cut it in half so now it was sucking water from the bilge and discharging out the back of the boat. That worked but it was clear that it wasn't going to work fast enough. I even began bailing with a five gallon bucket but to no avail.
The boat was equipped with a box life raft (not the one in the picture) that was an 8' X 4' X 18" tall box that had foam flotation under a shallow deck. It wasn't going to sink. It was lashed to the roof of the cabin.
When it became clear that we were going to sink, he had Beth gather three bags of stuff. Some food, some water, her wallet and some other odds and ends.
While all this was going on, Smokey never left the wheel. His only goal was to keep us heading in the right direction as long as he could. A goal that probably saved our lives.
There was no land in sight.
It didn't take much longer. He sent me up on the roof to cut the lashings on the life raft.
When I had it free, I looked back towards the stern and to my horror, I saw water pouring over it into the boat. We were going down. The back of the boat started sinking quickly. Smokey shut down the engines, grabbed his Wife and literally shoved her up on the roof. I pulled her into the raft. Smokey only had a few seconds. He started to climb up, grabbed one bag from the three Beth had set aside and stepped up onto the roof at exactly the same time as the entire roof broke free of the boat. The raft started sliding into the water and Smokey just stepped into it as it went by. We slid the rest of the way and we were in the water floating.
We were just about 8' from the boat when the bow raised up in the air pretty high. With a huge cracking sound, the boat broke in half. The stern rose up just enough to see it and sank quickly. The bow went vertical and very slowly started to sink. The name "Nancy" was painted in large letters on the side of the bow. I'll never forget watching those letters slowly disappear as they went below water level. She was gone.
The boat was equipped with a full size kitchen refrigerator that was bolted to the deck. About 30 seconds after the Nancy's bow disappeared, that refrigerator broke loose and came shooting out of the water like a giant cork just feet away from us. It jumped totally clear of the surface. It too, slowly filled with water and sank. As it was sinking and in spite of all that was happening around me, all I could think about was the three T-bone steaks that were inside.
We looked around in shock. It was around 8:00 PM and starting to get dark. There were waves that I suspect were close to 12' tall rolling under us, but all waves look tall when you are in a life raft.
The roof of the boat was floating about 20' away. There were two paddles in the raft. We grabbed them and paddled to the roof and tied on to it with a piece of rope thinking to stay with the wreckage.
That idea was very short lived. Every wave jerked the roof in a different direction than the raft and we had to cut it loose.
We put on life jackets that were in the raft and took stock of what we had. There was no land in sight.
The bag that Smokey grabbed had a gallon of water, some potato chips, maybe a loaf of bread, and somehow, Beth's wallet.
I had on a pair of cutoff shorts, my knife, a comb, and two dimes in my pocket. I didn't even have a shirt on. I don't mind saying I was a scared kid.
Beth had tears in her eyes but toughed it out. She was 27 years old. Smokey was calm but worried. He was 30 years old.
He took a drink from the jug of water and threw up over the side. He was also pretty nervous. We were all wet.
Just before it got dark, the ocean swells started calming down until they really didn't throw us around at all.
Then it was dark. We were in the Gulf Stream flowing North around 3 miles an hour. There was no land in sight.
There really wasn't much we could do. Floating there in the darkness in a raft the size of a sheet of plywood, all we could do is look around. A wave lifted us a little and Beth yelled "look, there's a light!" Far on the horizon we could see one light. Smokey said it could only be the Bahamas. He said we have to paddle. As I said before, there were two paddles in the raft. Smokey and I started trying to move this rectangular box through the water. It wasn't easy but it would move.
There was no way that Beth would sit there and do nothing. She wasn't that kind of girl. So we started paddling in shifts. The box raft moved slowly but it moved. After some time, it seemed the light was getting brighter. After quite some time, we saw a second light. Then a third. Smokey thought we had moved East of the Gulf Stream. That was a very good thing. We might otherwise have ended up in Newfoundland in a couple of months. And we only had a soggy bag of potato chips to eat.
We paddled for hours and hours. We saw more lights. We were getting pretty tired but nobody complained.
Around 2:00 in the morning we saw lights from a big boat coming our direction. This was great news!! Until it got closer and we thought it might run us over in the dark. We started trying to paddle to the side but the big boat veered off a little and went by us about 300' away with us yelling as loud as we could. Oh well.
We continued paddling.
We got really tired. I remember feeling that my arms were knotting up. No one complained. Beth was one tough girl never missing her turn. She and Smokey had a 2 year old little girl named Tabitha that was staying with Beth's Mom and Dad. She wasn't going to quit.
We got closer. There were now lots of lights and we could clearly see land. This is a guess but I think we were probably about 3 miles from shore.
Then it turned bad.
A wind came up and started blowing us backwards away from land. When we realized we couldn't make headway against it, our exhaustion set in. We laid down our paddles and all of us fell asleep immediately. I believe that was probably around 5:00 A.M. or so.
The next thing I know, Smokey was waking us up. We had been asleep about an hour. The wind had blown us in towards a very small uninhabited island. It was daybreak and we could see it clearly about a mile away.
With a resurgence of energy, we started paddling again.
As we got closer, maybe a half a mile away, we saw a pleasure boat anchored next to the little island. And there was a guy getting ready to go out in a small boat to fish. He put off in his little boat and started coming our way. There was a yellow rain coat in the raft and Smokey grabbed it and started waving it like crazy. The guy saw us and sped over.
We were pretty happy. We told our story and he tied a rope to our raft and towed us slowly back to his big boat which was maybe 40' long. We winched our raft up onto the stern of his boat and set off for Freeport, Bahamas. It was not very far.
We got to his marina and docked. He said wait here and he went and got a customs agent to come talk to us.
The very tall, very distinguished, and very black, uniformed custom agent looked us over and said in a very deep Bahamian accent "How did you get here?" We just pointed at the raft. He had us fill out some paperwork and we were there.
Smokey had a friend in the island and called him. He came and picked us up and took us to his house. We were safe. We had fish head stew for supper. We had a very good sleep.
We made headlines in the Freeport newspaper. "Former Freeport Couple Shipwrecked Off West End".
I was named as their "young companion" in the story. They spelled my name wrong.
Somehow, someone found me some clothes. I don't remember.
The very next day, his friend said "let's go fishing". We went out in his big boat and caught a bunch of red snapper. We never left sight of land. We were fishing in deep water with heavy fishing tackle. While reeling in big red snapper, bigger sharks were hitting them and cutting them cleanly in half. We would reel in half a fish. I'm glad we weren't swimming.
We had to get home. Beth's wallet that was in the bag that Smokey saved had $60 in it. Believe it or not, a flight from Freeport to Fort Lauderdale, Florida was only $15 each in those days.
We donated our raft to the guy that saved us and flew to Fort Lauderdale where Beth's parents picked us up. I called home to New Jersey and spilled my story to Mom and Pop. They were flabbergasted.
Smokey had to call the Nancy's owner and tell him the bad news. It was a hard phone call. The boat was not insured.
I then flew home to New Jersey and had a great story to tell when I started school my Senior year. I was the only kid in school who had been shipwrecked before.
I waited 50 years to write all this down but it has been in my brain ever since it happened. Recalling the details has been pretty easy even after all this time. Surprisingly, it was a little emotional reconstructing the events.
Michael Elledge
1/2/2020
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