My brother in law use to take his whaler out all the time in the Keys. They weren't taking the whaler to the Marquasas or anything like that, but they would go out to the reefs.
Anyone following the story of the two teens missing at sea?
- Thread starter OrlandNole
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I think the key here is that the kids did it while a crazy storm was coming........through an inlet that's often tricky, even on relatively calm days. I don't think anyone's arguing that a 19ft. center console is often adequate to go out to sea.
A hundred bucks in gas is not much in a boat. Marine fuel is stupid expensive (typically ethanol free) so likely 4 bucks a gallon meaning they pumped a whopping 27 gallons into the boat. This would have been standard fare for me on a typical day on the water as a kid. Heck, my old sea doo holds 15 gallons. Why they went out in rough seas is anyone's guess but likely just youth and inexperience. Hope they are found and soon.
I noticed in one of yesterday's articles a Coast Guard official saying he thought they might have fashioned a raft using their cooler, flotation devices, and the engine cover. At first I thought he meant for connecting the raft somehow, but I guess he meant for rowing. At any rate it sounded like grasping at straws to me. I think those poor naïve kids went out of this world on Friday. I know they were getting their fuel at 1:30 or so, and I've seen the weather track that showed a pretty intense cell blowing over the inlet (from inland out to sea) at around 1:50 through 2:10. One of their mothers tried to do the planned hourly check-in at 2:30 PM by texting them, but got no response. But they didn't call the coast guard til 5:00 I think.
A 19 ft Center console is adequate for offshore ....until it's not. The sea offshore can be quite surprising with little squalls that look like nothing on the radar but are locally horrific. I personally would never take something that small offshore, heck out of curiousity I looked up my little sporty car and found it is 16 ft long and most people consider it tiny. Just because you CAN take a tiny POS boat offshore doesn't mean you should. I would never think of taking something a couple of foot bigger than my basically two seat (they claim 5, but no adult fits in the back) car well offshore. Even three foot waves are going to toss it around let alone when the sea gets angry.
But yeah, it was doubly stupid considering there was a known storefront coming through. As I said the general Coast Guard approved guideline is no standard boat under 30ft should be offshore. Now having said that... not every boat is built the same, so there are some very deep and double hulled 25fters and thereabouts with cell foam rather than air that are specifically designed for offshore that I would feel comfortable in. Some of those specially designed boats are basically unsinkable...ridiculously expensive but tough to flip and almost impossible to sink due to the foam keeping it up rather than air which can be replaced with water in a breach. Even then I'd want all of the appropriate safety devices. But my understanding is that their 19fter was just a standard boat.
Dumb dumb dumb.
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Yeah, that's what I think. A standard 19fter designed for inshore and freshwater that was flipped in heavy waves. The boys were then either taken away from the boat by the waves/current, killed on impact when the boat flipped or eaten by sharks. I'm not buying the "raft" story.
the larger point that @FSUTribe76 and others have made is that there were clear indications of bad weather, from reading the reports to looking to the fricken east and seeing hugh jass clouds.
A guy in my dept is an avid boater/fisherman and he said he didn't take his out because of the northeast activity that had been forecast.
still very sad.
A guy in my dept is an avid boater/fisherman and he said he didn't take his out because of the northeast activity that had been forecast.
still very sad.
I looked at the Coast Guard film footage of their boat floating in the ocean. It was not in very rough seas at all, but the thing was very low in the water and would have allowed for almost no purchase by someone floating nearby. Unless for some reason it was initially floating a lot higher in the water than that (?)….. with them being In ROUGH seas, no way they could have held onto it, or even gotten any benefit by doing so. In the midst of the weather I think they would have been just about immediately swept away from the boat into open water. It probably would have been all they could do to keep their heads out of the waves.
In South Florida, a 19ft. center console is often adequate enough to go out in the ocean. You see a fair number of them out there when the weather's decent and the waves aren't too bad. Obviously not when there's a storm. I don't think these guys were planning to have the boat 65 miles from land.
I don't disagree that common sense was missing.
You could say that about any boat. The Edmund Fitzgerald was over 700 feet long, as an example.
I think we all agree this looks like a case of really poor judgment.
Sadly I think these boys had just enough experience to be overconfident, but not enough life experience to know their limits. What I think happened is they got caught in the squall, boat flipped, they got tossed, and in seconds their floating alone in nasty waves far from land. Who knows how long they made it or what they finally succumbed to.
RTM posted this chilling account earlier in the thread, but I think this says it all. Even a 20yr commercial vet on a 30'er, was wtf on seeing these kids head out in front of the storm:
PB Post update at 5:15 p.m.:
As Jim Dulin struggled mightily to steer his 30-foot fishing boat away from an ugly storm and into the Jupiter Inlet early Friday afternoon, he was startled to see a small boat heading the opposite direction into the rough weather.
Among the dozens of vessels in the water, Dulin said the small boat carrying two young males was the only one not going toward the safety of the inlet.
“I said to myself, ‘Those kids are crazy,’” said Dulin, a Jupiter resident and commercial fisherman for 20 years. “There’s no way they couldn’t see that storm. The storm was really black, the temperature dropped and you could tell it was going to be a really mean one.”
RTM posted this chilling account earlier in the thread, but I think this says it all. Even a 20yr commercial vet on a 30'er, was wtf on seeing these kids head out in front of the storm:
PB Post update at 5:15 p.m.:
As Jim Dulin struggled mightily to steer his 30-foot fishing boat away from an ugly storm and into the Jupiter Inlet early Friday afternoon, he was startled to see a small boat heading the opposite direction into the rough weather.
Among the dozens of vessels in the water, Dulin said the small boat carrying two young males was the only one not going toward the safety of the inlet.
“I said to myself, ‘Those kids are crazy,’” said Dulin, a Jupiter resident and commercial fisherman for 20 years. “There’s no way they couldn’t see that storm. The storm was really black, the temperature dropped and you could tell it was going to be a really mean one.”
I don't disagree that common sense was missing.[/QUOTE]
Sadly, common sense and fourteen years old don't often go hand in hand.
Sadly, common sense and fourteen years old don't often go hand in hand.
I was sitting on the beach at Hobe Sound (9 miles North) at from 12-1 that day. At noon there's what it looked like (please adjust, I don't know how):
It was glass.
Those kids got fooled - I have a photo where you can start to see the system developing in the north, and by 1:00 I decided to pack it in because it was coming.
Now, there is a captain that said he saw them heading out of the inlet at 5:00, just as the storm approached. If that was in fact them, it was just a dumb youthful mistake.
I hope those boys somehow get home safe.
It was glass.
Those kids got fooled - I have a photo where you can start to see the system developing in the north, and by 1:00 I decided to pack it in because it was coming.
Now, there is a captain that said he saw them heading out of the inlet at 5:00, just as the storm approached. If that was in fact them, it was just a dumb youthful mistake.
I hope those boys somehow get home safe.
In skydiving we call folks like this 200 jump wonders. They have just enough experience not to be scared of their gear any longer and be decent parachute pilots. That 200-500 jump range is where most big accidents and fatalities happen. After 500 you have usually seen a few bad accidents, after 1000 you have probably seen someone die, after 2000+ you have usually lost friends or people you know. You start really hedging your risks.
Free, you see this in the cell tower industry as well. Not many climbers in their 40's, mostly this is due to physical limitations, but Darwin plays into it as well. They have a saying, "It's not a matter of how, it's a matter of when".
Safety has come a long way in the last decade because of the high amount of fatalities, but when it comes to a 5 minute free climb vs a 30 minute "3 pts of contact" climb, you see many err on the former. One word of advice I will never forget one of the older foremen said to a couple of greenies, was "If you stop getting a little scared, then don't even climb."
Safety has come a long way in the last decade because of the high amount of fatalities, but when it comes to a 5 minute free climb vs a 30 minute "3 pts of contact" climb, you see many err on the former. One word of advice I will never forget one of the older foremen said to a couple of greenies, was "If you stop getting a little scared, then don't even climb."
The coast guard guy said you can survive 4-5 days in water at these temperatures. Which means today or tomorrow. But can anybody tell me how likely it is to even survive an ocean squall in the first place – without drowning –even if you have on a life vest? I’ve never seen water that rough.
I’m going to take a guess that they could have been lucky and not encountered sharks interested in humans. But either way their life vests have by now been carried by the gulf stream along the same general path their boat took. They are likely still floating out there, though the search will probably have to be called off without them being spotted.
I’m guessing they’ve done that before, gone out into the open ocean when they were “supposed” to stay in the inlet. Like others have noted, just poor, poor judgement to do it with storms looming. The parents shouldn’t have trusted 14 years olds to have the proper judgement for those situations.
Somewhat unrelated but the term self-correcting profession came into my head. I first heard that in a foraging class with Dr. Green Deane and he was talking about mycology. Unlike with plant, lichen and animal life where you're not very likely to make any mistakes and eat something poisonous once you know the general rules and have some experience, in mycology/mushroom hunting there are VERY close lookalikes. One morel will be absolutely tasty and delicious as good as any $1k an ounce truffle but another "morel" will liquefy your liver and kill you almost instantly. So he always said mycology was a "self correcting profession" meaning the dumb dumbs and less cautious individuals will quickly end up dead. I solved this problem by eating only wild fruit, nuts, herbs and roots when foraging and never even tasting a mushroom even if I "think" it's safe.
I don't know about Jupiter, but here in Brevard we've had upwelling for the last month that has dropped the water temp down 10 degrees. I jumped in the other day and it shocked my breath away. While not cold enough for a wetsuit, a few hours in that will hyp you out with minimal movement. And if they drifted north, as their boat did, that just might have brought them in colder waters. If they didn't make it, hopefully the got hypothermia and passed rather peacefully considering the other options.
I just don't think you could go 5 days without running into sharks. Yes it's a big place and yes most random spots in the ocean won't have a big predator. But....after a few days (even hours) you'll get pushed into the general currents where all food ends up and right where hungry sharks would lie in wait. The ocean is not a purely chaotic system, they would have ended up where all nutrients go sooner or later.
Very interesting.....thanks
I know that humans are not the "ideal" food for sharks, not being a very fatty meat. But I also know there's a species called the Oceanic Whitetip that was known to take down a lot of stranded sailors in WWI and WWII. Including probably the USS Indianapolis crew. And at any rate, once one shark detected your muscle electricity, took an interest in you, and decided to do a taste test, even if he didn't like you the blood in the water would soon attract others and get them more excited.
Like he said above, let's hope the boys succumbed quicker than expected to hypothermia.
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Yeah, when people think "shark attacks" they usually think of the large predatory Sharks that go into shallow water on occasion like the Great Whites, tiger sharks, and bull sharks. And of course those three will make snacks of humans when presented an opportunity. But in the deepwater/oceanic currents where shipwreck and plane crash survivors/bodies are you're more likely to be eaten by the whitetips, makos, blues and to a much lesser extent any tiger or great white that may be roaming there. Usually what happens in the shipwrecks is that a large tiger or mako makes the first meal if there's not a lot of blood already in the water but then the smaller and much more numerous whitetips and Blues start feasting. (While the largest whitetip on record is 13ft that's the equivalent of a 20lb largemouth bass a super rarity, most are under 9 ft with only the rare one exceeding it. So a 100-120 lb fish doesn't usually attack a full sized human until there's a feeding frenzy. But there's no doubt from the comments of the survivors that most of the Indy sailors ended up in the guts of whitetips simply because there were so many of them).
I took my dads boat and went skiing with my friends all the time when I was 14, he kept it in a marina. I would take the boat to shell island many miles away My dad bought me a truck when I was 14 and I could launch a boat myself if I needed to. It was no big deal since I had been driving front end loaders and fork lifts since I was 10. I was very seasoned at 14, of course this was the mid 70s and people weren't so wimpy back then.
Trying to think very carefully about both this boat tragedy as well as your own example, I definitely don't think the issue is skill so much as judgement. In the boating accident, kids apparently capable of making very poor decisions were put into a position by adults where their decisions could end up being life-threatening. And it's looking more and more like they were in fact life-ending. I don't think the parents believed them to be such poor judges of a situation and a decision- making point that anyone in the area would know they might encounter. Yet the parents were mistaken. Adults can get fooled or just get it wrong. That's partly why we tend to take it out of their hands with things like driving age laws. Really I'm surprised that it is/was legal for a 14 year old to take a boat out into the open ocean when you can't get into a car with no adult supervision until age 16.
Regarding your own story, so far as I know you never kept your friends out skiing during a lightning storm, or made a decision that got any of them killed. If you were to tell me you had then maybe that meant your dad misjudged your level of maturity, ability to assess situations, or to obey his instructions. BTW, when you would go out at that age, was anyone along older than you or was 14 the oldest there? And did you guys do anything that you look back on as extremely dumb/way too dangerous for the parents to have approved of?
We are not talking about water skiing adventure in a lake or 20 yards offshore nor some wussy coast hugging trip to shell island, but an offshore excursion in a real ocean
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I stayed safe, mainly because I respected my father and wouldn't let him down. He taught me well. I wouldn't do anything dangerous and regardless of age I'm still that way. The one big difference is we didn't have cell phones, you couldn't make a call if you had problems. Anyway, I hope these boys turn out to be ok.
Adults do die on the water everyday. It can be dangerous. All the more reason to make damn sure they either are two of the most responsible 14 year olds in the state or to have an adult with them. But if you as a parent judge your 14 year old kids are fine out there by themselves and they decide to a) go way out further then they were suppose to and b) head into a bad storm then clearly, you as a parent messed up and you can bet your arse people are going to question your descision. Just like they would have questioned your parents behind their backs even back in the 70s had little Jamn met a similar fate on the sea or while driving a car.
14 is too young in my opinion for boating unsupervised in the Atlantic. Granted, there are no age based laws so you as a parent can decide when they are ready. You just better be right. I do recognize you also don't want to be too overprotective and let kids grow up and earn your trust. This is a terrible way to find out they were not ready for that trust.
14 is too young in my opinion for boating unsupervised in the Atlantic. Granted, there are no age based laws so you as a parent can decide when they are ready. You just better be right. I do recognize you also don't want to be too overprotective and let kids grow up and earn your trust. This is a terrible way to find out they were not ready for that trust.
put another way: tactical ability vs strategic ability. Knowledge vs wisdom. I agree with this.
@jamnolfin I've only been to Shell Island one time, but isn't it very close to the main shore? I don't remember being out of sight of land at all when we went. Seems like we stayed in a channel and hugged the coastline the whole time.
Back then I lived in town so it was a good ways. We would take it out trolling in the gulf and to fishing spots, diving. Basically the same things as these kids. From what I read they have been doing this a long time. Maybe they did push it, who knows. I did a lot more dangerous stuff surfing than I ever did on a boat, seen my life flash before me more times than I can remember. People die on the water everyday, I don't see any sense in making new laws every time bad things happen. We all die, it's just a matter of when and how.
I have most likely spent more time 25+ miles offshore than 99% of the posters on here. Most of it has been in GOF but have a lot of days in the Atlantic also. Don't make the mistake of minimizing how quickly the gulf can turn nasty. On most days I would rather navigate in 6' seas in the Atlantic than 4' seas in the gulf.
I saw this earlier and kinda think to myself this guy has blood on his hands. The guy's a 20 year commercial vet and doesn't chase after these guys knowing what's coming (a huge ass storm)? I have to think if I was in that same situation that I would have stopped them and made them turn around or at least radioed the Coast Guard and kept an eye on them until they could intervene...
I know you're being a wiseace (I'm an expert) but if you don't respect weather and the power of water be it 30 ft. waves at buzzards bay or freeking blue lake in S. Miami you're being foolish. I'm very comfortable in/on the water but I damn sure pay close attention when I'm on/in it. These kids are toast,rip, and their bodies will never be found.Right coast surfers and their dangerous waves are cute...
He must. I was sitting at my buddy's house on Cocoa Beach that Friday when the storm ripped through. It was blowing like hell for a while and there were a couple of microbursts where the wind got up to 70-80 mph I bet you...
