Saving Not One, But Two Brothers In The Dark

By Cary Smith
President, California Boating Safety Officers Association
**This Rescue Won Cary Smith and Don Kinneman Officers of the Year Awards in 2000**
Deputy Harbormaster, Pillar Point Harbor

It had been a real windy afternoon.  I had given the lifeguard a break.  It was at Santa Cruz Harbor beach, which is the only beach where hobie cats can launch and land.  From the harbor, boats are going in and out, and then also Hobie cats are going in and out, launching off the beach.  When it gets really windy in the afternoon, 15 to 25 knots northwest, you get white caps and wind chop.  It gets very difficult to see these hobie cats if they go over.  You usually pick them out, then they roll over, the people have to roll themselves back over to get going again.

It was Labor Day weekend.  It had been pretty crazy.  I ended up going home after working a long day.  I got a six pack and ordered a pizza.  All my friends were out celebrating the holiday, barbecuing or hanging out with friends.  I was going to hang out and have a couple of beers and turned on espn.  I got a call from Don Kinneman, from Santa Cruz Harbor.  He was working 12:00 – 9:00 or something.  He told me that he needed me to come back in because they had a search and rescue case.  I ended up going back into the harbor.  My house was like three miles west of the harbor and as I drove in I could see that it was still pretty clear. 

Don was there and he was talking to one of the coast guard guys.  The Coast Guard has a substation that they man in Santa Cruz on busy weekends, 4^th of July, Labor Day, etc.  I asked Don to brief me.

He told me there were two brothers that had left off the beach in a higher performance hobie cat called a prindle.  They left about 3:30 and ended up not coming back.  They were good sailors and usually came back around 4:30 or something, but this time they did not come back.  It was now 5:00, 5:30 or so.  One of the brothers had a wife and a couple of kids.  Another woman was the fiancé of the other brother.  They were due to get wed in like two weeks.  These two women had made the report that the brothers were not back yet.  They knew that if everything were OK, the brothers would have called.

We advised the women that we would do our best to find the boys, but that they should check at home, continually check phone messages, and do what they could to check in anywhere that there might be messages.

So we began a search with the Coast Guard.  We were each given quadrants to search.  We were searching like one mile south of the harbor and one mile north of the harbor.  There was still sun.  We searched with the Coast Guard.  We have now expanded our search area to about six miles north or south of the harbor.  Now it started to get dark.  We now had a Coast Guard search that was doing another quadrant outside of us and we also had a helicopter searching with us.  Well, it got to be around 9:30 or 10:00.  After dark our search techniques are different.

We were in a 32’ patrol boat.  It was an aluminum hull with an inflatable collar.  We have  spotlights.  However at night, you don’t use a spotlight so much as you use your ears.  You’re looking at lines, wherever the moon is, or lines inline from shore.  We also have a blue strobe light on the boat that helps a bit.  The spotlight ends up not being such an effective tool when we shine it into the moist air and a refraction of light more blocks our view, than aids our view. 

We were now off of Capitola, which is pretty far south from where we began this search.  We were really hungry.  My buddy Don is like a total Yogi Bear, always looking for a free cookie, a free coffee, a free whatever.  Well, I had totally forgotten about it, but in my wetsuit/gear bag I had a pizza with one piece missing folded in half.  I opened it up and asked Don, “Who’s your buddy?”  We proceeded to eat some of the pizza but agreed that we would save some pieces for the brothers, insisting that we were going to find them. 

We kept searching and it got to be about 11PM.  We got a message over the radio that the Coast Guard said we can cancel our search.  We thought about out our lifeguard backgrounds where we are pretty adamant that when someone leaves our beach, they come back safely.  Being still hopeful, we asked if the message was a command or if we had the option to stay searching.  There was a big pause.  They said we had been out there all afternoon and into the dark hours and could be dismissed from the search.  However, they added, if we chose to stay and search, it was OK with them.  Relieved, we radioed back to them that we would head back to the harbor, check in with our boss and come back out to continue soon after. 

Because we had been released from Coast Guard ‘s search, when we went back out, we were no longer restricted to the quadrants that they had in mind for us.   Now it was nearing midnight.  These brothers had been in the water since about 3:30.  That’s  long time.  If they were in the water that long, there would be a good chance that they would no longer be alive when we found them.  The water temperature was high 50’s.  Brian Foster was the harbor director at the time.  He told us that if we needed to go home it was OK and the search could be relieved or continued again in the morning.  We chose to keep at it.  We got some coffee and some extra blankets. 

As we were headed back, we ran into the fiancé and the wife.  They had been there the whole time, with no call back from their loved ones.  They wanted to get an update from us.  I had to have the conversation with them that we were doing everything we could do, we hoped everything was going to be ok.  It had been some time and it was now getting late.  Although we were doing everything we could do, I did have to inform them that they needed to have their thoughts and prayers with the missing brothers because it’s a big ocean out there.   There wasn’t much of a moon that night.  I couldn’t tell them that we could do more than our best.  We were still in rescue mode, as opposed to recovery mode. 

We talked to one of our friends who was a boat captain – Lighthall.  He came out of the Crow’s Nest laughing.  Well, we told him what we were up to.  He told us that a lot of times the wind will cook to the Northwest then turn offshore and they find a lot of debris when looking in that particular heading sometimes.  This area was about four miles offshore and eight miles south.  We decided to take a course heading about ten degrees off of that to give them the set and drift and we’d stick to that line. 

It was getting late.  Don and I were calling to each other to make sure we were awake.  We could hear the water splashing on the hull of the boat because we were going so slow.  We could hear all of the different birds making their screeches.  We would hear the call of the muir.  We would hear the cormorant.  We would hear the seagulls’ call, who rafts on top of the water.  But now there was Monterey Bay Canyon, which is the third deepest underwater canyon in the world.  Then there were jelly fish and the upwelling.  There were hundreds of jelly fish, maybe thousands.  It seemed like something out of Dr. Seuss.  The blue light was flashing, we were going so slow.  We had to convince ourselves not to give up.  We just kept telling ourselves we were not giving up on this one.  Right then, we saw a shooting star.

I made a wish.  The star was amazing.  Don and I looked at each other, then continued on. 

Probably about a half hour after that, it was about 2:00 am or 2:30 am, we were about eight and a half miles offshore, in the middle of the Monterey Bay.  All of a sudden I hear this ever so slight, “Help..”

I couldn’t believe it.  I yelled to Don, “Did you hear that?”  We heard all the birds cawing, and couldn’t believe that we heard something else. 

Again we heard, “Help, help.”  It was so soft.

We turned everything off. We turned off the motors, we turned down the radios and heard it even louder, “Help!” 

We were so surprised. 

I couldn’t get up with our search light because it would have just reflected off the fog.  So I got up with my flashlight and could not see him.  We could continue to hear him though, again, “Help.”

We called in the Coast Guard Helicopter to light up the area for us.  They have the fluer and the infrared cameras so they can see in the dark.  They ended up creeping over the top of us as we were creeping along, but could not see.  We heard, “Help” again.  The Coast Guard confirmed that there was someone directly off of our bow.

It turned out it was Bill Hobbs, who had been separated from the catamaran and was in a black dry suit with a navy blue life jacket on in the dark, in the middle of the Monterey Bay, which is 36 miles across and about 20 miles deep.  We were about 12 miles into the bay.  We were seven miles off shore.  He was exactly at our bow, ahead of us, right in front.  If we hadn’t heard him, there was a chance we would have run him over.

As we got him out of the water, we didn’t want to shock him because of the cold water and hypothermia.  The core is the last thing that stays warm.  We did not want him to go into cardiac arrest.  So I got him to sit up with me and was saying to him, “You’re going to make it.”

He kept asking, “Where’s my brother?”  All he wanted to talk about was his brother.  I told him that we were going to look for him, but we needed to get him back to safety right now.  We made the call of either transporting him back to the hospital via the helicopter, or taking him to the paramedics by the boat.  It would have been about five or ten minutes longer via boat, but it wouldn’t have been a drop and lots of other details.  I am an EMT and we felt it was the right call to make. 

We also figured that his brother would still be with the boat.  The helicopter would have a good chance of finding the other brother because it was a bigger target to find.  We cruised back to the harbor at got there around 3:30 am.  It had been twelve hours since they were in the water.   I kept him sitting up.  He couldn’t move himself.  I was actively warming him, rubbing the skin to try and get circulation going.  He was hanging with me.  We ended up transferring him to the paramedics.  We informed him that this was the guy!  We were pretty tired by then, but we were on a mission.  We handed him off where the fiancé and wife both were still waiting.  They went to the hospital with him.

We decided to go back out.  We were determined to find the other brother.  We varied our course.  We altered it by 12 degrees, a little further to the south, taking into consideration a heavier boat that would probably be with the other brother.  We were fourteen miles down, ten miles off shore.  We ended up getting a hit on our radar.  We called the Coast Guard with our hit.  We heard nothing back, but saw their 47’ boat in a beeline towards where we reported our hit.  Now both of us were trying as quickly as we could to arrive at our target.  As we got almost on scene, we heard them say over the radio, “We have the other brother onboard.”  They picked up the other brother Matt, who was floating on the overturned Hobie Cat.  He was actually in better shape than his brother because he was out of the water and it was a pretty nice night and there wasn’t a lot of fog. 

So it ended up that the Coast Guard took him in.  We had to drag the Hobie Cat back to the harbor, upside down the whole way, then tying it up to one of our refuse buoys. 

We ended up getting out of the water at like 5:30 or 6:00 am.  As we got out, there were the morning news shows and their cameras waiting to interview us.  We did a couple of live interviews, then informed us that we still had things to do, then went to the hospital.  We got to the emergency room and were talking to the wife and fiancé and were asking him about an update.  They told us that Bill was in a heating blanket and was under all types of active warming the hospital could do for him. 

Don was talking to the women and I was talking to the ER doctor to compare my diagnosis and treatment to that of the doctor.  The most important part of emergency medicine is what happens with the first responder is there with you.  From there on out you have a history. 

They said his core temperature was down to 92 degrees.  He probably had another half hour in the water, maybe, before he was done.

We had a chance to talk to him after that.  He was very thankful.  He told us that his life was already over.  He had planned for the passing.  He was a fit guy who did marathons and such, but knew he felt himself start to fade away with hypothermia.  He had seen the helicopter fly by and not see him, not once, but twice.  He had seen one of the boats go by with no way to contact them.  He had seen it go from light to dark to the different phases of lights around as night fell.   He thought he was seeing hallucinations with the thousands of jelly fish around him and didn’t realize they were real.  Literally, there was every different kind of jelly fish you could imagine.  He had been stung a bunch of times and didn’t even realize it.  They stung his hands.  He said he remembered me talking to him, and that was about it.  We invited him to come and see us when they got better and went back off to work.