Addai's Adidas
Footballguy
This morning on the Today show a guy from the Coast Guard said the had life vest on "at some point". This says to me that they had them on when they left, but took them off once they were away from people.
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Coast Guard searching for missing boat w/NFL players aboard (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Andy Herron
- Start date
Left the boat to swim? I doubt they left the dock wearing vest.Addai's Adidas
Footballguy
That is something a captian would make them do, at least wear a vest where people can see them.Left the boat to swim? I doubt they left the dock wearing vest.
There is no law to wear vest unless it's a child.That is something a captian would make them do, at least wear a vest where people can see them.
mex
Footballguy
ugh NO, they only have to have the life vests on board with them, they are not required to wear them 24/7. Hopefully they had mechanical problems and realized that with the rough conditions that they better put on their life jackets just in case. If the weather came up fast and they were still messing with stuff and got rolled without life jackets then it will make their survival chances diminish.That is something a captian would make them do, at least wear a vest where people can see them.
Da Guru
Fair & Balanced
I have been on a few deep sea fishing trips, we never wore our life vests. That being said we were never in any kind of rough weather.I have been on a boat in Lake Michigan when the weather kicked up and the first thing I did was put my vest on.ugh NO, they only have to have the life vests on board with them, they are not required to wear them 24/7. Hopefully they had mechanical problems and realized that with the rough conditions that they better put on their life jackets just in case. If the weather came up fast and they were still messing with stuff and got rolled without life jackets then it will make their survival chances diminish.That is something a captian would make them do, at least wear a vest where people can see them.Left the boat to swim? I doubt they left the dock wearing vest.
Addai's Adidas
Footballguy
I don't know what the hell I am talking about.There is no law to wear vest unless it's a child.That is something a captian would make them do, at least wear a vest where people can see them.
Sonny Lubick Blowup Doll
Footballguy
That is something a captian would make them do, at least wear a vest where people can see them.
This isn't One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Dreamer
Footballguy
CLEARWATER
They were anchored about 38 miles offshore Saturday afternoon when high waves flipped their small boat.
The four football players, who had been fishing for amberjack, were thrown into the frothy Gulf of Mexico. Frigid, 6-foot seas crashed over their heads.
Struggling in their life jackets, they somehow managed to make it back to the boat. But the 21-foot Everglades fishing craft was upside-down. And though the men were in their 20s and strong — two played for the NFL and the others had played for USF — they couldn't right the boat.
So the four friends clung to the slick, white hull.
Hours passed. Gusts of 10, then 20 mph slapped their faces. Darkness descended.
By then, experts say, the men must have begun to lose feeling in their limbs. Their faces probably felt frozen. They likely became disoriented.
For more than 12 hours, they gripped the boat as the temperature dropped to 60 degrees and the waves climbed over 10 feet.
By Monday, only one man was left holding on.
• • •
They met playing football, and working out at a gym. Marquis Cooper, 26, was a linebacker and special teams member for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2004-2005, where he played with defensive end Corey Smith, 29.
Will Bleakley, 25, was a tight end at USF from 2002 to 2006. There, he met Nick Schuyler, 24, who walked on for the Bulls in spring 2006. Schuyler is a fitness trainer at L.A. Fitness in Lutz, where the other men often worked out.
On Saturday, the friends gathered before dawn for an all-day fishing trip. Cooper told his wife, Rebekah, and 3-year-old daughter, Delaney, that he would be back by dark. He drove to the Seminole boat ramp in Clearwater, parked his platinum GMC truck and boat trailer. The one-day pass on his truck dashboard was stamped 6:21 a.m.
As Cooper steered his craft toward Tampa Bay, the day dawned clear and sunny.
Jason Adams of Palm Harbor said he followed a boat he thought must have been Cooper's as it left the dock. He was in a 19-foot Cape Horn, just slightly smaller than the Everglades craft. "Only three boats were going out that early," Adams said. He and his buddy followed the one "with four big guys in it" for a couple of hours.
But by 11 a.m., he said, the wind picked up and the water was spitting whitecaps. "We started getting nervous," Adams said.
"Within 20 minutes, the seas were at 6 feet. We decided we had to get out of there. It took us 2 1/2 hours to get back."
The boat they had been following, he said, kept going.
"The Gulf of Mexico can go from flat to rough very quickly," said Ed Chambers, an officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "You have to watch the cold fronts. You can be running along in 2-foot seas and within 15 minutes, be battling 8-footers."
No one knows why Cooper dropped anchor so far off Egmont Key on Saturday afternoon. He had asked another angler for coordinates for good amberjack fishing and might have been headed to a deep-water spring 50 miles offshore.
Maybe he and his friends were battling big fish when their boat capsized. Maybe their single engine had stalled. Maybe they were just trying to wait out the waves.
• • •
Cooper's wife wasn't too worried when he didn't come back by dark. The weekend before he and his pals were on the water from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m.
But by 9 p.m. Saturday, Rebekah Cooper thought she would have heard from her husband, at least a call back when he was in cell phone range, saying he was heading home.
She called his friend Brian Miller, whom he often fished with. Miller knew the coordinates where Cooper had been headed. About 1:30 a.m. Sunday, he called the Coast Guard and gave them those numbers.
Coast Guard Capt. Timothy Close, who commands Sector St. Petersburg, said rescue efforts began by typing the boat's size and route into a computer program — along with wind direction and speed, currents and drift data.
The computer spit out a 750-square-mile search range.
About 2 a.m., crews of a Coast Guard cutter and a 47-foot Coast Guard lifeboat began carving out rectangles in the dark, churning sea, watching heat-seeking infrared screens. Overhead, pilots of a Jayhawk helicopter and a C-130 search plane strapped on night vision goggles and flew similar patterns.
By sunrise, they still hadn't seen a sign.
Family members of the missing men gathered at the boat ramp all day Sunday, where Cooper's truck and trailer were still parked. They held each other and hoped as the Air Force, Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission and the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office joined the search. Six planes and another six cutters from as far as Alabama and Georgia criss-crossed the search area.
By Monday morning — 48 hours after the men had set out — the search had expanded to 16,000 square miles, from Citrus County to Charlotte County.
The Coast Guard had never received a distress signal from the missing men.
• • •
Just after noon, the crew of the cutter Tornado, from Pascagoula, Miss, spotted a tiny orange dot bobbing in the turquoise gulf. They pulled closer, and saw a man sitting upright on an overturned boat. He was wearing his life vest and had pulled a hood over his head.
He seemed to be clinging to the exposed propeller.
The cutter crew sent a smaller boat to rescue the man, who turned out to be Nick Schuyler. They gave him a dry blue Coast Guard uniform. A helicopter lowered a metal litter.
Schuyler was flown to Tampa General Hospital where he was in serious condition: dehydrated, cut and bruised — but able to tell his dad, "Hi, Pops!"
His mom, Marcia, passed out when she heard her son was still alive.
From his hospital bed, he told her that he survived by telling himself that she was not going to go to his funeral.
"That's what kept him hanging on," she said.
Schuyler grew up in the tiny city of Chardon, Ohio. In high school, he played football for the first two years, but lettered in basketball for three. He spent two years at Kent State, then moved to Tampa in 2006.
He wanted to play football so badly he gained 50 pounds and, in spring 2006, walked on as a fullback and defensive tackle. He had the uniform, suited up and practiced. But because he was a transfer student, he wasn't able to play right away and left the team that fall. It was a disappointment, said his dad, Stu.
In December, Schuyler graduated with a degree in communications, but his first job out of college was spotting for sweaty guys in weight rooms and counting their repetitions.
"So, you went to college for four years and you can count to 10," his dad teased him.
He had no idea then that his son's lifelong commitment to fitness would help save his life.
• • •
Once Schuyler was found alive, relatives of the other three fishermen kept praying.
"That keeps our spirits up, that keeps us real positive," Ray Sanchez, Cooper's cousin, said Monday afternoon. "We have three more to go."
Sanchez talked about how strong his cousin is, how tough football players have to be, how that will help them all.
"He's got to have a strong mind," Sanchez said. "It's just a big practice. This is not to stay on the team. This is to live."
Dark fell Monday night without a sign of the other three men. Coast Guard crews promised to continue searching. But after two days in frigid waves, the situation was seeming bleak.
Sanchez said the Coast Guard told him that the other three football players clung to that overturned boat for 12 to 16 hours. Schuyler must have seen them all slip away.
Times staff writers Alexandra Zayas, Emily Nipps, Brant James, Greg Auman and Leonora LaPeter Anton contributed to this report.
http://www.tampabay.com/
They were anchored about 38 miles offshore Saturday afternoon when high waves flipped their small boat.
The four football players, who had been fishing for amberjack, were thrown into the frothy Gulf of Mexico. Frigid, 6-foot seas crashed over their heads.
Struggling in their life jackets, they somehow managed to make it back to the boat. But the 21-foot Everglades fishing craft was upside-down. And though the men were in their 20s and strong — two played for the NFL and the others had played for USF — they couldn't right the boat.
So the four friends clung to the slick, white hull.
Hours passed. Gusts of 10, then 20 mph slapped their faces. Darkness descended.
By then, experts say, the men must have begun to lose feeling in their limbs. Their faces probably felt frozen. They likely became disoriented.
For more than 12 hours, they gripped the boat as the temperature dropped to 60 degrees and the waves climbed over 10 feet.
By Monday, only one man was left holding on.
• • •
They met playing football, and working out at a gym. Marquis Cooper, 26, was a linebacker and special teams member for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2004-2005, where he played with defensive end Corey Smith, 29.
Will Bleakley, 25, was a tight end at USF from 2002 to 2006. There, he met Nick Schuyler, 24, who walked on for the Bulls in spring 2006. Schuyler is a fitness trainer at L.A. Fitness in Lutz, where the other men often worked out.
On Saturday, the friends gathered before dawn for an all-day fishing trip. Cooper told his wife, Rebekah, and 3-year-old daughter, Delaney, that he would be back by dark. He drove to the Seminole boat ramp in Clearwater, parked his platinum GMC truck and boat trailer. The one-day pass on his truck dashboard was stamped 6:21 a.m.
As Cooper steered his craft toward Tampa Bay, the day dawned clear and sunny.
Jason Adams of Palm Harbor said he followed a boat he thought must have been Cooper's as it left the dock. He was in a 19-foot Cape Horn, just slightly smaller than the Everglades craft. "Only three boats were going out that early," Adams said. He and his buddy followed the one "with four big guys in it" for a couple of hours.
But by 11 a.m., he said, the wind picked up and the water was spitting whitecaps. "We started getting nervous," Adams said.
"Within 20 minutes, the seas were at 6 feet. We decided we had to get out of there. It took us 2 1/2 hours to get back."
The boat they had been following, he said, kept going.
"The Gulf of Mexico can go from flat to rough very quickly," said Ed Chambers, an officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "You have to watch the cold fronts. You can be running along in 2-foot seas and within 15 minutes, be battling 8-footers."
No one knows why Cooper dropped anchor so far off Egmont Key on Saturday afternoon. He had asked another angler for coordinates for good amberjack fishing and might have been headed to a deep-water spring 50 miles offshore.
Maybe he and his friends were battling big fish when their boat capsized. Maybe their single engine had stalled. Maybe they were just trying to wait out the waves.
• • •
Cooper's wife wasn't too worried when he didn't come back by dark. The weekend before he and his pals were on the water from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m.
But by 9 p.m. Saturday, Rebekah Cooper thought she would have heard from her husband, at least a call back when he was in cell phone range, saying he was heading home.
She called his friend Brian Miller, whom he often fished with. Miller knew the coordinates where Cooper had been headed. About 1:30 a.m. Sunday, he called the Coast Guard and gave them those numbers.
Coast Guard Capt. Timothy Close, who commands Sector St. Petersburg, said rescue efforts began by typing the boat's size and route into a computer program — along with wind direction and speed, currents and drift data.
The computer spit out a 750-square-mile search range.
About 2 a.m., crews of a Coast Guard cutter and a 47-foot Coast Guard lifeboat began carving out rectangles in the dark, churning sea, watching heat-seeking infrared screens. Overhead, pilots of a Jayhawk helicopter and a C-130 search plane strapped on night vision goggles and flew similar patterns.
By sunrise, they still hadn't seen a sign.
Family members of the missing men gathered at the boat ramp all day Sunday, where Cooper's truck and trailer were still parked. They held each other and hoped as the Air Force, Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission and the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office joined the search. Six planes and another six cutters from as far as Alabama and Georgia criss-crossed the search area.
By Monday morning — 48 hours after the men had set out — the search had expanded to 16,000 square miles, from Citrus County to Charlotte County.
The Coast Guard had never received a distress signal from the missing men.
• • •
Just after noon, the crew of the cutter Tornado, from Pascagoula, Miss, spotted a tiny orange dot bobbing in the turquoise gulf. They pulled closer, and saw a man sitting upright on an overturned boat. He was wearing his life vest and had pulled a hood over his head.
He seemed to be clinging to the exposed propeller.
The cutter crew sent a smaller boat to rescue the man, who turned out to be Nick Schuyler. They gave him a dry blue Coast Guard uniform. A helicopter lowered a metal litter.
Schuyler was flown to Tampa General Hospital where he was in serious condition: dehydrated, cut and bruised — but able to tell his dad, "Hi, Pops!"
His mom, Marcia, passed out when she heard her son was still alive.
From his hospital bed, he told her that he survived by telling himself that she was not going to go to his funeral.
"That's what kept him hanging on," she said.
Schuyler grew up in the tiny city of Chardon, Ohio. In high school, he played football for the first two years, but lettered in basketball for three. He spent two years at Kent State, then moved to Tampa in 2006.
He wanted to play football so badly he gained 50 pounds and, in spring 2006, walked on as a fullback and defensive tackle. He had the uniform, suited up and practiced. But because he was a transfer student, he wasn't able to play right away and left the team that fall. It was a disappointment, said his dad, Stu.
In December, Schuyler graduated with a degree in communications, but his first job out of college was spotting for sweaty guys in weight rooms and counting their repetitions.
"So, you went to college for four years and you can count to 10," his dad teased him.
He had no idea then that his son's lifelong commitment to fitness would help save his life.
• • •
Once Schuyler was found alive, relatives of the other three fishermen kept praying.
"That keeps our spirits up, that keeps us real positive," Ray Sanchez, Cooper's cousin, said Monday afternoon. "We have three more to go."
Sanchez talked about how strong his cousin is, how tough football players have to be, how that will help them all.
"He's got to have a strong mind," Sanchez said. "It's just a big practice. This is not to stay on the team. This is to live."
Dark fell Monday night without a sign of the other three men. Coast Guard crews promised to continue searching. But after two days in frigid waves, the situation was seeming bleak.
Sanchez said the Coast Guard told him that the other three football players clung to that overturned boat for 12 to 16 hours. Schuyler must have seen them all slip away.
Times staff writers Alexandra Zayas, Emily Nipps, Brant James, Greg Auman and Leonora LaPeter Anton contributed to this report.
http://www.tampabay.com/
Last edited by a moderator:
Yeah, I think you and everybody else knew I ment hull but they were not smug enough to correct me.
Last edited by a moderator:
greedygoat
Footballguy
Is that French?
Mr Capicollo
Footballguy
Did you misspell "smart"?
Chances are pretty good he won't be able to recount much. He would have been dehydrated, fatigued and possibly delirious. On top of that I imagine it would have been pitch black dark so if anyone slipped off the boat in the dark no one would probably have known.
Warhogs
Footballguy
I know it is easier for us to sit back and ask why did they not do this or that since we were not in the situation but I am a bit surprised that they would not use a rope and attach themselves to the boat to keep from getting seperated. I assume they had some rope as I have never had a boat with no rope. Again, this is more hindsight but it would probably be a good idea to try to rope yourself to your floating object.
My first post in this thread but I have been following this story closely since it broke. I am at the point where I have lost almost all my hope for the 3 still missing but I sure hope we hear some good news. This is just terrible news.
My first post in this thread but I have been following this story closely since it broke. I am at the point where I have lost almost all my hope for the 3 still missing but I sure hope we hear some good news. This is just terrible news.
Browns Rule!
Footballguy
I totally was thinking the same thing. You obviously have plenty of fishing line, tie yourself to the boat.Warhogs said:
Burning Sensation
Footballguy
What happens if you are tied to the boat and it sinks?
-jb-
Footballguy
untie yourself?
Football Menace
Footballguy
I wonder if they searched under the boat.
Burning Sensation
Footballguy
If you have the ability to untie yourself, why not just hold onto the boat?
Autumn Wind
Footballguy
How easily is that done if your hands are numb and you're physically and psychologically drained?
FFFanatic71
Footballguy
Per ESPN, the latest is that the Coast Guard is decreasing the resources they've been using in the search and starting to tell the families to prepare for the worst. Bad news for sure.
bcr8f
Footballguy
They have rotated resources. They do have other jobs to do down there. They aren't giving up. Video here
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?i...ce=NFLHeadlines
Homer @ RJ
Footballguy
Yea these guys are gone. 4 days in the cold ocean with no food, no fresh water? Very, very sad.
4 days in the cold ocean with no food, no fresh water? Very, very sad.
greedygoat
Footballguy
Da Guru
Fair & Balanced
RIPIt is sad because I am sure that the planes and choppers had to fly over these guys at some point.
TheFanatic
Footballguy
Fine motor skills are greatly impaired in cold water. Or any cold for that matter. That being said, if they tied slip knots at least to each other that would make for a larger target to find. Everyone should've still clung to the boat, but tying to each other may have helped. Hard to give encouragement to a guy who has drifted off, just dropped his head into the water due to fatigue and then gulped in a bunch of seawater which will wreck his body even more than it already has been. Encouragement and morale are a big deal. The guy that survived kept saying that he wasn't going to have his mom attend his funeral. Very sad story...
Sonny Lubick Blowup Doll
Footballguy
Has Burning Sensation ever seen the ocean?
mex
Footballguy
Has Joe been in this thread at all? I know he deals with mainly ski boats, but even still I would like his opinion. I think all boats should be painted international red on the bottom vice white to help in the spotting of over turned boats. When you are looking down at the water and there are white caps everywhere it makes it hard to spot a white hulled boat.
Sad day, I'm glad the Coasties all made it back safe. God speed to all involved.
Sad day, I'm glad the Coasties all made it back safe. God speed to all involved.
Burning Sensation
Footballguy
Two of them.
Mr Capicollo
Footballguy
Homer @ RJ
Footballguy
Nothing was worse than Maurile talking about how he could overturn a boat; while four football players floated in the ocean because they couldn't do so.
Toxic Gatorade
Footballguy
Prayers to these guys' families. With the search being called off, even if they are still alive.........they won't be much longer out in the ocean.
southeastjerome
Footballguy
Very sad. GB their families.
Homer @ RJ
Footballguy
How sad. I feel terrible for them boys and their families. Just a sad, sad situation for all involved.
goldenchild
Footballguy
wow... very sad if true.i'd be surprised if this is how it actually went down. especially considering the fact that at least one of them had children. i can only imagine how that experience would affect me, but i would definitely want to fight as long as i could so i could see my kids again.
:sad:
steviey
Footballguy
I will throw my uneducated and uninformed two cents in here. I think it will come down to the fact that there was only room for one of the four to remain securely attached to the boat and at least partially out of the water. That one person was the one that was rescued and when they found him he was in the only spot that one could be expected to survive for so long (i.e. sitting up somewhat out of the water and hanging onto the motor). That boat basically became a table for one once it was overturned. Just hanging onto it but still being in the water would do you in after that long and you would give up eventually. Now, how or why the guy that was saved ended up with the prime spot remains to be seen. We may never know but that is my guess as to what happened.
Chicago Hooligan
Footballguy
Yes speculating about some sort of wacky murder scenario is definitely the smart and tactful thing to do at this point.
steviey
Footballguy
Say what?
Onions
Footballguy
Murder?!?!?WTF.
Chicago Hooligan
Footballguy
If I have misread you and that was just more random speculation then never mind.
steviey
Footballguy
I assume you were talking about my post. Yes it was just a random, speculative post. But when I look at the picture linked below, the first thing that comes to my mind is there simply was not enough room for all 4 of them to hang on. There is nothing to hang onto other than the motor. I was not insinuating anything about murder or anything. Although it would be one of those situations where one person could be saved and three could not so who knows what went through their minds and what their thought processes. Not pleasant to think about but I suppose when you are on the brink of death out in the ocean you would first try to save yourself.
LINK
LINK
Wow, basically only one spot anyone could have hoped to survive for over a few hours.Maybe he was just the quickest to get up there but it is a bit odd that the Coast Guard warned not to take the story he gave as fact.
Mr Capicollo
Footballguy
I'm pretty sure that Hitler actually jumped out with the Boy Scout's backpack, so the joke's on him!
Sonny Lubick Blowup Doll
Footballguy
Homer @ RJ said:
I still don't think that was Maurile, couldn't have been...someone jumped on his computer at lunch.Some classic stuff in here...RIPSimilar threads
