3 p.m. Port Lucaya, the Bahamas,
103 nautical miles from Fort Lauderdale, Florida
After sailing around the Bahamas for a week on a 50-foot sloop called Zephyrus, we headed back to Fort Lauderdale. The forecast for the return trip called for rough conditions: rain, plus six- to eight-foot swells with 10 to 20 knots blowing from the east-coming from behind us, in other words, so that the waves would be pushing our boat toward Florida like a surfboard.
The crew were seven students from Ohio State's Fisher College of Business: Mike, Eric, Rob, Ashley, Kelley, Kennia, and me. We were a close-knit group, having worked on several teams together over five quarters at Fisher. The other member of our crew was the captain, Arty, my best friend from our undergraduate days at Brown. He's 32, and he's been sailing since he was six. I had made this same trip with Arty in 1995 on an undergrad spring break. This was his eighth Gulf Stream crossing.
With the wind and waves in our favor, Arty decided to kill the engine and make the trip under sail. We had motor-sailed on the way over from Florida and had not done any pure sailing during the entire week, so it seemed like a glorious way to conclude the trip. We now expected to reach Fort Lauderdale around 3 a.m. One by one, members of the crew returned to their cabins to read or take naps. I lay down around seven, nodding off to the sound of the water rushing alongside the boat. One of my last waking thoughts was that the sound seemed much louder than on our way over. Because we were surfing, I figured. I drifted off.
10 p.m. I awoke to people talking. The voices were loud, especially considering that most of us had conked out. I peeked out and saw Rob and Mike looking into the engine housing, in the middle of the main cabin. Rob said they'd heard a kind of whup-whup-whup noise from the engine area, but now the sound was gone. From his position behind the wheel, about five steps up from the main cabin, Arty told us to check the bilge for water. The bilge is a kind of crawlspace in the hull, covered by removable floorboards. Rob, Mike, and I lifted up several of the boards: bone-dry. I returned to my cabin. Rob was a mechanical engineer; he'd know if there was trouble. There was no water in the bilge. There was nothing to worry about.
1 a.m. 20 miles offshore. The sound of water. It sounded like it was sloshing around near my head-like, inside the boat. I felt around to see if a hatch had leaked, but the bed was dry. I switched on the light. Maybe the head was leaking? I lifted the toilet seat. The bowl was dry, as it should be on a boat. Then I checked the bilge, and there I found the problem: seven inches of water and more flowing in. "Arty, we're taking on water down here." "What?" Arty sounded a little startled, but not overly concerned. "How much? Where? Turn on the bilge pumps." As Rob and Mike ran down from the deck, I went to turn on the bilge pumps. The first one already seemed to be on, but it wasn't working. I flicked the switch on the second one, and it started to hum. "Arty," I hollered up. "The pumps are on, but only one's working." "Yeah, and the water's still gaining on us!'' shouted Kelley from her part of the bilge. By now Eric, Kennia, and Ashley had joined us-everybody was up. "Rob, get up here and steer the boat," Arty said. "Mikus, get on the manual bilge pump." Arty pulled a metal handle from a storage locker and attached it to a manual pump next to the steering wheel. I began pumping as hard as I could and felt a tremendous rush of relief as I saw the bilge water flowing back into the ocean. That feeling lasted about 30 seconds, before Arty climbed back on deck. "We're still taking on water!" he yelled. "Everybody, get back down there and start to bail. Just bail out as much as you can. Rob, see if you can find the leak."
1:15 a.m. 18 miles offshore. "It's still getting worse," Kelley said. Everyone was filling red 16-ounce plastic cups with water and dumping it into the blue five-gallon bucket. "Just keep bailing," said Arty, a phrase that would become his mantra. "Grab buckets, pots, pans-whatever you can. Someone get on the radio. Turn to channel 16 and call the Coast Guard. Rob, give them our coordinates."Perhaps out of boredom, near the start of our vacation Rob had sat down with the GPS manual and taught himself how to use the device. Throughout the trip we teased him about how he wouldn't go anywhere, not even to a bar at night, without the manual. Thank God. Ashley jumped on the radio and called the Coast Guard. "Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is the vessel Zephyrus. We're taking on water and we need help." From where I was sitting the response was barely audible. At that moment, I realized the pressure I had felt in the manual bilge pump was gone-it had stopped working, probably because it was clogged. "Tell them we need a pump!" Arty hollered. After a staticky response, Ashley pulled back from the radio. "What did they say?" Arty asked. "They said we should put on life jackets."
1:35 a.m.16 miles offshore. The water was now several inches above bilge-not even ankle-high, but getting there. The group devised a system for bailing: Kelley scooped water with a white plastic bowl and passed it to me, perched on the steps, where I could dump the water overboard. Eric and Mike stood in the deepest part of the bilge, where Eric filled a big cooking pot and passed it to Mike, who dumped it out an open hatch. Ashley continued to radio. This was our system. It was important that we had one, because it took our minds off fear. Maybe because we were down below, all together, unable to see the cold, black expanse of ocean and sky around our little boat, I don't remember anyone seeming afraid. (Except Ashley, but she just kept working.) The boat was riding 12-foot swells, and we kept losing our balance. The detached floorboards were floating around our shins. With each wave, the water gathered at one end of the boat and then rushed back at us. Without the boards in place, we were slipping on the uneven floor, turning ankles and banging knees. We were falling on top of one another and spilling water, which slowed the process. Then: "Arty, something's burning down here," Eric yelled. Just keep bailing. The water will put it out." One more thing to worry about. Meanwhile, the radio had gone silent. "Maybe you should bail," I suggested to Ashley. She grabbed the 10-gallon garbage can from the galley and went to work. She and Kelley took turns feeding me bucketfuls to heave overboard.
1:50 a.m. Suddenly we could hear a scratchy voice over the radio. Ashley grabbed the receiver."They can't get a boat out to us," she said a minute later. "They want to know if we have a dinghy and how big it is. And they want to know how much time we think we'll have before we sink."I told Ashley to tell them we would sink in 20 to 30 minutes. I didn't know if this was true or not but, ever the good MBA candidate, I wanted to create an incentive for the Coast Guard to act more quickly. "What about the dinghy?" "It'll hold all of us," Arty said. That was an optimistic answer. First, the dinghy was strapped across the bow, which meant that in order to get it someone would have to climb up and untie it. Not easy in these conditions. More to the point, maybe three or four of us could sit inside; the rest would have to hang onto the sides. Not that it would really matter. With the 10- to 12-foot swells we were surfing through, the dinghy would flip in minutes. The cabin lights began to flicker. "Arty, we're losing power," Rob hollered up. "Ashley!" shouted Arty. "Get on the radio, give the Coast Guard our coordinates, and tell them we're about to lose radio contact." Ashley repeated the message until the lights flickered off and a final cloud of smoke hissed from the navigation control panel. Our power was gone. We bailed by the glow of a single flashlight, and we weren't making much progress. We were bailing like crazy, and the water was still filling the main cabin and was above our knees. Kelley was up toward the bow, and it was almost at her waist. We started to evaluate our process. It didn't take us long to identify some bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Collectively, we decided to reorganize. We rearranged ourselves. Kelley swapped her bowl for Ashley's can. Things began to change. It seemed we were holding the water to a draw. "We're gonna do this!" Mike shouted. Our plight had turned into a bona fide case study. I wish there had been a bunch of recruiters watching us.
2 a.m. 12 miles offshore. Two tiny lights appeared in the distance, one approaching on each side of the Zephyrus. Helicopters!Kelley's resumŽ included a stint in the Marine Corps. She climbed on deck and fired off flares.
2:20 a.m. A helicopter was hovering about a half-mile behind us. It was clear from the way it was flashing the beam of its searchlight around that it had no idea where we were. At that moment, Eric asked a good question: "Will our cell phones work?" Seconds later, a 911 operator patched Arty through to the Coast Guard. "Tell the pilot we're out here!" he shouted. "Tell him we're going to fire our last flare!" The helicopter pilot still hadn't spotted us. Fortunately, a nearby barge had seen our flare and radioed in an estimate of our location. Within a couple of minutes, the helicopter was hovering above us. When the pilot turned on his spotlight, it was like daytime. Later we learned that the pilot had planned to lower a water pump and a battery, but when he looked down and saw all those hands attached to bowls and buckets throwing out water from every hatch frantically, he figured we were better off bailing than trying to catch a pump. He was right. The Coast Guard later determined that if we had stopped bailing, we would have sunk in 20 minutes. "Keep bailing!" Arty ordered.
2:45 a.m. 7 miles offshore. I peered over the bow. I could just make out the lights of Fort Lauderdale. Suddenly, the wind shifted, and a big gust caused the boat to tack-that is, the boom swung around, and the boat changed direction unexpectedly. The sudden violent motion threw everyone to the floor. "I think we just snapped the boom," Arty said. We could no longer sail to shore. He added, "I'm sorry, guys. I'm so sorry this is happening."
3 a.m. Arty was inspecting the boom when I noticed a boat about 200 yards away, trying to reach us, bashing its way through the towering waves. It was a big yellow rubber boat-it looked like an oversized bathtub toy with the words 'Sea Tow' printed on the side. A guy with long hair and overalls was behind the wheel. "I'm going to hand you a pump," he shouted a few minutes later when he bumped up against us. More easily said than done. It took three attempts, and each failure was agonizing-the boats would bob away from each other and need to be realigned. Finally we managed to haul a pair of pumps aboard, but that wasn't the end of it. They were useless without power. "We need a battery!" shouted Arty to the other captain. And so with the rain falling and the boats bobbing and ours rapidly taking on water, we worked to manhandle a 30-pound battery off the Sea Tow. Finally we tied our boats together, and with one hand holding a line on to the Zephyrus, I hoisted the battery onto the stern. I threw the pump hoses below and yelled for someone to submerge them in the water, and then Rob helped me attach the pumps to the battery. We both felt a few electric shocks from touching the battery with wet hands, a sensation that was unpleasant but not unwelcome. The pumps whirred to life and began shooting water over the side. It was a beautiful sight.
4 a.m. 2.5 miles offshore About six or seven more boats from Sea Tow and the Coast Guard had gathered around us. The pumps were working, but we still needed a tow into port. The Sea Tow captain threw Arty a line, and at the same time a second Sea Tow pulled up and heaved a line at me. At that moment, the rain grew heavier, pelting our faces sideways, like bullets. We didn't mind. We were tied securely to two seaworthy boats. We knew, at last, that we were safe.
4:30 a.m. At the dock, the Coast Guard sailors and the captains from both Sea Tow boats came aboard. They discovered that the whupping was coming from below the motor. A shaft is supposed to attach the motor to the propeller, and ours was missing. What was left was about a one-inch hole in the bottom of the boat where the shaft used to be. The Sea Tow captains explained that a shaft falling off a boat is a freak occurrence. It happens, but not that often.
Three months later Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University Back at school, we were the talk of the campus. I can't tell you how many times I told the story at lunch, in class, in group meetings. One person I never told was my mother, for fear she would pass out, but the dean of Fisher College took care of that. At the beginning of his speech at graduation, he briefly told the entire graduating class, our friends and families-and my mother-about the courageous Fisher students who had narrowly survived a sinking boat on their way back from the Bahamas. That's how my mother found out. Over the past year and a half, Mike, Eric, Rob, Ashley, Kelley, Kennia, and I had learned how to work effectively in teams. We had learned how to work under extreme pressure and devise solutions. On the boat, we created an operation and recognized the slack and the bottlenecks. We revised our process until we were able to work at our fullest and most efficient capacity. It was like the ultimate case competition, but the end result was real: survival. I know in my heart that had I been in this situation with any other group of friends who were not MBAs, I would not be here today. I'm serious. I can only imagine what would have happened if we were all law students. We probably still would have been arguing as the Zephyrus slipped under the waves.
