No doubt you are all familiar with the loss of two young fishermen off the Florida coast a few days ago. Their boat was located, adrift and capsized after a squall, but there was no sign of them. Search and rescue operations continue, but every hour that passes without their sighting can only lead to pessimism. The US Coast Guard is probably the best in the world for this sort of mission, with training, resources and experience second to none. If anyone can find these boys, it is them.

It is reported that the young men were very experienced seamen, familiar with those waters, and that they were in excellent physical condition. The warm water temperatures and normally placid sea conditions are in their favor. Working against them is the flow of the Gulf Stream current, whose northerly set is about 3 1/2 knots off the Atlantic Coast. An overturned boat will drift differently than a swimmer because it is also subject to wind action, but the maritime authorities are familiar with this and will have made allowances for it. I don’t have any more information than any of you about this case, but I am familiar with the area and boats, so perhaps my speculations will be useful if any of you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

The boat is the first line of defense, and theirs is a pretty standard offshore fisherman, designed for these waters and with a good reputation for seaworthiness, if properly handled. It is designed for high speed operation in rough water, but it is an open boat and can be swamped in a heavy sea or if maneuvered improperly in a seaway. I am confident these young men knew how to handle their craft appropriately in the conditions they encountered, but any boat and any sailor can be overwhelmed.

Although a sport fisherman of this type has plenty of power to handle any but the strongest wave action, if they had experienced engine trouble it would have been another story. These boats are nimble and powerful, but without an engine to push them their hull shape, designed for pounding through heavy seas, is awkward and clumsy. With the engine weight concentrated astern, and all the buoyancy up forward, they have a tendency to turn their stern into the weather when drifting. Like a weathervane pivoting in the wind, it turns the stern, the lowest and most vulnerable part of the hull, directly into the waves. In a heavy sea, the boat can be easily flooded because the freeboard (distance from the deck to the waterline) is higher in the broad bows which are lifted up to act as the fletching of an arrow. The hull is unballasted, with no heavy keel to help keep it upright and v-shaped for cutting through waves when motoring at speed up on a plane. But when not in motion, being of relatively shallow draft, it has little ability to resist rolling. Unlike a sailboat hull, which is designed to take care of itself when adrift and lie a-hull to the seas, the open runabout is helpless without power.

A floating hull is more easily spotted from the air than a swimmer, so I am certain that these young men had the experience and wit to stay with the boat at all costs. Even if they had been close enough to shore to believe they could swim for it, it still would have made more sense for one to stay with the boat while the other swam to land. Of course, it is impossible to speculate exactly what happened, but they would have known not to both try and swim ashore as long as the boat was floating. However, they might have been separated from the craft involuntarily. Or they may have not had confidence the boat would stay afloat and they knew every hour that passed carried them miles away from home. One or both might have been injured, or thrown clear of the wreck. We just don’t know.

I wish them the best of luck. They looked like good kids and good seamen.