Patricia Kilday Hart
Troubled Waters
What caused Texas A&M’s racing sailboat to overturn in the Gulf of Mexico, costing a heroic crew member his life and plunging his shipmates into an angry ocean?
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Meanwhile, Conway and the other two crew members, Joe Savana and Ross Busby, were being tossed about by monster waves that were carrying them away from the boat. Conway shouted to the others to see if they could reach the boat’s strobe light, horseshoe lifesaver, or lifeboat, which were all underwater. They couldn’t. With the wind howling and the waves impeding his vision, Conway was dangerously close to being blown beyond shouting and sight distance. He called for the students near the boat to swim toward him. Coast Guard training had drilled into Conway two important survival rules for distressed sailors: Stay together, and stay with the boat. But as Conway would tell me later, “I had to pick one from column A or column B.” Their survival now depended upon tying themselves together with belts and sharing four life jackets among five men. Coughing, snorting, and gagging on salt water, the crew formed a group and slowly drifted away from the doomed Cynthia Woods, clinging to one another and the dim hope that Stone had found a way out of the overturned boat.
The Houston-Galveston sector of the U.S. Coast Guard commonly juggles multiple response calls, especially on weekends, and Saturday June 7 was no exception. A fishing boat off the coast of Louisiana had reported a man overboard, and local authorities called to ask for assistance with a jet-skier on Lake Conroe. But it was the call that didn’t come that indicated trouble aboard the Cynthia Woods. The crew was supposed to check in by satellite phone at 8 a.m., but the time came and went with no word. Around 8:15 the sailing team’s designated emergency contact called the Coast Guard, which began trying to reach the boat by marine radio. By 9:45, a patrol boat had been launched out of Freeport to begin a search, but the high waves forced the 41-foot vessel to return to shore. A jet was dispatched from Corpus Christi, but it was delayed when it hit a bird.
A second jet resumed the search. At 2:30 p.m., the pilot reported spotting the bright-blue hull of an overturned boat. The Coast Guard called A&M to ask if the boat’s hull was indeed blue. With the accident confirmed, Captain Bill Diehl, who was coordinating the rescue operation from the Coast Guard offices in Galena Park, shifted the focus to hunting for survivors. The operation involved, at various times, three airplanes, three helicopters, and an 87-foot Coast Guard cutter searching for the crew over 3,800 square miles. Computer models were consulted to predict where the crew members might have drifted, as well as how long they would be able to survive in the 80-degree water: 36 hours.
With the sun beating down and salt water burning his sinuses, Conway kept up the crew’s spirits by detailing Coast Guard protocol for searches. At one point, a Coast Guard jet flew so close they could see the pilot, but he failed to spot them. “That was hard,” Conway told me. But he advised the boys that a jet was unlikely to be their salvation. Helicopters were coming, he said, and they flew lower and slower. The searchers would continue for at least a week, he assured them.
The power of positive thinking became the fifth life preserver. The young men talked to seagulls, joking, “Hey, Lassie, go tell the Coast Guard Timmy fell into a big well.” Fish nibbled at their legs, and when one crew member theorized that no large sharks lived in the Gulf waters, Conway did not disabuse him of the notion.
The Cynthia Woods had flipped so suddenly that there had been no time to radio for help or deploy the life raft. The only asset they had was a $7 flashlight clipped to Conway’s life vest. Another night fell, but in some ways darkness made the search easier. During the day, whitecaps and the reflecting sun made it difficult to detect the bobbing heads of survivors. “It’s like walking across a football field looking for six pennies,” Diehl said later.
With a cloudy sky and only a sliver of moon, the Gulf was black except for the occasional oil rig lights. Then, at about 2 a.m. Sunday, a helicopter pilot “caught a light.” It was Conway’s flashlight. Circling back, the pilot could see the reflection of their life preservers and called in, “We got them!” For a brief moment, as Diehl would later tell me, “It was like Christmas.” Then someone asked, “How many?” When the answer was five, Diehl knew his search mission wasn’t over.
The survivors were taken to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston for treatment of severe sunburn and dehydration, and Diehl learned from them that Stone had pushed the boys out of the hull. He regarded this as “a strong indication” that Stone had remained in the boat.
Sailors love gadgets, and one of the nifty innovations in the sailing world is a GPS sensor, one of which had been mounted on each boat in the regatta and linked to a Web site so that family and friends could track the boat’s progress across the Gulf of Mexico—as well as post their comments on an online message board. The conversational thread about the unfolding tragedy of the Cynthia Woods placed the reader in the living rooms of grieving families as their worst fears were confirmed.
The entries had begun at 4:34 a.m. Saturday with a query: “Any word from Cynthia Woods? She seems to be suddenly parked and drifting slowly towards the coast.” Throughout the day, more details emerged: the satellite phone call that never came, the progress of the Coast Guard search, the sighting of the overturned boat, the rescue. Finally, at 6:55 p.m. Sunday, Eric Stone, Roger’s fourteen-year-old son, who had been contributing to the discussion board, posted: “He’s gone. Roger was found in the boat. He was a hero. He did his job as safety officer. He got those kids off the boat. He’s in a better place now. Thanks to everyone who prayed and prayed and prayed. I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am to you guys. Keep my mom, my sister, me, and the entire Stone family in your prayers.”
Sixteen of 26 boats completed the trip to Veracruz; the rest sought shelter along the Texas coast. The ruined hull of the Cynthia Woods was towed to Freeport, and Texas A&M officials promised a thorough investigation. Within days, newspaper reports and sailing blogs carried criticisms of the keel design of the Cynthia Woods and reported that the boat had been donated by Houston oilman George Mitchell, who had purchased it from his son’s company, Cape Fear Yacht Works. (Cynthia Woods is Mitchell’s wife’s maiden name.) Some designers theorized that the keel, the underwater fin that stabilizes a boat as it heels over in the wind, was too heavy. It was also confirmed by the university that the boat had run aground as many as six times the year before and had undergone repairs to the keel. For Jeff and me, the race that had begun amid great anticipation ended at Roger Stone’s funeral, at Clear Lake United Methodist Church. The Reverend Tony Vinson talked about Stone’s heroism and about Conway and the remaining crew members, how they’d survived by sharing their life jackets, and holding one another close. We can all learn from their ordeal, he said, if we view their experience as a metaphor for the way we should live our lives: sharing, lifting up our fellow man, in life’s treacherous seas.
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