From Brittle Cold
Bob Jameson reached down and scratched his dog, Max, behind the ear. The Lab had settled comfortably at his feet as Jameson sat on a fiberglass storage box on the deck of the rolling boat. It was a brittle cold morning in January 2004."How many fox do you think you'll catch?" he asked Newt Sterling, the owner of the small flat-bottomed vessel called a garvey. They were motoring out of the Oyster Creek docks on the New Jersey shore, to Brigantine Island on the edge of the Atlantic.
"Eight or ten," Sterling replied. He was a professional trapper who also worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His job was to protect piping plovers from egg-eating predators on the low-lying coastal islands. He and his buddies Jameson and John Scagline were going to check the snares Sterling had set the day before.
Jameson stood, ducking beneath a metal rack that held a green canoe above the deck. A cold front was moving in from Canada, pushing raw, wet gusts across the bay that opened to the rolling, gray Atlantic. The salt spray rasped his face, but he and his friends were looking forward to a day in the salt marshes, a place they loved.
Eight miles south, Al Kurtz took his eyes off the dark water for a moment and gazed at the laser points of stars in the predawn sky. He was taking a group of hunters out in his 22-foot runabout to hunt geese and ducks. The weather conditions -- temperature at a near-freezing 35 degrees, wind blustering in from the west at 18 mph -- made for a good hunting day. The birds would be moving.
Jameson patted Max. Like the others, Jameson was dressed in heavy layered clothing and a camo jacket. He was concerned for the aging animal, lame in the hips from arthritis. They'd been constant companions the last eight years and it felt good, even in the biting cold weather, to be out on the water now with the dog beside him.
Jameson, 52, was a professional wildlife damage-control agent. At six feet, 220 pounds, with shoulders built by weight-training, he towered over his five-foot-three-inch buddy Sterling. But Sterling, one of the last Jersey "Pineys," men who make their living from the Pine Barrens and adjacent salt marshes, was as tough as oiled rope and leather. His lined, brown, bearded face showed a lifetime spent in the wind and sun.
John Scagline, 54, a taxidermist and trapper who often worked with Jameson, was a lean and fit five-foot-ten, but also a severe diabetic who wore an insulin pump.
By the time Sterling steered the boat into Great Bay, the eastern sky was bright red, the traditional sailor's sign for storms. The tide was full-moon high. At 7:45 a.m. they were 300 yards west of Egg Island, and Sterling was quartering into swells to reduce pitching and rolling. Then it happened.
Among the normal waves was a rogue. The 16-foot garvey slid into the wave's deep frontal trough. Then, motor revving, it rose upward, exposing its right side and flat bottom to the wind. At that moment a powerful gust hit the boat and rolled it onto its left side as smoothly as a roller coaster going into a banked turn. And then the wind knocked the garvey all the way over, dumping everyone into the frigid water of Little Bay.
Trapped beneath the garvey, Sterling and Jameson fought their way to the surface. Max and Scagline had been thrown clear. All were gasping from the stunning shock of the 45-degree water.
The stern sank until the outboard motor snagged the bay bottom some seven feet below, anchoring the boat in place. A section of the overturned bow, about 5 feet by 4 feet, projected out of the water. Sputtering, coughing, the men swam frantically to the overturned hull and clung to the sides.
There was not a boat in sight.
"What are the chances we'll be seen?" Jameson asked.
"Not good," Sterling said. Anguish replaced initial shock. "I'm sorry. I killed you guys today." The thought that he was responsible for his friends' deaths overwhelmed him.
"It's nobody's fault," Jameson replied. They were all outdoorsmen. They knew what the risks were, and they knew their odds. "It was an accident."
Holding On
Survival in cold water depends on two key environmental factors: wind speed and water temperature. And a third more subtle factor -- physical conditioning and will. With diabetes, Scagline was at the most risk. In 45-degree water, survival could range from 30 minutes to about three hours.Sterling and Jameson hoisted themselves onto the pitching hull. Weighed down by his Gore-Tex parka, bib overalls and hip boots, Scagline couldn't lift his legs out of the water. And from their bobbing, precarious perch, his friends didn't have enough leverage to lift him.
Max frantically clawed at the slippery surface and Jameson was finally able to pull him aboard. He wrapped his arms around the dog.
No one panicked. Conserving energy and keeping positive would be crucial. "Everybody stay with the boat," Sterling said. "It's our only chance." They scanned the horizon for help -- there was none.
They waited. Then without warning, Max jumped off the hull and swam away. Jameson yelled for him to return, but he kept going until he disappeared from view. Jameson was distraught. At his age, and with arthritic hips, Max couldn't survive in the frigid bay.
Half an hour passed. The men were losing hope. Scagline's speech was slurring. Staring blankly ahead, he began speaking to phantoms. "I love you, Cara. I love you, Holly," he said, as if his daughter and wife were there.
"We have to get him out of the water," Jameson said. But how? Shivering, stiff fingered, weighed down by waterlogged clothing themselves, they couldn't get him to budge.
"The canoe!" Sterling said. "We have to dive for it."
Burning what little energy they had would lessen their own chances of survival -- but that wasn't a consideration. Sterling dove first, knife in hand, searching for the line that held the canoe. Visibility was zero. At first he sawed on a steel cable and came away with bleeding hands. Finally locating the bowline, he dove repeatedly and kept sawing away until he cut it.
Then it was Jameson's turn. He went under several times hunting for the stern line. When he sliced through, the canoe popped to the surface, and the two men rolled it upright. The paddles were not inside. They shoved the canoe over to Scagline, who by now could barely move his arms or use his hands. How could they get him in? Sterling steadied one side of the canoe; Jameson got his hands under Scagline's armpits and heaved him upward. Jameson is a powerful man, but without a place to stand, each time he pushed Scagline up, he drove himself under the water. Eventually, he got his friend halfway in. Sterling grabbed Scagline's arms and pulled from the other side of the canoe. But the canoe rolled and dumped Scagline headfirst into the bay.
As Jameson yanked him to the surface, the alarm on Scagline's insulin pump went off. The cold was draining the batteries -- and with it, the diabetic's life support.
Miles away, sports guide Kurtz, who had earlier dropped off his hunting party in the high reeds at the north end of the Absecon Bay, returned to pick them up and take them to another blind in Little Bay. The view was flat to the horizon -- low islands covered with knee-high salt grass, broken only by an occasional cedar tree. Kurtz kept a sharp lookout, as is the custom of baymen, for changes in the weather or anything unusual in the water or onshore.
Scagline appeared to be dying. "Bob," he said, "I'm slipping."
"Don't worry, buddy," Jameson replied. "I've got hold of you."
Freeing the canoe and trying to get Scagline in it had taken over an hour, and Jameson and Sterling were exhausted. Sterling's fingers were stiff. With difficulty, he tied the canoe's line loosely to a two-inch metal ring on the boat, just above the water.
Scagline was now unresponsive. His limbs were rigid. Having no strength left to lift him, his buddies tied his left hand to the bow ring so he would not sink, but his head kept flopping forward into the water. To keep him from drowning, Jameson straddled the bow, reached down with his left hand, grabbed Scagline's right -- and lifted. After a while, the strain on his shoulder felt like his ligaments were ripping. He held on for over an hour.
During that time, at first unnoticed, the canoe slipped its knot and floated away. It finally lodged in the marsh grass on Egg Island some 300 yards distant -- and with it their last hope seemed to have drifted away.
The Right Angle
The tide was still full as Al Kurtz brought his boat carefully down the sound. The wind, now gusting over 30 mph, felt like the breath off a glacier, and the bay was covered with whitecaps.Waves rocked the hull of the boat and knocked Sterling and Jameson off their perch repeatedly. They would climb back on and Jameson would take hold of Scagline's hand. He urged him to "Stay alive," but as time passed, he thought he was holding the hand of a dead man. Still he held on.
Sterling took a short tally of his life. He had no regrets. No enemies. No resentments. He felt sad to leave his friends, but he had lived the life he wanted. It was a stark, beautiful winter day. He looked out over the choppy bay and the salt marshes he loved. He was ready.
And then he spotted a small form moving in the water.
"Bob," he shouted, "I see your dog!"
Jameson looked up. Was it possible? Max had been gone so long. He swam directly to the boat. They pulled him aboard and Jameson wrapped his arms around the Lab. Where had he been? Why did he come back? It was impossible to know, but his reappearance lifted their hopes. They all huddled together against the cold.
At about 10 a.m., Kurtz set up his hunters in a new blind, and then scanned the bay to the east. A green, shiny dot was blinking regularly on the horizon like a beacon.
He looked through his binoculars. Something green against the brown swath of winter grass. Something out of place. It's an unwritten law among baymen that anything unusual on the water should be investigated immediately. It might be someone in trouble.
Kurtz motored over a mile before he identified the object as an empty canoe caught in the grass. Where had it come from?
He was within 100 yards of the overturned garvey before he saw it and the men.
Sterling heard the motor first, and saw the boat approaching. "We're saved!" he cried.
Jameson's senses were fading. He turned but didn't see or hear anything until Kurtz pulled up beside them.
It was 10:45 a.m. Kurtz radioed "Mayday," pulled the men aboard and headed for the nearest Coast Guard station.
The friends had been in the water three hours. They had gone the limit. They had stayed together. And they had survived.
On the shore, ambulances were waiting to rush the men to Atlantic City Medical Center.
Sterling could barely walk; Jameson and Scagline could not. Scagline's core temperature was 78 degrees. His body was rigid, his eyes yellow, his liver shutting down.
But all they needed was to get warm, and astonishingly, all of them recovered quickly. Even Scagline, his insulin pump checked and working, was released the next day.
A remarkable series of events had led to their rescue. The heavy clothing weighed them down but provided insulation. The tide that took their canoe away carried it into the grass where it became a flickering beacon. If the sun had not been at just the right angle when Kurtz passed by, he might never have seen the reflection from the canoe. If Max had not come back to give them encouragement, or if the three had not stuck together, they might have died separately. But instead, their effort -- spent willingly for each other -- saved them.