by Katie Hendrick | May 27, 2016
Coquina: Beached Boats
Finding a washed-up vessel on Florida sands is unusual, but not as strange as the forces that may have brought them there. Below, the mysterious circumstances of an East Coast dinghy reunion and a possible refugee raft discovery
LOST
Feb. 2016
Around 3 a.m. on February 13, roughly 15 miles east of New Smyrna Beach, Jim Wilds, a Michigan native, and his 8-meter MacWester sailboat were startled by a rush of air, then the sound of brief but heavy rainfall. “I couldn’t see anything,” says Wilds, but he suspected he heard a whale’s blowhole.
Next, a jolt pitched the boat 45 degrees starboard. Wilds face-planted on the deck, breaking his glasses, then got up and checked for damage. No water got in, but he lost a sail and his dinghy, which was tethered by an 80-foot rope. Bleary eyed, he navigated to Ponce Inlet, dropped anchor and slept.
When Wilds awoke he shared his whale of a tale. Representatives at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission confirmed that right and humpback whales migrate through the area and sent the severed dinghy rope to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for testing to determine what he encountered. (Results are still pending.)
On February 19, Wilds was reconnected with his dinghy, which landed on Ormond Beach.
FOUND
Nov. 2015
While walking her rescue dog, Buddy, on Ponte Vedra Beach Thanksgiving weekend, Trudy Clark spotted some unusually large debris. “You could call it a boat,” she says of the rickety, rusted structure she estimates to be 28 feet long and 12 feet wide. “There were oil drums cut in half and welded together.” Peeking inside, she saw crushed water bottles and dirty shoes. “I couldn’t help but think how badly someone had to want to leave where they’d come from to get in this contraption.”
The prevailing belief among bystanders was that the drum boat carried refugees, though authorities could not confirm this.
“It’s not rare for vessels to wash up on North Florida shores,” says Assistant Chief Patrol Agent Frank Miller with U.S. Border Patrol. “That’s the way the water flows. Boats that leave from Cuba and the Bahamas can [even] wind up in South Carolina.”
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