When Judy Brown swam to the shore and walked up to the beachside bar she was calm. Mary Henson remarked at the strength of the woman who asked to use a phone, but Brown had already made a couple calls before Henson put it all together.
“I said, ‘well you’re the one they’ve probably been looking for,’” Henson recalled Tuesday.
She was one of them. Brown and her Richard Smith, of
Smith and his ‘signifcant other’ Brown had taken a personal watercraft to
“When we left we didn’t realize they had stayed on the beach,” Smith said.
Smith was driving and he noticed their companions weren’t around. It was about 4:30 p.m. Smith, an inexperienced personal watercraft operator, was attempting to turn the craft around when it capsized.
They couldn’t right it.
Brown and Smith are in better-than-average shape than their peers, they said, but Smith later credited their survival with their ability to remain calm as they hung on to the craft for the next several hours; Smith said he takes after his mother’s side of the family that way.
Brown said she’s less patient than Smith, but she agreed with him, mostly.
“We kept our cool,” she said. “Actually, I fussed at him.”
Their companions had returned to
MBPD put a boat in water to search. So did the Gulf
“Everybody on the beach knew that we were looking for them,” Norris said.
But, for several hours Smith and Brown hugged that capsized personal watercraft, which, unfortunately, was jet black underneath. They watched rescuers pass by and overhead, but could not flag them down. They knew people were looking for them.
They had life preservers, but they didn’t have any kind of emergency signal. They had been in the water for hours when the sun started to set and Brown made the decision to swim for shore.
“After a few hours — I’m a social worker, so — I said I’ve got to do something,” she said. “I’m not very patient so…”
She considered taking off her life vest, but when she did she realized how weary she’d become and left it on. It took about an hour to get to shore.
“I don’t know how many miles I swam,” she said.
Smith stayed behind with the personal watercraft for a while longer.
“I was worried about her more than anything,” he said. “I was just praying to be honest with you.”
After a while Smith decided to swim for shore too, but he couldn’t make it in. The currents kept pulling him out. From the water he could see flashing lights.
“I saw the blue lights up on the beach, and I knew that she had made it, and they found her,” he said.
She tried to direct rescuers to the general area where she’d left Smith and the personal watercraft, but Smith had started swimming. It was about an hour before he saw a passing search party and called out to them. They heard him.
Smith was checked out by medical professionals. It had been about six hours since they went into the water. He was exhausted but fine.
By then, Brown had been checked out and cleared too. She was at the motel, where staff brought her blankets, food and Hensen got her something to drink. She was heartened by the community’s response.
“Really it’s a much better world than I thought it was sometimes,” she said.
Brown was pretty casual about the experience. She called it “just one of those things that happens.”
But FWC spokesman Stan Kirkland thought it was more than that. Swimming to shore against the tide was impressive, and finding a swimmer in the Gulf after dark was more than that.
“It’s just a miracle that they found him,”