They Call Home After 21-Day Ordeal at Sea : 2 Women Believed Dead--and Then the Phone Rang

The Schwartz and Berkowitz families of Rancho Palos Verdes got an unexpected telephone call from Indonesia on Monday morning.

It was from their daughters.

That’s why it was so unexpected. They had thought the women were dead.

Judith Gale Schwartz and Rickey Ellen Berkowitz, both 27, and friends since childhood, had been reported missing--and presumed drowned--after their boat disappeared in the treacherous Sunda Strait region of Indonesia more than three weeks ago.

“We really lost hope when they called the search off (last Wednesday),” said Judith’s father, Richard Schwartz, principal of Dana Junior High School in San Pedro. “Logic took over. Logic would say that anybody lost 21 days couldn’t fight all odds.”

But logic was wrong. The two women and their Indonesian boatmen had been drifting with the tide--surviving for 21 days on a little food, half a cup of rainwater, and toothpaste , after their 16-foot outboard motorboat broke down on a 40-mile voyage to Udjong Kulon National Park on Java.

A large-scale search involving the U.S. Air Force, the Indonesian Coast Guard and local fishermen was abandoned after it was determined that currents would have carried a disabled boat into the Indian Ocean, where it would be at the mercy of 20-foot monsoon waves.

“We knew they were gone,” Schwartz said.

But it was the angry sea that actually saved them. Their boat disintegrated and they--along with the two boatmen--were forced to swim for their lives. They finally washed safely ashore at Benkulu, in southern Sumatra.

“They are in amazingly good health and extremely good spirits . . . sunburned and dehydrated, but other than that, OK,” Susan Wood, American consul general in Jakarta, said by telephone.

The consular service contacted the families Sunday night.

And then came the telephone call from Indonesia at 2 a.m. Monday.

It was a terrible connection, Schwartz said--a radio-telephone patch--but “she (Judith) sounded terrific.”

Judith, who teaches handicapped children in San Mateo, and Rickey, a hospital administrator in Pasadena, both had extensive outdoor experience, which helped them to survive, Schwartz explained. They had already gone white-water rafting and volcano climbing in New Zealand and Australia during this trip--which they had been planning for years.

“They could depend on each other,” Schwartz said.

He said the women were scheduled to fly to Jakarta today, then on to the United States later this week.

“It was one miracle after another,” Schwartz said. “I wouldn’t call myself religious, but I have been thinking very good thoughts and maybe this will help develop more of it. I don’t know. . . .”