Shipwrecked Strangers Reunited as Friends

The last time this group gathered, nine of them had just been shipwrecked on a Catalina Island shore and were drenched and shivering, three others had dived into the churning water to rescue them, five others had just watched their own boat sink and the rest had been sharing their camp food with the shipwreck victims.

On a recent Saturday, they gathered in the comfortable and dry confines of a Balboa Peninsula home to don identical T-shirts with the slogan “Shipwreck Catalina,” munch on cake decorated to look like a life preserver, make jokes about Gilligan’s Island and watch videotaped news accounts of their ordeal.

The occasion was a reunion of the shipwreck crews and their rescuers, four weeks after a Memorial Day weekend storm destroyed three boats and threw the bunch together on a sandy beach at Catalina’s Goat Harbor. The 20 who gathered had been strangers at the start of the holiday weekend, but on June 25 they hugged and exchanged photographs like old friends.

“They served us food, they took care of us there. This is a way of saying thank you,” said Barbara Dahl, one of the shipwrecked boaters who hosted the party. “To think of those people who rescued us, and then to share their food with nine extra people who suddenly show up, it’s really incredible.”

“It’s a miracle we were all able to make it out of there,” said Engel Harrop, who had to be rescued from the roiling water after her boat was dashed into another vessel on the rocks. “And then the campers: They gave us their food, their clothes. They were just like family. It’s a real bond.”

The Memorial Day weekend had started on a happy note. On Friday, May 27, the Mariposa, a 36-foot sailboat, set sail for Catalina with four aboard--Dahl, her brother, skipper Duane Feuerhelm, his wife and a friend. The boat was one of about a dozen from the Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club to set out for Goat Harbor for the holiday.

The next day the Cricket, a 30-foot sailboat with Harrop and four other young women aboard, joined the yacht club boats. But when they tried to drop anchor, the boat’s propeller wasn’t working, so the boat did not have the power to set its anchor properly. As a precaution, they strung a line to the closest boat, the Mariposa, to prevent the Cricket from drifting ashore.

That night, “a horrible storm came in,” Dahl said. The ocean suddenly developed 15-foot swells and the wind blew at 35 knots, with gusts even stronger, she said. The only thing that kept the Cricket from being dashed onto the rocky shore was the line to the anchored Mariposa. As dawn broke that Sunday, the other yacht club boats began to leave the cove and head back to the mainland because of the storm.

“We would have loved to have followed,” Dahl said. But the Cricket’s line had wound around the Mariposa’s propeller. Even if the Mariposa had been able to sail home, she said, “we couldn’t have left them (the women aboard the Cricket) like that.”

Storm conditions worsened, and the boaters radioed for help. But it was an accident-filled weekend in the water, and the Coast Guard was busy rescuing others who were in worse trouble, Dahl said.

Situation Worsens

Then the Mariposa’s front anchor line broke.

“Our boat was instantly blown into the rocks,” Dahl said. The Cricket, still tied, immediately crashed into the Mariposa.

“We were literally caught between a rock and a hard place,” Dahl said. The boaters had to get off the boat to get to safety, but all around them walls of water made it perilous for them to try to get to shore.

Angie Bowie, who was aboard the Cricket, said she was most scared when she watched the Mariposa slam into the rocks and saw the skipper, Feuerhelm, dive into the water.

“I thought he was dead,” she said. “I still don’t know how he made it.”

The other three on the Mariposa scrambled quickly into an inflatable dinghy and, after a panicky moment when the anchor line wound around the propeller, the boat caught a wave and was washed onto a tiny beach about 50 yards away.

Struggling to Safety

Meanwhile, the five women aboard the Cricket were trying to make it to safety. Two of them jumped overboard as a wave rolled to shore, and they were washed onto the beach. The three others, however, jumped in and were washed toward the sea, where they became caught between the boats and the rocks. That’s when three men who had been camping at Goat Harbor dived in to rescue them, pushing them into the surf that washed them ashore. One of the rescuers, Willie Reeve, saved Harrop and then suffered a broken nose when a wave threw him against some rocks.

“I got clobbered,” Reeve said, smiling.

But the ordeal was not over. The three women who had been rescued were able to make it to the larger beach at Goat Harbor where several groups of other boaters were camping for the weekend. But the Mariposa crew and the two women from the Cricket who had swum to shore were stuck in a tiny cove that was separated from the larger beach by a towering rock.

“We couldn’t see the others. We didn’t know if they were alive or not,” Dahl said. And Dahl’s group was still in danger, for the cove was so tiny that they feared a high tide could roll in and wash them away.

Helicopter Attempt

A Coast Guard rescue helicopter tried to pick up the six stranded people in the cove, but had to give up. Landing space was tight, and the gusting winds affected the stability of the craft, causing the tail rotor to come within a foot of Dahl’s head as she was trying to board, she said.

“It was so horrible, so scary,” she said, shuddering at the memory.

Soon, though, another rescuer, a Sea Scout, appeared on top of the cliff and said he and his companions would help the six climb over the rock, using ropes and a lifeline tied around them in case they slipped. The scout told them that the hardest part was going up the rock, “but he lied,” Dahl said. The descent on the other side was a sheer drop, and they had to hold on to crevices with their fingertips and toes as they were directed down.

“My dear, that was horrendous,” she said.

As harrowing as their ordeal was, the shipwrecked boaters said they did not have the time to fear for their lives.

“You didn’t think, you were trying so hard to make it to the beach,” Bowie said. “All you could think of was getting there.”

Further Chaos

After all nine boaters made it to safety and were being comforted in Goat Harbor, bad luck befell five more boaters who were camping there. As skipper Paul Kitlas watched helplessly, his 25-foot power boat, Lunch Rock II, sank that Sunday afternoon when storm-whipped waves crashed over the vessel and filled it with water while it was anchored offshore.

“It was Murphy’s Law,” said Bob Fritz, one of the five people who had traveled to Catalina aboard Lunch Rock. “I think Murphy was out there that weekend.”

The 14 stranded boaters from the three destroyed boats were not airlifted out of the harbor until the next day, May 30, so the still-wet crews of the Mariposa and the Cricket spent a long and cold night. Luckily, someone had left a tent behind, and another boater, eager to get out of the harbor, had left behind an ice chest full of food and drinks to lighten his load. Campers from the Lunch Rock II and two other boats also shared food with the shipwrecked bunch.

A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department helicopter took the stranded boaters to Avalon the next day, and they sped home to the mainland aboard the Catalina Flier, a high-speed commercial boat that Dahl and the other Mariposa crew members had admired as they left Newport Beach only a few days before.

“We thought how fun that would be to take to Catalina,” she said, “but I would have preferred to have come home on the Mariposa.”

On the Bright Side

But she made some marvelous friends, she said. On that Sunday back in Goat Harbor, as they all huddled and shared food and conversation, Dahl got a paper plate from one of the campers and a pencil that had washed up among the debris and had all of them write down their names. In return, she issued them a party invitation.

Reeve, one of the rescuers, who lives in Stanton and had traveled to Goat Harbor aboard the 20-foot power boat Liar’s Club (renamed Hung Tough on the return trip), was enjoying the party and camaraderie in the posh Balboa home June 25.

He and a buddy who helped the women boaters to safety “are just grease monkeys,” he said.