Boat Survivor Saw Friends Die, Feared He Was Next

As darkness approached, Opha Watson said, he doubted he would survive another evening in the chilly Gulf of California.

Thirty-eight hours after a charter boat sank early Monday in high seas, leaving him and 15 others to the mercy of the waters, Watson was thinking about death. He had already seen four of his companions lose consciousness and drift away from a makeshift raft of wood and other debris that had been salvaged from the swirling water.

Among those he saw float off, he said, were Joseph and Janet Ream of Del Mar, two middle-aged diving enthusiasts who had befriended him when the trip began Dec. 28.

Watson’s wet suit--spirited from the wreckage thanks to an improbable quirk of fate--had enabled him to survive that long.

“Honestly, I began to believe that I wouldn’t make it through the night,” Watson recalled by telephone Thursday from his home in Tucson, Ariz. “I was getting cold and weak. But I thought I’d give it a try.”

As it turned out, he didn’t have to try much longer. Just before dusk Tuesday, a private rescue craft, the Sala del Mar, navigated directly toward Watson. A waving hand from a crewman signaled recognition and Watson’s survival.

“I guess it was just providence,” said Watson, a 62-year-old retired engineer who credits his frequent workouts and outdoor life style with keeping him in good enough shape to survive the ordeal.

He was one of two survivors of the wreck of the Santa Barbara, a converted fishing boat on a scuba-diving expedition that went down early New Year’s Day in the Gulf of California about 25 miles west of the Mexican port of Guaymas. Remarkably, the other survivor, Vicente Gonzalez Mancilla, a 25-year-old Mexican machinist, stayed in the estimated 55-degree water for about 35 hours with only a life preserver and some plastic covering that he used both for flotation and warmth.

“I never stopped moving,” the still-dazed Gonzalez said Thursday from the Social Security Hospital in Santa Rosalia, the Baja California town where he was taken after being picked up by a passing ferry Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before Watson was rescued.

On Thursday, as weather in the gulf worsened, U.S. and Mexican officials suspended their search for the 14 people still missing, saying there was little hope of finding them alive. As of late Thursday, no bodies had been recovered, officials said.

Among those missing are 10 U.S. citizens--seven from Arizona and three from California--along with four Mexican crewmen. The Californians are the Del Mar couple, Joseph T. Ream, 63, a retired engineer, and his wife, Janet Ream, 53, and Jerry Lyons, 53, a New Jersey native who ran a drug-treatment program in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.

Both survivors said Thursday that the capsizing of the boat at first caused a period of swirling chaos and panic as screaming, pajama-clad passengers and stunned crewmen thrashed about the sinking craft in the early-morning darkness.

From his bunk below deck, Watson said, he bolted through a hatch into the water as the boat was tossed onto its side. He grabbed a floating object that turned out to be his “dive bag,” containing his custom wet suit, a knife, cord, a flashlight, extra batteries and other essentials.

Eventually, Watson said, he and four other passengers--he identified them as the three Californians and a woman named Nora (a Nora Malloy was listed among those who signed up)--grabbed a chunk of wooden ship door, which was enhanced by floating bags, a plastic bottle and other debris. The night was stormy, but Watson said he was able to put on his wet suit without losing hold.

As time wore on, Watson said, he watched his four colleagues develop hypothermia and drift into unconsciousness, finally losing their increasingly desperate grips on the wood and life. He recalled how Joseph Ream attempted to save his wife, without success. By nightfall Monday, Ream himself drifted away, the last of the four to go.

“I saw them die,” Watson recalled as, on the other end of the line, his wife provided him with hot compresses. “It took hours, but they had to give up. The cold water just saps your energy. Without my wet suit, I wouldn’t be here today.”

By Tuesday, the seas had calmed, and Watson said it was less of a struggle to maintain his grip on the raft. But he said his energy was flagging when he saw the rescue vessel headed right for him. Providence, he said, had intervened.

The sinking occurred about 3:15 a.m. Monday in extremely high seas as several huge waves swamped the vessel, Watson said. The Santa Barbara turned over and sank within minutes, before anyone had a chance to launch one of several lifeboats.

Watson declined to comment on the seaworthiness of the 70-foot converted fishing craft, whose reliability has been questioned by at least one person with knowledge of it.

“Many of us commented on a frequent basis that the Santa Barbara looked very unseaworthy; she listed very easily,” said Jack McMillan, 54, a San Diego boat owner who spent three months during 1988 in the port town of San Carlos, north of Guaymas, where the ill-fated vessel was moored. “It was kind of a laughingstock.”

Representatives of the Silent Experience Scuba Center and Caiman Expeditions, two Tucson concerns that helped arrange the charter, have defended the ship, saying it had been refurbished recently.

Joaquin Dorantes Gutierrez, the port captain of Guaymas, said the vessel underwent a full inspection in October and was certified to continue its mission as a tourist boat for divers, mostly U.S. citizens.