Flowers and Empty Seats

Some of the mourners wore black--wetsuits--and paddled their surfboards behind a weathered outrigger in a slow, prone processional.

Two of the canoe’s six seats were empty.

They were vacant in homage to John Deblin and Scott Sullenger, who had shoved off Jan. 3 for a trip in the channel that ended with Deblin’s death from hypothermia and Sullenger’s presumed death after he swam toward shore for help and was never found.

On Saturday morning, several hundred friends and family members watched from atop Silver Strand Beach’s rocky breakwater as three of the men who survived the accident, and Deblin’s son, paddled the flower-draped canoe out to sea.

Friends said Deblin, 50, would have been embarrassed by the size of the crowd but pleased by the setting for the informal memorial service.

“This is the way he would have wanted it,” said Charlie Grant, who worked on Deblin’s construction crew. “Everybody in their shorts and their thongs, just the way he would have been out here.”

Mourners said Deblin’s weekend mornings were often spent on the same beach with a cup of coffee. He would have liked watching his friends’ children playing in the cool sand, their dogs catching sticks in the surf, they said.

Under clear, sunny skies, the events of that Sunday were laid out for the mourners by landmarks along the coast.

More than three miles away was the oil platform the six men had paddled toward to start their weekly trip. Beside the beach was the rocky jetty they had hoped to reach after their 40-foot canoe took on water and began drifting. Small boats bobbed offshore, much like the fishing boat that rescued the men when they were too cold to move and Deblin was dead.

Above all, there was the ocean that the two Oxnard men loved and respected and the islands for which their canoeing club is named.

To members of the tightknit Channel Islands Outrigger Canoe Club, Deblin was “Big John,” a tall, kid-like construction worker whose image lives on in the tanned face and long, sandy blond hair of his grown son, Bret.

“If you knew Big John, you knew how big he was, inside his heart and outside his heart,” accident survivor Ben Taitai, the canoe’s steersman and club leader, told the crowd, gathered around a photo of Deblin that was flanked by birds of paradise, orchids and other tropical flowers.

“If you knew Scotty,” Taitai continued, talking about Sullenger, “he was constantly in motion. They’re still in motion. They’re together right now.”

The memorial was meant especially for Deblin, though because of the accident, neither friend could be remembered without the other. A candlelight service Friday night was a chance to honor Sullenger, 35.

At that memorial about 200 people along the beach listened to guitars and talked about the missing man who gave up his wetsuit for Deblin.

“What he did was out of his own heart, trying to get help and get into shore,” said Jerred Olsen, who grew up going to weekend surfing contests with Sullenger. “He cared for the ocean and cared for everybody around him.”

Those who knew Sullenger stood in the sand with their candles Friday night. “Everything was nice and calm,” Olsen said.

“And at the last minute, the wind switched and blew out all the candles.”