troy

'It was just me, Troy and God'

Teens tell of days helplessly adrift on an endless sea

BY RON MENCHACA

Of The Post and Courier Staff

Days and nights became one, broken only by a dreamlike succession of prayers, freezing darkness, frantic fits of energy to keep their boat upright and desperate signals to passing ships.

Time stretched on forever like the endless blue horizon that surrounded them.

"You could see nothing but miles of ocean," 15-year-old Troy Driscoll said Sunday morning from his hospital bed at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Two North Charleston teenagers at the mercy of the sea, scared and cold, clinging to each other and their faith. "It was just me, Troy and God," 17-year-old Josh Long said from his bed in the next room.

They were like two prizefighters recovering the morning after a ferocious battle. They had both won, defying logic and all the rules of nature. She threw a lot at them but couldn't defeat them.

* * *

They paddled out from Sullivan's Island about 11 a.m. on April 24 to fish for shark. Their small, white, self-bailing JY-15 sailboat, previously thought to be a 14-foot Sunfish, was ratty and lived up to its name, "Under Construction."

The boys were ill-prepared for the trip. Both wore jeans and T-shirts. Josh had on a pair of cowboy boots. Troy's sweater sopped up the sea spray like a sponge. They had no food or water onboard.

Bad weather was moving in, stirring up a nasty chop. By the time they knew to be worried, the familiar harbor was slowly fading into the distance.

"We didn't even get a chance to fish," Troy said as he rubbed his fingers over a robot toy from a fast-food meal, a welcome-home gift from his young nephew. "After 20 minutes we knew we were in for a long trip. We knew we were in trouble."

Troy wanted to swim for shore. Josh argued against it, remembering survival lessons his grandfather had taught him growing up. "Stay with the boat," he could hear his grandfather's voice inside his head.

They stayed with the 15-foot, motorless boat, helpless to slow their drift out to sea.

When they woke the next morning, they were engulfed by ocean.

No dramatic turning point marked the beginning of the ordeal. One minute, they were two best friends on a fishing trip. The next, hopelessly lost.

LOST

At night when the temperature dropped, they held each other tight.

"I was freezing cold," Troy said. "Half our bodies were laying in water."

They crammed themselves underneath a shelf on the boat's bow and tried plugging the opening with clothing and whatever they could find on the boat. They swept water off the boat's open back. They hid inside the same cavity to escape the cold at night and the day's blistering rays.

Their fishing rods kept getting in the way, so they tossed them overboard. They figured the rods were useless anyway because they had already lost their bait and tackle.

Troy had eaten nothing but a bowl of cereal the morning of the launch and his stomach began to stab with hunger.

He wanted a banana split, but there was nothing around to eat but jellyfish. "Halfway through, I knew I had to eat something."

"It smelled really nasty," he said. "It was like a little jelly ball. I just slurped them down."

Josh wanted nothing to do with the jellyfish. He feared they'd make him sick and that he'd lose his bearings. He dreamed about enjoying an icy sweet tea. Instead, he gargled saltwater a couple of times a day to keep his throat from drying out.

They stole sleep in fitful bouts. Troy was constantly waking up and calling out for Josh. "Josh, are you OK?"

Troy's worst fear was that his friend would die in his sleep and he would wake up alone in the giant ocean.

They had no sense of direction as the Gulf Stream and a strong prevailing wind nudged the small craft up the South Carolina coast.

The boys thought they were drifting south. The direction didn't much matter to them; the ocean looked the same.

"We sang and prayed to God throughout the whole day," Troy said. "We knew He was there and we asked Him to put His hand on us."

Clothing shielded some of the sun, but Troy's pale skin blistered in the blinding-white light.

They ravaged a folding chair for its foam and used it for pillows at night.

They had set out on their trip to snag a shark, and now circling sharks hunted them. "We could see a bunch of them swimming under the boat," Josh said. After that, they quit dipping into the water.

The boys tended to each other's needs like mothers, Josh offering reassurance to his younger friend and Troy fashioning a pair of shoes from a waterproof-chair cover to shield Josh's feet from the elements.

They took turns wearing a wetsuit. Sometimes they held hands.

The boys were slowly dying and all they could think about was how worried their families must have been at home. A couple of days before the ill-fated trip, Troy's dad, Tony Driscoll, gave his son a yellow Lance Armstrong "Livestrong" wristband. His father wore one, too.

The father and son looked at their wristbands and knew the other was doing the same. "He would look down at that and it would give him strength to hang on," his father said.

The teens guessed that people were looking for them but had no idea how big the search effort really was.

Every ship that passed in the distance, oblivious to this little speck between the ravenous waves, chipped away at their hopes.

Josh remembers Troy murmuring something about having to eat the other's fingers for food if one of them should die.

Time was running out. Soon, the ocean would swallow them. That is, if something else didn't kill them first.

One night, they awoke to the drone of a container vessel bearing down on them. "It sounded like a hurricane," Troy said. "That's when we thought we were going to die."

The monstrous vessel's hull came within feet of the tiny sailboat. Its wake alone almost capsized them.

By the end of the fifth day, Troy wanted to die. He asked Josh to take him out of his misery.

Josh, too, wanted to give up, but he knew Troy's father would be counting on him to watch out for the boy. He held on for both of them. "No," he told Troy. "We are going to keep going."

Their last night at sea was turbulent. Waves crashed over them. Above, a clear sky belied the danger.

Was God hearing their prayers?

What happened next willed them to endure one more night, Troy said.

"That night I saw a shooting star."

FOUND

Saturday morning exploded with a bright orange sunrise. A rainbow arced across the sea as a pod of playful dolphins surrounded the sailboat.

They thought the glorious scene might be a sign.

But as the day wore on just like all the others both started to believe it was their last day alive.

Before the ordeal began, Josh was bullheaded. "Nothing can stop me," he thought. "I can take care of myself."

He made a promise to himself that if he survived, he'd never again take his family and friends for granted.

He'd have to make good on that pledge.

Troy heard it before he saw it. A boat. He heard a boat. This one sounded closer than the others had.

It was a fishing vessel. The boys went ballistic. It was their last hope.

The fishing boat crew had no idea two boys were lost at sea. They hadn't known to be on the lookout.

Still, in the limitless ocean that's who found them.

The boys jumped and screamed and begged the fishermen not to leave them.

The fishermen asked the boys where they were from and how long they'd been adrift. "We're from Sullivan's Island," Josh said.

How many days? They had no idea.

The Coast Guard was looking for the boys. The boys, with the aid of their rescuers, found the Coast Guard.

Troy asked the Coast Guard to call his dad's cell phone. Tony Driscoll was at the Sullivan's Island beach house where the family held vigil all week. "I have your son right here," a Coast Guard petty officer said on the other end. "He wants to talk to his dad."

Troy's voice was weak, but he was alive. "Dad, they got me," he said.

His father felt like he'd been struck by lightning. Word of the rescue spread quickly back to South Carolina, across the Lowcountry and around the country. Complete strangers cried when they heard the news. It was a miracle.

Family and friends poured into the hospital throughout the day Sunday. Most of the guests just sat and stared at the boys as if they couldn't believe their eyes.

But there they were, eating their first solid meals in a week. Josh had grits and eggs for breakfast and ice cream and Subway for lunch.

Troy had fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and applesauce. His mother, Deb Fowler, spoon-fed him as she gently stroked his blond, wispy hair. "Just like when he was a baby," she said.

It's over. And yet it's not.

Josh had trouble sleeping Saturday night. He had an awful dream. "I keep having flashbacks, and we're sitting on the boat."

A big search for a tiny boat on the vast ocean

BY TONY BARTELME

Of The Post and Courier staff

For more than a week, in one of the region's largest coastal searches ever, rescue teams in airplanes, helicopters and ships scoured the ocean, trying to pick out a tiny white boat hiding amongst the whitecaps.

When the sun set, helicopter crews used night-vision goggles sensitive enough to pick out the glow of a cell phone screen. They dropped a special buoy with a Global Positioning System to track the ocean's fickle currents. On land, teams used powerful computer programs to predict where the boat and its two teenage passengers might have drifted.

In the end, the sea confounded everyone -- except a sharp-eyed fisherman who spotted them bobbing off the coast of North CarolinaThe boat and the two teens, Josh Long and Troy Driscoll, floated farther north than rescue teams ever imagined, dozens of miles outside the giant grid where much of the search occurred.

U.S. COAST GUARD

The "Under Construction," the boat the rescued teens drifted in for nearly a week, washed ashore Sunday near Bald Head Island.

The hunt for Josh and Troy is a story of frustration, tough decisions and relief. And though it has a happy ending, some family members wonder whether the Coast Guard quit too soon and trusted their computers too much.

For their part, the Coast Guard and other rescue officials said Sunday they were elated that the boys were found alive. They also said they will study the operation for any lessons they can learn. They plan to take an especially close look at how their computer models performed.

A search in the ocean isn't easy under the best conditions, but Josh and Troy made it especially difficult. They set out from Sullivan's Island on April 24 in a 15-foot JY-15 sailboat on a day when weather forecasters were warning boaters about high winds and waves.

One boy was wearing a white T-shirt, the other, a gray or camouflage color. They didn't have a sail or a motor. And, they didn't have flares, a radio, a satellite beacon, whistles or any other gear that might have helped anyone find them if they ran into trouble.

The water off Sullivan's Island and the Isle of Palms is full of sandbars and rip currents, and minutes after they launched, the boys were swept far offshore, a white boat riding waves of white foam. The sea all but swallowed them.

Rescue teams got their first good lead late that first night when they identified a cell phone tower in downtown Charleston that was closest to one of the boys' phones. They began their search within a seven-mile radius of the tower. On Monday, they found another clue: The boys' truck, parked on Sullivan's Island.

The search grew. More than 100 people from the Coast Guard were involved, along with rescue teams from seven municipalities and the state Department of Natural Resources. "When kids are involved, everyone gives 110 percent," Coast Guard Cmdr. June Ryan said.

The Coast Guard brought up a C-130 search plane from Key West, Fla. to do flyovers. It launched its bright orange helicopters. On one mission, a crew dropped a tracking buoy about four miles off Sullivan's Island.

On land, Coast Guard teams tracked the buoy's movements. They plugged information from the buoy into two computer programs. They also fed their computers information about the winds, wave heights, the size of the boat and other factors. The programs then spit out predictions of where the boat -- first thought to a Sunfish -- might have drifted.

Racing against time, rescue teams established a 1,300-square-mile grid from Bull's Bay, about 30 miles north of Charleston, to Hilton Head, about 50 miles to the south. It was an area about the size of Rhode Island, and teams began searching smaller squares in this grid.

It was as if they were looking for a needle in a field of haystacks, and last Monday and Tuesday, teams debated whether the sailboat could have floated father north, or even farther south. Currents and winds can make floating objects do strange things. The Gulf Stream flows north. But in 1946, four friends set out on a moonlit sail from Sullivan's Island and never came back. The bodies of the two young women and their 16-foot sailboat washed up south of Edisto Beach several days later. Their male companions were never found.

Last year, while on the eastern side of the Gulf Stream off Charleston, a man tossed a bottle with a message in it. The bottle ended up in the Bahamas.

"There were definitely two camps," Ryan said about the debate over where the boat might have drifted. "We didn't have much to go on."

Ryan said the Coast Guard flew more than 40 missions. "It was one of the largest search and rescue missions in the Southeast for a coastal search." The case was sent to the government's National Search and Rescue School in Yorktown, Va. "We were trying to engage anyone we could," she said.

But late Tuesday, after about 48 hours, the Coast Guard scaled back its search, though its helicopters would continue flying up and down the South Carolina coast the rest of the week. The state Department of Natural Resources also kept flying its own plane and sent teams to the state's barrier islands on four-wheelers. But rescue officials began to call the effort a "recovery operation" -- a search for dead bodies, not survivors.

The decision to pull back wasn't easy. "We're all moms and dads," Ryan said. "We felt we had completely saturated the area. We had covered 1,300 square miles backward and forward, with small boats, big boats, aircrafts and helos (helicopters), and we had no new information to turn to." They also had learned from family members that the boat had just been repaired. "Considering they were in 62-degree water and the seaworthiness of the craft, at that point, the only conclusion we could draw was that they had met their demise."

The Coast Guard's decision didn't sit well with some family members. Eddie Long, Josh Long's father, said he and other family members kept asking the Coast Guard about what-if scenarios. "We were afraid when they started talking about scaling back."

Matthew Driscoll of Wisconsin, uncle of Troy Driscoll, said he questioned whether the Coast Guard properly considered that currents could move the boat quickly to the north, and whether teams in South Carolina properly communicated with teams in North Carolina. "I think the Coast Guard needs to give a straight answer and say they made a mistake by not listening to other laypeople that know the water as well."

Ryan said Coast Guard stations from Virginia to Florida were alerted, and that she personally talked to Coast Guard officials in North Carolina.

The search grid itself may have been right, she added. "We don't know whether they came through the grid or not." Had the search continued past Tuesday, the grid probably would have grown larger, probably too large to be of any practical use.

As the week went on, the tracking buoy went to the north, then east, then did a loop, a map of the buoy's movements shows. When the boys were finally rescued and their boat left behind, the buoy was still about 50 miles south. Their boat later washed up on Bald Head Island, N.C.

"Certainly, if we thought they were (off North Carolina), that's where we would have gone. That's what we do," Ryan said. In this case, they simply had few clues to work with. "We were praying for a miracle."

The Coast Guard is an easy target, but any blame game should begin with the boys, added L.J. Wallace, an avid boater who does a locally produced radio program called "The Water's Edge."

"Since when is the U.S. Coast Guard a 100-percent insurance policy against incredible stupidity? Wallace said he got choked up when he heard the teens had been rescued. "I had been praying for them, and I'm happy they were rescued. But sharkfishing in a little wafer of a boat? In a storm? They had no respect for the ocean."

Ron Menchaca of The Post and Courier staff contributed to this story.