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One person has died and another is in critical condition after a rogue wave caused a commercial dive boat to capsize Thursday, authorities said.
The Thanksgiving Day incident happened in Pompano Beach at the Hillsborough Inlet as the boat was returning from a dive trip, according to the Broward Sheriff's Office.
Authorities said the captain of the 45-foot Coral Princess catamaran did everything he could to keep the boat upright after a wave hit it from behind.
"Apparently the captain was just trying to come through some rough waters," said BSO spokeswoman Dani Moschella. "It was windy, there were waves rolling in, there was a rogue wave that hit the back of the boat and capsized the boat sending everyone into the water."
A woman in her 50s, who was transported to Broward Health North, has died, authorities said. Although her cause of death is unknown, BSO said it appears that the woman may have drowned.
"At least one person was caught underneath, another person was injured," Moschella told NBC 6 South Florida.
Three others were also taken to the hospital but are in good condition, hospital staff said.
"But during the rescue it got pretty dicey and scary because we were told there were more people, there may be people missing, so all of these agencies began searching for people to make sure we had everyone," Sandra King, spokeswoman for Pompano Fire, told NBC 6 South Florida.
She said the inlet is tough to negotiate.
"They say it turns into a wash basin," she said. "It's a rough inlet."
Good Samaritans assisted in the rescue effort. Chapin Dalton, who was on shore at the time, said he saw the boat capsize.
"When we were looking at it, it was just pure shock," he said. "We turn and we hear, 'Oh, this boat is going down.' And he just timed it wrong, that's the whole thing. He ducked his front nose in, the bow of the boat ducked in the wave and he just rolled over."
BSO said homicide investigators will investigate the incident.
"Right now it looks like this is a tragic accident," she said. "What started out as a gorgeous day on the water for 23 people ended in tragedy."
The boat's passengers consisted of two crew members and 21 divers.
Leave a Comment:
23 people on that boat?I can see why it capsized.
Twenty divers couldn't help the last one?
Dumb question, answer is no.
If they could have helped her then they would have helped her.
Because it's a diving boat doesn't mean they were diving at the time.
there were 23 people on it.... which is normal for a dive boat like that....
I'm about a mile from that inlet... and it's treacherous on a good day... narrow, high current, funny angle, it's got a rough inlet warning up every day...
and today was small craft advisory with hazardous water warning, seas 8-11 feet (!), rip current warning.... there is no way in hell anybody in their right mind would go diving... or even go out in a 45 footer in those seas unless you had to....
Captains going to jail.... dive customers were crazy to do it..
I haven't done it in a while but I've done that inlet quite a few times, its never fun, it's never routine and you always pay attention, I agree going out that inlet or diving today was a total waste of time and errrrr risky?
They are called cattle boats for a reason. They are also USCG certified for a specific number of passengers with stability tests and safety devises mandatory on a regular basis.
Um, it didn't say they were swimmers, it said they were divers.
Other than both getting wet, there is a big difference.
'Because it's a diving boat doesn't mean they were diving at the time.'
It does mean they can be expected to be highly qualified open water swimmers.
@oldhamletman
Do you think society will be better off with the captain in jail/prison? What good will we as a nation get from him going to prison/jail? It was an accident, nothing more! If he set out with the intention of sinking his boat along with his passengers then I can see him going, but for a horrible accident no! Do you think he is ever going to go and do the same thing again?? I doubt he will ever set foot on a boat for the rest of his days after this!!
Sounds like going out the inlet they should have been wearing life vests, but many folks do not like doing that. Captain probably should have insisted on it. Condolences to the family.
@Cheetah: Your knowledge of boats and the sea can't possibly go beyond your bathtub and your rubber ducky.
Just to put it in terms you CAN understand: Imagine your car turned upside down on the way home from whatever it is you do when you aren't trolling. Just because you are a very skilled walker doesn't mean you will be walking the rest of the way home.
If it's true 8-11 ft seas why did they go out? I don't even go out in 3-4 ft seas.
When the brochures say "come for the adventure" and the fine print says "we are not liable" - guess what, there just might be some risk in what you are doing. When you hit 50yo, stick to lawn bowling, you really are not as fit as you think you are.
When your friends say they are not comfortable doing something - shut your trap and let them stay on the beach.
Even in calm waters, many strong swimmers can't back float. I've tried to teach several people how to back float, they just don't get it that you have to let your butt sink into the water.
So, who survived Black Friday, always a few deaths on that adventure too.
I would like to start out by saying that they had no business going out yesterday. I live in South Florida and it was 20+ kt winds and a minimum of 5-7ft seas offshore, likely higher in the inlet, making an already tricky inlet very dangerous; "rogue wave" or not. There is no way diving in 5-7' seas is going to be a happy experience for your customers, danger to life aside, so why risk it?
That said, there is some serious day-after-thanksgiving-armchair-quarterbacking going on here:
onermailliw: 23 people on a 45' diving catamaran is perfectly normal and safe. Taking a diving catamaran out in those conditions was questionable judgement at best no matter how many were or weren't aboard, the number of people was not a factor.
greed over people: The USCG only regulates the weight load and number of people on vessels 25' and under, vessels 26' and greater are yacht certified and in this case the number of passengers allowed would depend on what the diving business and captain were certified to carry. In this case as I said above, seeing 23 people on a 45' diving catamaran is not at all unsusual.
cheetah: You can pay $500 or so and get your open water diving certification in a weekend, and don't even need to mantain any particular amount of dives to keep your license once you get it. The people on that boat could have not taken a dive in years and barely have any experience for all we know. It hardly means you are the civilian equivelant of a CG rescue swimmer as you seem to imply. Even if everyone on board was a master diver with thousands of dives, that doesn't mean they are going to be able to do anything to help someone in 8 ft confused and murky seas in an inlet after getting flung out of a capsizing boat.
sumatymrolls: The sea is a cruel mistress, and when you become a licensed captain, especially if you run a business as a licensed captain, you take on the liability for the well being of your crew and guests, and anything that happens while you are on board your vessel is your fault. Doesn't matter if you are the captain of a cruise ship or a dive boat, you want to be the captain, you take it seriously, because it all comes back to you. The smart choice was to call everyone up, and say it is not going to be a pleasant day to dive, and give them refunds or reschedule them later in the week.
Wants to know: the divers wearing lifevests would have only likely gotten many more of them killed. The boat capsized; it was upside down. What to livevests make you do? Float. If you are under a boat in a lifevest, you will most likely drown and or be knocked unconcious trying to get out of your jacket as it forces you up against the hull beating you against the waves.
@hiap
My question is not about his decision to take them out or what level of liability he has when he does take a boat full of people out, my question is what good will come from him going to prison? His business is ruined without question if he was on his own boat! If he was operating someone Else's then I am sure he has been terminated or soon will be!
Prison should be for BAD PEOPLE, people who are sociopaths who simply cannot abide by laws and create a necessity to remove them from the general population! There is ZERO rehabilitation in the US prison industrial complex, people are warehoused there and rot, they do not come out better than they wen't in! very few people actually learn from the prison experience, some do but the majority do not, they simply learn new skills at criminal enterprise!! I work in a prison and see just what they churn out after they have been churned in! Just asking peoples view as to what good will come from this man going to prison, that's all!!
@ hiap
All those laws apply for a commercial captain unless you run a parasailing boat
Sumatyrolls. I don't think he needs to definitely go to prison, certainly not for homocide; but he needs to undergo serious repremands of some sort, which could include some amount of prison. What good will it do you ask? It will help make other captains think twice before they choose to put making a paycheck for the day over keeping their customers and crew safe. Again, becoming a licensed captain is a fairly extensive and time consuming process, as well as is expensive, and ususally requires a large amount of liability insurance. It is not the boating equivelant of going to the DMV to get your driver's license. When you are the captain it is ultimately your responsiblity to use your judgement to take the best actions for the safety of those on board your vessel. With the conditions present that day, no one would have blamed the captain if he had cancelled the trip. Inlets are extremely tricky nautical hazards, and they have taken the lives of very experienced captain's such as this unlucky gentleman a couple of years ago: http://www.soundingsonline.com/news/coastwise/266162-broach-near-nasty-inlet-proves-fatal. And that wasn't even on a particularly nasty day, in a vessel designed for offshore fishing in big seas.
I don't think anything will or should happen to the captain, It is a big boat capable of handling the waters it was in, it was just a rouge wave, there was little to nothing the captain could have done. I have been in and out of many inlets in my time, sometimes in very rough waters, this is about the most treacherous inlet I can think of in South Florida, it's even worse with the tide change and we are having very high tides here again.
@sumatymrolls
I'll wager you've never been in 11-16 foot seas in a small boat... we are talking about wave height taller than the boat... additionally getting amplified by the small funnel of that inlet facing into a major rip current right next to the gulf stream.... that inlet is murder in a big boat on a nice day
he really deserves to be in jail.... he is the captain of a commercial passenger carrying craft
he did something very dangerous at a very dangerous spot... it's the equivalent of a bus driver trying to beat a train crossing or a cruise ship captain sailing a ship to close to a rocky shore.... it's negligence... he pushed a trip on a very bad day that the divers I bet would have never done if they had know how rough it would be
any other sane captain would have cancelled the day because of weather.... I guess this guy was too greedy and as a result there was a disaster with loss of life...
they have a term for that: negligent homicide
I hope he goes in for 20 years.
Really.... what size boat were they on and where did you read it??
The boat's passengers consisted of two crew members and 21 divers.(From the article)
I would guess by the upside down hull the boat was at most 32 feet long.
45' according to article. Just bad luck I think, though that's one of those inlets where things go haywire in a heartbeat.
Seems to me it was big enough for tht many people
Bob, look at that photo again. It appears to be a two hull boat, a diving catamaran, and those aren't made for anymore than 4-6 people on board. They had 4-5 times that amount of people. When you have that much weight those little boats become tipsy, and then if you have too many people on one side of the boat, then with all that weight on one side, it's no wonder that that little boat capsized with just a little wave.
In the article at it says, "Accommodations on all three boats are generous and comfortable—from sleeping six adults in complete privacy on the ArrowCat 42, to the ArrowCat 30 and 32 sleeping four adults in complete privacy, or six if you take advantage of the salon settee conversion".
23 people and 21 (maybe 23) sets of dive gear.
And probably all of those tanks were empty...the boat was on it'g way BACK to port...and even is they were chuck full of air, THE BOAT IS UPSIDE DOWN. Hard to get geared up while UNDER water.
PS...I it the "like" button by mistake...take one of the two off.
No problem. I couldn't care less about that number. It's completely irrelevant, and has no meaning.
(Oh, no!! You don't "like" me?;)
Says in the article it was a 45 footer. Big enough. That's a treacherous inlet in a following sea.
This is weird.
So is gravy when you're on peyote.
The article says it was a cataraman it has 2 hulls.
Sane Central: The article says they were on their way back, which means no one had their dive gear on. I'm guessing you are not a diver if you don't know that by time anyone got their dive gear on and got in the water to help the woman, it would not have done much good. Plus, if the boat capsized, exactly how would they even have gotten to their dive gear?????
Exactly! Once the boat broached the gear was scattered to all points south and the people were in a state of chaos, no one but the Captain and crew knew the head count. The Captain should have called that trip off by the weather reported, those South FL. inlets are treacherous, but he was probably employed by a shop and was trying to hold on to his job!
I would have to say no one would of had time to grab their dive gear since it was a cap size issue (which I would have to assume means it turns over pretty quickly) most all would have been in panic mode to begin with.
A person on a dive boat who didn't know how to swim?
It wouldn't matter if you are the unlucky one in the wrong spot (hit on the head, trapped by something or in the cabin, ect).
I know that inlet, Michael Phelps would have a serious problem, I suspect they all had life vests on even the one that didn't make it, but even with the vest it is a narrow inlet, rocky on both sides nearer the middle, the current is very fast and turbulent. All kinds of changing currents inside a huge rush of water and you have to be alert on the best of days
Kinda hard to swim if you are knocked unconscious by a 40 pound dive tank, or tangled up with the anchor. All bets are off once any boat capsizes. It always amazes me how quick so many are to judge with virtually no experience or knowledge on a situation other than their perceived vision of how they think something should work. It does appear to be poor judgement on the captain's part going out, but I seriously doubt anyone on the diveboat was in a position to rescue anybody after the flip.
I'm a USCG veteran, avid boater, and rescue diver, I have been through many rogue waves and had many close calls on the water. I have also participated in numerous SAR calls. I can assure you a rogue wave from the stern on a following sea is bad news, especially when the boat drops into the trough of the wave and the bow goes into or under the next wave. I've been there and done that and only by the Grace of God I am alive to tell about it. As a Captain in that instance you are at the mercy of the sea.
Any of you armchair quarterbacks who are neither divers or boaters have little right judging this boat captain. The article plainly states the boat was on a return trip into the inlet. All of the dive gear would have been stored, the tanks would have been secured in the tank racks and nobody onboard the vessel would have found the time to put there dive gear on to assist in the rescue of anyone. The captain would have been lucky if he had time to send a Mayday call on VHF channel 16 or deploy an EPIRB.
The only reason there was not more fatalities is there were good samaritan boaters who assisted in the rescue. My thanks and prayers go out to those who helped and my sympathy to those who lost loved ones. If you have never been caught in a rip current or very strong tide or current you need to shut up, you have no idea what those people suffered.
If you do happen to find yourself in a rip current "Do not swim against it, You will drown". You have to swim across it to get out of it. If you happen to get caught in a very strong outgoing tide, hopefully someone will be there to help. Try rescuing a drowning person and find out what they will do to you. A panicked swimmer or diver will use you for a ladder to climb out of the water. In that situation you had better know what to do or they will drown you too.
Thankfully all of the people I have pulled out of the water were alive USCGMKII.
@andywest63
I know this particular inlet, it's narrow, treacherous, has very strong currents, with whirlpools and eddies, and rocky at its narrower section, and that's on a good day. The two biggest factors in having only 1 fatality is 1.) that they likely had life vests on and 2.) that inlet has a drawbridge that is manned 24/7 and a Marine Patrol station is very close by.
Given the skill of the average boater around here, I would be very wary of good samaritans, this is not easy water to hold a smaller say 25' boat steady, and in these waters with live props and pulling people aboard, it could turn disastrous quickly.
Andy,Great post.I've swam in riptides in Huntington Beach,Ca. and am thankful that our mother taught us to swim parralel with the shore.I've been caught in undertow there also,wasn't fun but I'm still here.
@ andywest63:Great post!
Andy, spot on.
I know the inlet and the boat. The changing tide and the strong winds can make that inlet very difficult. With 40 plus dive tanks and all the other gear bouncing around it is a wonder more weren't seriously hurt.
$hit Happens.
The wind was howling and the waves were huge down here in South Florida yesterday. Hillsboro Inlet is tough to navigate even on a calm day. No sane person should have gone out that inlet in those conditions yesterday. Sounds like the boat either pitchpoled over or broached.
these people seem to have had their minds made up to go out that day.
My condolences and best wishes for the others to have a full recovery.Two crew members doesn't seem like enough to me with this many passengers on board.Even the rescue people said that this is a precarious inlet so why would anybody use it to begin with?