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Tampa Man Recalls 1984

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By KEITH MORELLI

kmorelli@tampatrib.com

Published: March 4, 2009

TAMPA - As Ben Ellis watched the news over the past couple of days about four fishermen missing in the Gulf of Mexico, he could almost feel the salt water spray and the body heat draining away.

He survived an eerily similar situation a quarter century ago. One of his friends didn't.

Ellis, 62, of Tampa was one of four scuba divers who motored out of St. George's Island in the Florida Panhandle on a cold December day in 1984. They were aboard a 23-foot boat and planned to spend the day diving.

The boat was overturned by a wave about 22 miles from shore.

"It wasn't terribly rough," Ellis said. "But we were overloaded with scuba gear."

The four men were tossed into the 55-degree drink. Fortunately, they wore wet suits, which held off the chilling effects of hypothermia.

The men rigged the bow line and two stern lines into a mesh and were able to drape the lines over legs and under arms to keep them strapped to the upside-down boat.

He said without the lines, waves would have easily washed them off the boat. Constantly being thrown off and climbing back, "will wear you out," he said. "A wave comes along, tilts the boat and washes you overboard. You struggle to get back. You're exhausted in no time flat."

Hours turned into days and nights, he said.

"We went out there on a Saturday," Ellis said, "and they didn't find us until Wednesday morning."

The men saw Coast Guard planes looking for them but couldn't catch their attention.

"Over the first couple of days we hoped we were going to get found," he said. "We saw them flying over us. But, after a while we were just resigned to it. The sun went down on that Tuesday night, and I said, 'We may see the sunrise, but we won't see another sunset."

Wednesday morning, a Coast Guard buoy tender found the shipwreck adrift and rescued the four.

Ellis, along with brothers Kieffer and Rob Harris and Ric Altman, were plucked from the hull and taken to a hospital in Panama City, where Rob Harris died of hypothermia a short time later.

The experience had a long-term effect on Ellis.

"You recover from it, but when I saw this on the news, it brought it all back to the front of my mind. When something like this happens, you know what these guys are going through."

"I really feel for those guys," he said. "I know what they're going though."

Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760.

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