The last voyage of the New Zest

By STEPHEN NOHLGREN, Times staff writer
©St. Petersburg Times, published April 18, 1993

ST. PETERSBURG -- Peaceful, timeless rhythms have returned to Bunces Pass.

A slender wading bird stands motionless in ankle-deep water, patiently waiting for dinner to swim by. Cars on Interstate 275 head toward the Sunshine Skyway. An incoming tide ripples under a small humpback bridge.

Only below the surface does nature reveal an ugly face.

On the sandy bottom lies the broken hull of an oceangoing sailboat. It is all that remains of one couple's dream of a life at sea.

"Coast Guard, Coast Guard. This is the vessel New Zest. We're in distress. . . . Our anchors are dragging, and we're going in towards the Skyway bridge."(Read the Coast Guard transcript)

The taut, British voice of Sheila Wilde broke through on the emergency radio channel used by mariners. It was 4:05 a.m. March 13, and Wilde and her longtime companion, James Harden, were in desperate straits.

Caught in Boca Ciega Bay by the leading edge of a killer storm, they had tried to ride it out by anchoring. But the wind was too strong. It overcame their anchors, overwhelmed their engine and blew them relentlessly toward the Skyway causeway.

Over the next 15 minutes or so, they would fight to save their beloved sailboat from destruction. In the end, they would lose their lives.

More than anything, their story illustrates how quickly Florida weather can turn from tranquil to terrifying. (See related story)

Wilde, 42, and Harden, in his 50s, were experienced sailors who earned their living by crewing on large charter boats. They had crossed the Atlantic in their 35-foot boat -- only to sink in water 15 feet deep.

When their boat hit the bridge, they were a stone's throw from shore. The mast leaned up against the roadway. In normal conditions, they easily could have swum or climbed to safety.

The Coast Guard was stymied by misinformation and confusion. Accustomed to saving lives hundreds of miles out in the gulf, they lost a chance for heroics 8 miles from home.

It was a recipe for disaster.

A dream come true

Seven years ago, James Harden and Sheila Wilde made a midlife change that many would envy.

Companions for 15 years, they sold their homes and a business in Liverpool, England, bought a sailboat and embarked on an adventure at sea.

They had prepared for several years, said Harden's sister, Rita Hogg. They took sailing and navigation courses. They sailed up and down the coast of England and across the Irish Sea to Ireland, through waters notorious for vicious, unpredictable storms.

Then they bought the New Zest and headed across the Atlantic.

"They were making their dream come true. They were doing what they loved, and they were doing it together," Hogg said.

For several years, they worked out of Tortola, one of the Virgin Islands just east of Puerto Rico. Hiring on with a charter boat company, they shepherded wealthy Americans on four-day cruises on huge yachts that rented for $1,000 a day.

Harden would skipper, and Wilde would cook.

"When they first started, Sheila would get very seasick," Hogg said. "But toward the end, she loved it more than he."

Roughly a year ago, they outfitted the New Zest and left Tortola to sail around the Caribbean. In October, they put in at Naples, Fla., where Hogg and her family were vacationing.

"The last time we saw them, he told us he was hoping to sail up to St. Petersburg," Hogg said. "He wanted to buy a house in America, only as a place to come back to. But he didn't know if he could because he didn't have a work permit."

By January, Harden and Wilde had struck up a close friendship with Roger and Barbara Townsend, residents of Broadwaters, a finger-fill neighborhood in southwest St. Petersburg. The dock behind the Townsends' home became a temporary base for the New Zest.

The Townsends declined to comment for this story, saying Harden and Wilde were private people who wouldn't have appreciated publicity. But their statements helped authorities piece together the English couple's last days.

On Friday, March 12, Harden and Wilde headed south from St. Petersburg. Their visas were expiring, and they planned to sail to Longboat Key, around the state and over to the Bahamas.

When they said their goodbyes at 1:30 p.m., sunny skies gave no hint of the menace ahead. It was so hot they wore T-shirts and shorts.

But pushing across the Gulf of Mexico was a vast system of arctic air. Weather forecasters dubbed it "the storm of the century" and warned that Florida's coast could expect high tides and gale-force winds before morning.

"The Townsends told them they better wait until Monday, to stay another weekend," Hogg said. "But they were ready, and they wanted to be back on their boat. They loved it. It was their life."

Normally, a trip to Longboat Key takes four to six hours, sailors say. And a drawbridge tender's log shows the New Zest passing through the Tierra Verde bridge at 2:40 p.m. -- a typical passage down the Intracoastal Waterway. Under normal circumstances, they should have been moored somewhere at Longboat Key, having their dinner, long before the storm arrived.

By late afternoon, brisk winds were kicking up from the south -- good weather for sailing, but perhaps a problem for the New Zest if the couple tried to enter the Intracoastal Waterway in Manatee County. That area, known as the Bulkhead, is a narrow channel that requires a sailboat to rely on its engine.

If the New Zest lacked power, sailors say, wind of that speed and direction may actually have blown the boat backward. Bridge tender logs for Longboat and surrounding islands show no record of the couple arriving. So apparently, they turned around and tried to beat the storm back to Boca Ciega Bay. Then they dropped anchors and tried to ride it out.

But that worked only for a while.

"Our anchor is broke with the storm. And we're going towards the Skyway bridge. . . . We're under power, full power, but not making any headway because of the winds."

It was 4:05 a.m. when Sheila Wilde radioed the Coast Guard. A National Weather Service sensor near the Skyway was clocking wind gusts near 65 mph.

For 10 minutes, Wilde and the Coast Guard station in St. Petersburg exchanged information about the boat's position. Harden apparently was up on deck, working the boat. Wilde's voice was tense but controlled. She clearly was reading from a nautical chart of the bay. And in hindsight, when you know her location, most of her transmission makes good sense.

But for the Coast Guard, trying to pinpoint the boat's location, the conversation was painfully confusing.

Twice, Wilde mistakenly put the boat east of the bridge instead of west.

As coordinates for her position, she read off: 27 degrees latitude and 82 degrees, 42 minutes longitude, which describes a position 12 miles south of the boat's actual position.

The bridge that threatened them is the second bridge south of the Skyway's St. Petersburg toll booth. Some people call it the Little Maximo Bridge -- but it's not named on nautical charts.

Four times, Wilde said they were blowing toward the Skyway bridge. Only on the fifth reference did she indicate it was a small bridge on the causeway -- almost a mile north of the main bridge.

She repeatedly referred to her position as the Skyway Channel, which was absolutely accurate. Nautical charts list the Skyway Channel as a narrow, north-south navigational channel that parallels I-275 about 400 yards west of the causeway.

But to many people, "Skyway Channel" refers to the main shipping channel under the Sunshine Skyway bridge. And because she was talking about being blown into the Skyway, that's how the Coast Guard initially interpreted it, Lt. Bruce McIntosh, chief of operations, said later.

Finally, she and Coast Guard tentatively agreed that the boat was in Bunces Pass and heading for the Bunces Pass bridge.

The boat was in Bunces Pass, an east-west stretch of navigable water that intersects the Skyway channel near a small fixed bridge.

But unfortunately, Bunces Pass also flows under a small fixed bridge south of Tierra Verde. And that bridge -- almost a mile west of the New Zest's actual location -- is the one that's commonly called the Bunces Pass bridge.

Uncertainty about the couple's location within Bunces Pass proved critical during the next two hours as Coast Guard officers decided how to react. But during the distress call, they had this to say:

"We'll try to get a boat over there to assist you. But the quickest we're going to be there is 30 minutes."

"Okay. Thank you," came the response. Then, a few seconds later: "My husband said we're almost hitting the pilings of the bridge."

"Roger, ma'am. . . . Have you got your life jackets on?"

"Yes."

"Roger, ma'am. We'll try to get someone out there right away, but about 3-0 minutes before we can get there. Over."

That was the last the Coast Guard heard from the boat, despite 11 more attempts to raise the couple on the radio. McIntosh, the operations chief, described what happened next.

"Confused seas"

Located at Bayboro Harbor, Coast Guard Group St. Petersburg oversees search-and-rescue boats up and down the west coast. In charge that night was Petty Officer 1st Class Tom Peck.

Minutes after Wilde radioed in, Peck called the "ready room" to wake up the standby crew for the 41-foot utility boat, the workhorse of search and rescue. Petty Officer 1st Class Brian Botzenhart led the boat crew. It fell to the two petty officers, both in their 20s, to evaluate the horrendous weather, the capabilities of the rescue boats and the New Zest's uncertain position.

The 41-foot boat can safely operate in up to 30 knots, Coast Guard guidelines say. At that point that Saturday morning, winds at the Skyway were gusting close to 60 knots.

Compounding the problem was water depth around Bunces Pass. The pass, which is unmarked, varies from 8 to 20 feet deep. But surrounding water is only 1 to 2 feet, particularly near the Tierra Verde bridge, where the two officers mistakenly thought the New Zest was, McIntosh said.

Botzenhart worried about the safety of his crew. You won't be able to get into Bunces Pass, he told Peck.

The Coast Guard has 21-foot rubber boats designed for shallow water, but "to operate them at high speed, to get them there quickly, they would have flipped," McIntosh said.

Unmarked shallows. Steady 50 mph winds. Darkness. Peck added it up and changed his mind. He wouldn't launch the rescue boat immediately.

About 4:30 a.m., 15 minutes after Group St. Petersburg had lost contact with the New Zest, someone telephoned with a disturbing message. He had picked up a later transmission from the boat that the Coast Guard never received: The boat was taking on water and sinking.

Then another confusing message arrived. Peck had asked the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office to check out the Bunces Pass bridge by land. A deputy dutifully drove to Tierra Verde and reported at 4:37 a.m. that there was no sign of a sailboat in trouble.

A few minutes later, Peck called the Coast Guard Air Station at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport to see if it could launch a search-and-rescue helicopter. There, too, wind gusts were pushing the limits of its equipment's ability to perform.

It took about a hour to wake the crew, consult the weather service, launch the helicopter and arrive on the scene, said co-pilot Rai Combs. The helicopter's first destination was the Bunces Pass bridge at Tierra Verde. Finding nothing there, the helicopter crew turned east toward the Skyway causeway and followed the wind.

At 6:15 a.m. -- two hours after Wilde's first words of distress -- Combs saw something through his night-vision goggles: a sailboat mast sticking out of the water and leaning against a small humpback bridge.

With that word, the St. Petersburg station immediately launched its rescue boat. Winds had died a bit, and the crew then knew that they could approach the sunken New Zest from the east without hazarding many shallows. They arrived at 6:44 a.m. As the sun rose, they began crisscrossing Tampa Bay in search of survivors or bodies.

For six hours, the helicopter and rescue boat searched, pausing once to change crews. Meanwhile at headquarters, distress signals poured in from up and down the coast. Fishing boats had sunk. A surprisingly persistent tide kept rising. People living in low-lying areas were stranded on house roofs.

Before the day was out, the Coast Guard would launch 22 major search-and-rescue missions from Florida's west coast, an all-time high. With such demand for their services, the Coast Guard suspended the New Zest search at 12:30 p.m. Saturday.

And what of Sheila Wilde and Jim Harden?

As divers from Eckerd College would discover the next day, the New Zest had a gaping hole where its hull rested against the bridge pilings. That indicated impact from a strong collision, which would have sunk the boat quickly and dumped them into the churning water.

Under the bridge, water was rushing east at almost 10 mph. With 50 mph winds, the couple would have been swept rapidly into Tampa Bay with little chance to swim to safety, McIntosh said.

Once again, their very proximity to shore reduced their chances.

Seventy miles away, a commercial fisherman from a wrecked boat was bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico in his life jacket. He survived six hours in waves 15 to 20 feet high before the Coast Guard could rescue him. But those waves tended to arrive rhythmically, from a predictable direction -- giving the fisherman breathing space, McIntosh said.

In an enclosed area like Tampa Bay, storms tend to create "confused seas," he said. Like water sloshing around a bathtub, waves hit you from every direction.

The wind also knocks the tops off waves, creating an intense spray, McIntosh said. "It's like being in a driving, horizontal rain. You can't get your breath without sucking in spray."

With a water temperature of 60 degrees, hypothermia would also kill an average adult in four to eight hours or so, the Coast Guard manual indicates. Physically fit people like Harden and Wilde actually tend to succumb more quickly, McIntosh said, because they have less body fat for insulation.

The Coast Guard said Harden probably wasn't wearing a flotation device when the boat sank. "I don't think he was prepared to go in," McIntosh said.

But Wilde was wearing two kinds of flotation devices and was attached to a third. Coast Guard officials speculate that she might have tried to carry flotation to Harden. Or maybe Harden was wearing flotation. Maybe they had tied themselves together and he slipped out, McIntosh said.

Given the force of the wind and all the flotation she was wearing, Wilde probably blew 3 miles across Tampa Bay in a few hours, McIntosh said. Her body was found three days later in mangrove flats near Cockroach Bay on the eastern shore.

A fisherman found Harden's body near Port Manatee nine days after the storm. He was not wearing any kind of flotation. Without it, drowning victims typically sink immediately and then resurface several days later.

Medical examiners determined that both Wilde and Harden drowned, although no one could pinpoint when. Given the conditions, McIntosh said, they may well have drowned in minutes. "Once you start choking and can't get a breath, you drown very quickly."

Slim chances

In retrospect, the Coast Guard should have launched a rescue boat as soon as it knew the couple was in immediate danger, operations chief McIntosh said.

"There's an old Coast Guard adage that you have to go out, but you don't have to come back," McIntosh said. "That's not true anymore. But in more cases than not, we go out in dangerous conditions all the time.

"When there is cause for uncertainty about the position, you go and try to get as close as possible. In those conditions, you can't really decide whether (winds and shallow water) are a factor unless you've tried."

By the same token, he said, the chances of saving Harden and Wilde were probably slim even if the rescue boat had launched when the distress call came in. Most clues indicate the boat went down before the rescue boat could have arrived. Still, McIntosh expressed concern about his young officers who had to make tough decisions.

"They feel very affected by it emotionally. Peck is one of the best command duty officers we have. He's very thorough, very aggressive. If there's anyone I would give responsibility to, it would be that individual."

Two-and-a-half weeks after the sinking, Harden's sister and the couple's friends from St. Petersburg boated out to Bunces Pass and sprinkled Wilde's and Harden's ashes in the water over the sunken sailboat.

"The only comfort I can take was that he was making his dream come true," said Rita Hogg, now back home in England. "They were doing what they loved, and they were doing it together."

-- Times staff writer Jane Meinhardt contributed to this report.

* * *

Mayday

The distress call from Sheila Wilde on the New Zest, as received by the Coast Guard, lasted from 4:05 to 4:15 a.m. March 13. Here is a transcript taken from a Coast Guard recording:

NZ: Coast Guard, Coast Guard. This is the vessel New Zest.

CG: This is Coast Guard Group St. Petersburg, Channel 1-6, over.

NZ: We're in distress. We're in the Skyway Channel (unintelligible). Our anchors are dragging, and we're going in towards the Skyway bridge.

CG: Vessel calling Coast Guard. This is Coast Guard Group St. Petersburg, Channel 1-6. Say again. Over.

NZ: We're in the Skyway channel. Can you hear me? We're in the Skyway Channel with anchor, and our anchor is broke with the storm. And we're going towards the Skyway bridge. We're in the Bunces Channel.

CG: Vessel in Skyway Channel, this is Coast Guard St. Petersburg. Ma'am, are you able to get under way under power?

NZ: We're under power, full power, but not making any headway because of the winds.

CG: Roger, ma'am. Where are you in reference to the Skyway? Are you south, east or northeast of the Skyway bridge? Over.

NZ: We're east of the Skyway bridge in the Skyway Channel. Do you know the Bunces Pass? We're anchored right by the bridge.

CG: Roger. You're in Bunces Pass Channel or in the Skyway Channel? Over.

NZ: We're near Tarpon Key. Near Tarpon Key, but right close to the bridge.

CG: Vessel on Channel 16, in distress. What bridge are you located near? Over.

NZ: We're located near Tarpon Key. In the Skyway Channel in the waterway. Our engine is on full power, but we're going right into the bridge.

CG: Ma'am, which bridge are you headed toward? Over.

NZ: Skyway bridge. We're west of the Skyway bridge.

CG: Understand you're west of the Skyway bridge, you broke anchor and making no headway. What is the size of your vessel? Over.

NZ: Thirty-five-foot sailboat.

CG: Ma'am, what is the name of your vessel?

NZ: New Zest, November, echo, whiskey and then Zest, Zulu, echo, sierra, tango.

CG: Vessel in distress. This is Coast Guard Group St. Petersburg. Roger. Stand by.

CG: Vessel in distress on Channel 16. Do you have an exact position? Over.

NZ: Exact position, um, hang on. Twenty-seven degrees, 82, um, 42. Come from Boca Ciega Bay, down the Skyway Channel to get out across the bay, but we couldn't make it, so we actually came back. And anchored off the channel in Bunces Pass. We were trying to head back into Boca Ciega Bay, but we couldn't. So we're in Bunces Pass, right by where the, the, the bridge is . . . where the . . . it's a fixed bridge. There's red and green lights. It's only for small boats (so) that we wouldn't be able to get under it. You understand?

CG: Do you know the name of the bridge you are talking about? Over.

NZ: It's the Sunshine Skyway bridge, but not the big opening in the bay. The one as you are going north. It doesn't say it on the chart.

CG: Roger, ma'am. Stand by.

NZ: There's Tarpon Key in Boca Ciega Bay. There's Mullet Key. And then there's Cabbage Key. And there's Tarpon Key. And they're on the west. And we're east of them, but we're not actually east of the Skyway bridge.

CG: Roger, ma'am. Understand. Please stand by.

NZ: Please hurry!

(A voice breaks in from a third party monitoring the distress call) Probably Bunces Pass bridge. Bunces Pass bridge, most likely.

NZ: Oh, yes, Bunces Pass bridge.

CG: Sailing vessel at Bunces Pass, ma'am. Are you east or west of the Bunces Pass bridge?

NZ: We're, um, east of it.

CG: Roger, ma'am. You are definitely in the Bunces Pass Channel, not the Skyway Channel? Can you see any marker to give us a better idea where you are?

NZ: If you were coming from St. Petersburg and coming under the Bunces Pass, we'd be the other side of it. But just the other side of where the lights are, the red and green lights on the Bunces Pass bridge.

CG: Roger, ma'am. Can you go back under the west side of the Bunces Pass bridge and tie up to the docks there at the boat ramp?

NZ: We can't get there. We can't . . . we can't . . . we're not . . . we're not moving. We've got our engines on full power, and we're just not making any headway.

CG: Roger, ma'am. Have you tried to set an anchor out? Over.

NZ: We've got three anchors out, three anchors.

CG: Roger, ma'am. We'll try to get a boat over there to assist you, but the quickest we're going to be there is 30 minutes. Thirty minutes is the quickest we can be there. Over.

NZ: Okay. Thank you.

CG: Roger, ma'am. How many people do you have aboard the boat?

NZ: Just me and my husband.

CG: Roger, ma'am. Can you spell the name of the boat, please?

NZ: November, echo, whiskey.

CG: Roger, sailing vessel New. Have you donned your life jackets at this time?

NZ: (unintelligible) My husband said we're almost hitting the pilings of the bridge.

CG: Roger, ma'am, understand. Have you got your life jackets on?

NZ: Yes.

CG: Roger, ma'am. We'll try to get someone out there right away, but still 3-0 minutes before we can get there. Over.