Adam Best

Adam Best is a twenty-one-year-old gunner’s mate third class and the emergency medical technician aboard the USCGC Tornado. He enters the narrative at the point where the Coast Guard’s search becomes a rescue, and his importance lies in the disciplined medical care that follows Nick Schuyler’s removal from the Gulf. Best does not determine who survives the disaster, but he helps make survival medically possible and supplies the first professional reading of what prolonged cold-water immersion and dehydration have done to Nick’s body.

Identity and Assignment

Best is serving aboard the USCGC Tornado when the cutter is diverted on March 1, 2009, from routine patrol in the Florida Straits to a search-and-rescue operation off Tampa–St. Petersburg. The crew initially knows little more than that the vessel has been redirected to St. Pete; some members learn through the Internet that they are searching for four missing football players. Best’s dual position as a gunner’s mate and emergency medical technician places him between the operational and humanitarian sides of the mission. He is part of the crew moving toward a dangerous scene, but he is also the person prepared to judge and treat the body that may come back from it.

The cutter reaches the search area under worsening conditions. Its engines drive it at twenty-three or twenty-four knots before rising seas force a reduction to ten or twelve knots. Against that background, Best’s later actions are not routine bedside care detached from the disaster. They are the continuation of a difficult maritime operation in which the crew must identify the correct boat, recover a survivor, and keep that survivor alive while his condition remains unstable.

Medical Work During the Rescue

After David Earles, the rescue swimmer, helps bring Nick aboard, Best helps guide him to the executive officer’s bathroom. The rescued man is dried, stripped of wet clothes, dressed in Coast Guard coveralls, wrapped in wool blankets, and given sandals normally used for migrants recovered from rafts or small boats. The largest pair available is size twelve, while Nick wears size fifteen, an awkward but concrete sign of how improvised the immediate care must be. The sequence restores basic warmth and protection before any larger medical conclusion can be made.

Best’s assessment records the physical cost of Nick’s ordeal. Nick’s temperature is 89.5 degrees, far below the normal 98.6. His breathing is somewhat labored; he is cold, his lips are turning blue, his skin is cool and clammy, and he appears to be entering the early stages of shock. Pain and minor cuts affect his legs, with salt water making the injuries feel worse. These observations establish that rescue has not ended the emergency. Nick is alive, but he remains medically vulnerable after hours exposed to cold water, wind, waves, and exhaustion.

Best also tests Nick’s alertness with standard questions. Nick knows his own name, his location, and the month, but cannot remember who is president of the United States. The result is neither total unconsciousness nor complete recovery: Nick can provide identifying information while still showing the cognitive effects of exposure and dehydration. Best’s examination therefore becomes an early bridge between the survivor’s fragmented experience and the official understanding of what happened.

Controlled Hydration and Identification

Nick repeatedly wants water, but Best gives him only small sips. The restraint is deliberate. Nick is already dehydrated, and drinking too quickly could make him vomit and become even more dehydrated; excessive intake could also worsen the danger of shock. Nick protests that Best is killing him and asks for more water, while Best continues telling him to take it slowly. The exchange captures the conflict between urgent thirst and safe treatment: the most obvious comfort cannot simply be supplied without regard for the damaged body receiving it.

Best’s responsibility also includes helping establish that the rescued man is genuinely Nick Schuyler and that the cutter has found the correct case. Michael Briner asks Nick his name again, and Captain Close wants the identification double-checked because a hypothermic survivor might hallucinate or call out his friends’ names. Nick’s backpack and wallet verify his identity. Best’s questioning thus works alongside the physical evidence, converting a confused, exhausted arrival into a confirmed rescue subject rather than a possibly mistaken report from another capsized boat.

Understanding the Survivors’ Condition

Best’s actions gain significance from the medical realities surrounding the search. A person thrown into the Gulf could swallow large amounts of seawater, producing a dangerous sodium imbalance, cellular dehydration, delirium, seizures, heart failure, and death. Cold water could lower body temperature below 95 degrees, leading from constricted blood flow and shivering to clumsiness, shallow breathing, blue lips, confusion, slurred speech, and irrational or confrontational behavior. The symptoms seen in Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith—slurred speech, rambling, delayed responses, dry heaving, and desperate physical behavior—are therefore not simple evidence that the men had given up.

The narrative emphasizes that youth and fitness do not guarantee safety. At approximately 65-degree water temperature, an average twenty-five-year-old man might remain functional for 9.9 hours and survive for fifteen, while a fifty-year-old man might remain functional for 11.6 hours and survive for 17.6, partly because greater body fat provides insulation and flotation. Football-conditioned bodies may be powerful but not necessarily suited to hours of treading water. Best’s examination of Nick supplies the immediate human scale of those broader facts: the survivor is coherent enough to answer questions, yet hypothermic, dehydrated, blue-lipped, and close to shock.

The same medical framework later challenges the idea that Marquis, Corey, and Will Bleakley simply chose to stop fighting. Dr. Mark Rumbak explains that hypothermia can cause delirium, potassium loss, and breakdown of the heart’s cell membranes until the heart can no longer contract. In that account, the men’s confusion and disappearance are physiological consequences of cold rather than moral surrender. Best’s careful treatment belongs to this corrective understanding, preserving Nick long enough for the medical difference between rescue and death to remain visible.

Narrative Significance

Best is one of the first people to receive Nick after the sea has reduced the four-man fishing party to a single identifiable survivor. He helps move Nick from the overturned boat into warmth, clothing, blankets, and measured hydration, while his questions establish that the survivor is alert enough to be recognized but impaired enough to require continued care. The rescued man’s later reunion with Marcia Schuyler in Urgent Care—lying on a bed with intravenous tubes while doctors work around him—extends the chain of treatment Best begins aboard the cutter.

His role also clarifies the difference between dramatic heroism and procedural care. The search is filled with large-scale forces: the storm, the overturned boat, hypothermia, dehydration, and the possibility of cardiac failure. Best answers those forces through small, exact decisions—how much water to allow, what signs to record, how to test awareness, and how to keep the survivor warm. The survival of Nick Schuyler is not presented as the product of willpower alone, and Best’s work makes that visible.

For Nick, survival later becomes inseparable from the friends who worked to keep one another alive, especially Will Bleakley, whom Nick credits with helping preserve his life. The tattoo Nick eventually creates bears the initials of Marquis Cooper, Will, and Corey, along with a rope, an anchor, the date March 1, 2009, and the words “In the hour of adversity, be not without hope.” Best does not appear in that memorial design, but his intervention occupies the next link in the same chain: after the four men’s collective struggle in the water, a Coast Guard medic helps carry one living member of that group across the threshold from exposure into treatment.