Attempts to right the overturned boat

Attempts to right the overturned boat begin immediately after Marquis Cooper’s fishing boat rolls over in the Gulf of Mexico. The four men surface together beside the completely inverted hull, with its white bottom and propeller protruding from the water and thousands of bubbles escaping from beneath it. None is wearing a life jacket. Their first objective is therefore not yet long-term survival but the restoration of the boat’s air pocket and access to the vessel’s equipment. The overturned hull is the only substantial object keeping them together in the cold, heaving sea.

Trigger and Immediate Stakes

The capsizing follows an effort to free the anchor. The anchor had remained stuck despite Marquis Cooper maneuvering the boat for roughly half an hour while Will Bleakley and Corey Smith pulled from different directions. Will then suggested moving the one-inch anchor line from the bow to a stern cleat and using the engine to yank the anchor loose. Marquis agreed. As the motor was throttled forward, the anchor blades appear to have dug in more deeply: the stern squatted, water poured aboard, the bow rose, and the boat listed to port before overturning.

The decision was made in worsening weather, but not amid simple drunkenness. The boat had reached seven-foot swells, Nick Schuyler was badly seasick, and the group had already decided that the trip should end. Yet the men were described as relatively clearheaded: Corey Smith did not drink, Nick Schuyler had consumed about a beer and a half but vomited it, Will Bleakley had seven or eight beers over ten hours, and Marquis Cooper had five or six. The immediate stakes were consequently shaped by a bad maneuver, rough water, inadequate flotation, and the absence of time to send a Mayday call—not by a single, simple explanation.

The First Coordinated Effort

Corey Smith moved toward the stopped motor while Nick Schuyler swam with him through the swells. Will Bleakley and Marquis Cooper went toward the front of the boat on the left side. The men relied on the teamwork that had defined their athletic lives: they counted down together, trying to pull and push in unison rather than canceling one another’s force. They gripped the small ridges along the hull and attempted to use their combined body weight, timing each effort with the waves in the hope that a swell would roll beneath the boat and help turn it upright.

The sea defeated the method. Waves smashed the men against the hull, and every handhold was underwater. They slipped slowly off the smooth surface and could obtain no leverage. The contrast between their physical power and the boat’s resistance becomes central to the episode. These were strong, trained men accustomed to blocking, tackling, lifting, and working as a unit, but the three-thousand-four-hundred-pound boat behaved less like an object they could overpower than like a mass governed by water and mechanical geometry. The attempt did not merely fall short; it did not come within five percent of succeeding.

Cutting the Anchor Line

After about five minutes of struggling, Will Bleakley noticed that the anchor line was still attached to the rear of the overturned boat. He reasoned that the taut line might be holding the hull down and that cutting it would allow the boat to flip. The men drifted the boat until they gained a small amount of slack. Will Bleakley and Marquis Cooper then worked at the rope where it crossed the exposed propeller, sawing it back and forth against the blade as if cutting wood.

The work took five minutes. Once the line parted, the stern lifted slightly and the group began drifting. For a moment, Nick Schuyler believed that removing the restraint had changed the situation and that the boat could now be righted. That hope was quickly tested and defeated. Nick Schuyler and Corey Smith lay across the stern and kicked downward while pulling with their arms. Will Bleakley and Marquis Cooper pulled from near the front, then entered the water and pushed upward from the starboard side. The submerged center console acted as a large resisting rudder, while the men’s efforts drove Will Bleakley and Marquis Cooper farther underwater instead of producing a turn.

Repeated Failure and Recognition

The men continued returning to the same problem because the overturned boat remained the obvious route to warmth, flotation, food, and rescue equipment. At about midnight, Corey Smith again shouted that he could not believe four men were unable to flip the boat and insisted that there had to be another way. Will Bleakley and Nick Schuyler answered that there was no leverage and that the task was impossible under those conditions. Will Bleakley pointed to the cooler as a practical comparison: even getting water out of it and flipping it onto the boat had required two men.

This exchange marks a shift from muscular persistence to reluctant recognition. Earlier, the men had treated the hull as a problem that teamwork and timing might solve. Repeated attempts showed that strength alone could not overcome the boat’s position, the waves, and the submerged console. The effort therefore becomes a form of discovery: the survivors learn that the vessel cannot be restored by incremental exertion, and that continuing to spend energy on it may threaten the endurance required for the night.

Investigation and Consequences

The later official explanation confirms that the righting attempts were responding to the consequence of the original anchor maneuver rather than causing the capsizing. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission identified three contributing factors: the anchor line had been tied improperly to an eye bracket on the port side of the transom; the engine had been throttled forward in an attempt to pull the anchor free; and insufficient slack allowed the stern to submerge and the boat to capsize. The men’s subsequent attempts to right the hull were thus emergency actions within an already-created failure chain.

The absence of an emergency position-indicating radio beacon made the overturned boat even more difficult to locate. A capsized vessel presented searchers with little more than a small patch of white hull among vast numbers of whitecaps, under clouded, storm-driven conditions. Captain Timothy Close observed that, had the boat carried such a beacon, the situation might have been rescue rather than search. The failed righting attempts consequently had consequences beyond their physical result: they left the men dependent on the hull’s limited flotation while the Coast Guard searched without an exact electronic position.

Memory, Responsibility, and Meaning

After the rescue, Nick Schuyler had to recount the episode to Will Bleakley’s parents. They questioned the group’s choices, especially moving the anchor line to the rear of the boat, and Will’s father responded that Will had taken boating-safety classes and should have known better. Nick Schuyler defended the fact that the men had been trying to help one another, while acknowledging the decision’s danger. He also remembered that Will Bleakley’s work beneath the boat to obtain life jackets, Gatorade, and pretzels later became essential to survival.

In retrospect, the righting attempts carry both practical and moral weight. Nick Schuyler wished that the men had handled the anchor differently, worn life jackets, prepared flares and flashlights, and been better able to send a distress signal. He also wondered whether greater clarity, less illness, or a different distribution of warm clothing could have changed the outcome. The struggle to turn the boat upright therefore stands at the center of the accident’s ambiguity: it is an understandable response to immediate danger, yet it follows a preventable operational error and leads into consequences no amount of athletic strength can reverse.