After preparing for an hour, we finally set off. We were going to try and catch a make shark. They are known as one of the best game fish in the sea. We chummed up the water to attract the shark. The smell was a mix of blood, sweat, and sea salt. This wasn’t something that you would want to make a candle out of.
We were on the water for just under two hours until the sound of a line being pulled out faster than the best fisherman could reel in.
“John! Sam! Hey, I finally got something hooked,” Paul yelled from the back of the boat.
“Get into the chair. Sam, strap him in,” I hollered back
With the sound of struggle in his voice, Paul told us that this would be the catch of a lifetime. Paul would reel in as much as he could, then get his strength back and reel again. I felt that I should be helping him, but I’ve never done this before. I just stood there watching Paul in a fierce battle with the shark. After twenty minutes of fighting, Paul got the shark just fifteen feet away from the port side of the boat. Sam ran over to the other side to get a hook and I net. He kept the hook for himself and gave me the net.
“Come on Paul. You’ve got to fight for it if you really want it,” I said trying to encourage him.
“Don’t worry guys,” Paul ensured us, “Just wait a few more minutes.”
When the shark did get just two feet away from the side, Sam hooked the shark’s tail, and I put the net over its head.
Paul led us in pulling it up, “Pull it up on three. One….. Two….. Three!”
On three, we pulled up and brought the shark up to the boat. Paul hit the shark’s head to finally put it out. I grabbed the tail to move it to the front of the boat so that it wouldn’t get in our way. The shark weighed at least three-hundred pounds. It was like trying to pull a bag of hundreds of bricks.
“Hey, I can’t do this by myself. Could you maybe help me?” I asked them.
After we got it to the front of the boat, we decided to try and catch one more for the day. I didn’t want to even mess with a mako shark, so I let Sam try to catch one. I went into a cooler in the cabin and got out two buckets of blood and chopped up fish. I coughed when I first opened the lid.
“Hey Paul, could you take this to the back?” I asked.
“Yea, but are you only going to put two buckets in?” Paul said.
“Isn’t that how many we put in for the first shark?”
“Yea I guess so.”
Paul dumped one in, and I dumped the other. Sam picked up the fishing pole and put a fish head onto the enlarged hook and casted it into the red cloud of blood.
After two hours of just sitting and waiting for a shark to take the bait, I noticed a large cloud starting to move our way. Within another two hours, the cloud would be right over our boat. I pointed it out to the guys and they just thought that it would be fine.
“You guys, do you not realize how huge that cloud is? We need to get out of here now before it’s too late,” I told Paul and Sam.
“John, relax, it’s gonna be fine. We’ll catch the shark and head back in before the distance between us and it is cut in half.” Sam told me.
“Are you sure, because I’ve seen clouds this size before on the news, and they turned into tropical storms,” I said.
“Yea I’m sure. We’ll be out of here before you know it.”
After our talk, I never once looked back at the cloud. I was sure that Sam was right.
Just like Sam said, an hour later he caught the shark. We pulled it in, killed it, and hauled it to the front of the boat with the other shark. All I could think about now was getting back onto the island. Paul went into the cabin to turn the engine back on so that we could get out. We pulled the keys out of his pocket and put it into the key hole. He turned it and I expected to hear the sound of the twin engines turn on, but what I really heard was the sound of the engines sputtering. He let go of key and then turned it again, and again, and again, but nothing happened. The storm was now just thirty minutes away. The wind was already starting to pick up, and rain was slowly pouring down on us.
Paul turned to us and said, “Don’t worry guys, I’ll just radio back to the island and tell them to send a rescue boat out here to get us.”
Paul picked up the microphone connected to the radio, clicked the button on the side and said, “This is the boat ‘The Catch’, our engine is down, and a storm is just thirty minutes away from us.” Paul let go of the button so that we could hear an answer, but all we heard was what sounded like someone crinkling an empty candy wrapper. Paul tried again, and again, and all we heard was the sound of no one at the other end.
“The storm is causing the reception to be cut out,” Paul told us. “We’re just going to have to endure the storm. John, go into that bench and get out the life vests. We’re gonna need to put these on if we want a chance of making in through this.”
I handed Sam a vest and then I gave the other to Paul. I put mine on and sat back down in the cabin. I could feel the waves starting to get higher and higher. By now they were at least seven feet high. I closed my eyes, and all I could see was our boat getting picked up by a wave and flipping us over.
By now the storm had to be right over us. We all sat in the cabin with our life vests on hoping that the storm would pass right by us. Just as I looked up at Paul and Sam, a wave that had to be five times larger than the others picked up the boat and flipped it front first. I leaped up from my seat and grabbed the handle of the door so that I wouldn’t be thrown around. Paul and Sam also grabbed on to things.
When we were totally flipped, I opened the door and swam out of the cabin. Paul swam out seconds after I got out. There wasn’t a sign of Sam.
“Did you see what happened to him?” I asked Paul.
While shaking his head Paul answered, “No. When I last looked at him, he was okay.”
I wasn’t going to take a chance. I undid my vest and swam back down to the cabin. It was just five feet under the water at this time. I saw him in the cabin knocked out. I grabbed him and pulled him out of there. Sam handed my vest back and I put it on. I wasn’t scared of drown, but what I was scared of was sharks. The two sharks that we caught weren’t tied down to the boat. I knew that other sharks would come check them out and then they would later find us.
A few minutes later Sam came back into a conscious state.
“What’s going on?” He asked as he looked at us in a dazed way.
“Our boat flipped, and were in the middle of the ocean just off the coast of Bermuda,” I told him.
“Are we going to make it back?”
“Yea, were gonna be fine.” But I didn’t even know if we were going to be ok.
We laid there holding each other so that no one would be swept away. I look up to see where we were in the storm. There was probably just ten minutes left. I became excited, until I saw just what I thought that I would be seeing soon. It was a fin that was just peeking out of the water line. I told the guys not to move. It swam circles around us. All I could think of was the shark grabbing one of us and dragging that person down.
“Did anyone else feel that?” Paul asked. “I think that it just brushed up against me.”
“Just stay still,” I said.
I watched the fin go back down into the water. The storm had passed us when the fin popped back up. The fin was only down for about five minutes. It began to circle us again. It got closer and closer with every circle. When it was less than two feet away I looked at it. When I saw it, I think that my heart missed a beat. To our fortune, what we thought was a man eating shark, was really a dolphin that must have been separated from its group by the storm. I told the guys what it really was. Just like me, they were excited.
After that event, I knew that we were safe. Now we just had to wait for someone to find ocean in the open ocean. Minutes seemed to pass faster than seconds. In what felt like a real minute, I heard the sound of an engine. I undid my vest and waved it in the air. The boat must have seen it right away, because it came right to us. It stopped within feet of us. Two men and a woman walked to the side of the boat that we were at and threw us a rope. I grabbed it and they put me up. They did the same thing for Sam and Paul. They gave us a towel and we all laid down on the deck. I was shocked that anyone would ever find us, but I was thankful that they did.
We talked about what happened to us as we went back to the island. When we got back, it looked like nothing happened, but just a boat coming back with three wet men. We played in cool.
After three days of resting and trying to find out how to get back home without our boat, a man knocked on our hotel door.
“Is there a Paul Meconi here?” He asked
“Yes. You’re speaking to him.”
“A boat washed up on the shore this morning and it is registered in your name,” He said.
Paul told the man to come in. He told the hotel worker what happened to us. After the story, he told the man to tell no one, and the man promised.
Later that day, a news crew found us lying out by the pool. They wanted to get the scoop on the newest story. We looked at each other and shook our heads.
To this day, we are known as one of a few people that have survived the terrible Bermuda triangle.
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