Missing fishermen found safely after drifting at sea

Three people reported missing at sea since Sunday afternoon are safe after a day and night on the water. According to police, the twenty-five foot boat that Ron Hardwick, Linda Hudge, and Armstrong Ortiz set off in from Long Caye at Lighthouse Reef, ran out of gas and for the past two days the trio had been unaccounted for. With winds coming out of the north northeast, the vessel was swept toward the barrier reef and reached it in the vicinity of Columbus Caye. They reached the island in good health and spirits and made their way to Belize City today. The three had left Long Caye on Sunday morning on a one day fishing expedition, but when they failed to show up that evening, the caye’s watchman went to the Belize Audubon Society station located on Halfmoon Caye where a call for help was made to police officials via radio. Early on Monday morning, pilots of the Belize Defence Force Airwing were dispatched to the area. But as Captain Raymond Shepherd told us this morning, the mission was very much like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Captain Raymond Shepherd, Pilot, B.D.F. Airwing
?We were told that they went fishing and they were supposed to return back at around 5:00 on Sunday evening, so they didn?t return at that time so we went out to Long Caye and commenced our search from there.?

Janelle Chanona
?Based on that limited information, how were you able to come up with a grid, a search area??

Captain Raymond Shepherd
?That is the difficult thing; we did not know where to start. Our only position to start was Long Caye, so we did what we call an expanding box, where we start from there and kept expanding the box and we did approximately five and three quarter hours yesterday. All the description we get was three persons in a blue twenty-five foot boat. Yesterday we saw several boats, vessels fitting that description, but because we did not have any vessels on the ground to communicate with, we could not determine whether it was actually those persons or not.?

While the B.D.F. flew concentric squares over thousands of miles of ocean, the three people on the boat were watching the land they came from grow ever smaller. This evening we spoke to Ron Hardwick, who said it started out as just another fishing trip.

Ron Hardwick, Found safe and sound
?We just went out to do a little fishing Sunday morning and we just caught a good barracuda and were ready to go in and our engines wouldn?t start. We tried to signal a few boats as we passed by, but we didn?t really catch anybody?s attention, so we drifted off into the blue.?

Stewart Krohn
?So you were out by Lighthouse Reef and the way the wind was blowing, there really wasn?t much land out there. When did you realise you were in trouble??

Ron Hardwick
?We knew by about eleven-thirty in the morning as we were drifting away from Hat Caye that we were in some trouble.?

Stewart Krohn
?What went through your mind at that point, as to how you were going to get rescued??

Ron Hardwick
?Well we dug out a flare gun and we just kept waiting and flagging at every boat. Everything that went by we try to get their attention, but we didn?t get anybody?s attention that night. We drifted clear across the blue.?

Stewart Krohn
?There were three of you in the boat, was it very uncomfortable, anyone get sick??

Ron Hardwick
?If anybody got sick it was me. We were twenty-four hours drifting across before we hit the next reef and we dragged the boat across the reef by hand. From there we spotted a fishing shack about a mile and a half away and we pulled the boat along the reef until the wind would carry us to the fishing shack.?

Stewart Krohn
?What advice you have for other people that might be going fishing?

Ron Hardwick
?Have every piece of safety gear you can afford.?

Hardwick and his girlfriend are among the first inhabitants of a residential community at Long Caye. They thought that the built-in gas tank on their boat had sixteen gallons of fuel, but now believe that some had been stolen before they left the island.