Lost in the Stream

As told to Shane Scott by Johnny Savage

1998 is a year that Johnny Savage will never forget. The book that this Virginia local and long-time offshore fisherman authored, Lost in the Stream: The Miraculous Story of Two Fisherman Lost at Sea, covers his experience surviving the aftermath of one of the earliest documented rogue waves in history. Here is the story, as told by Savage, of how he and his captain, Eric Bingham, staged in Key West and set out for Cancun aboard the 58-foot Jim Smith sportfisher Anhinga, unaware they were about to miraculously overcome the unthinkable:

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On April 13th, 1998, we set underway just before light to be able to be up and running as the sun came up. And we were up and running at about nine o’clock. We looked in front of us and it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before; it was like a hole in the ocean, is the best way to describe it. So, we were in a two-to-three-foot following sea and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was just a hole. And basically, the whole boat fell off into it. It was a rogue wave. And within a couple minutes we were in the water without a distress call, EPIRB, life raft, life jackets, nothing. And she was down. A lot of people ask about the wave. And I don’t know of any boat that could have made it through there.

So as this boat went off the wave, I was standing up on the bridge next to Captain Eric at the helm. And it was steep enough that I free fell forward.

And when she hit the bottom, I just heard this terrible “boom” and basically it was the bulkheads breaking. And just the pressure, I think she broke her spine and then the pressure on the sides­—so her bow deck popped. When she hit, as I was free falling forward and was able to grab ahold of the tower, the tuna tower leg and rail at the front of the bridge—I was able to see a crack running from the starboard side running into the port side where the bow deck met the house, about a foot forward of that position.

And just from that moment I knew that this wasn’t going to be good. But even though I saw what I saw and heard what I heard, I was still kind of expecting to feel that ride up. But it didn’t. She just stuck, and started to go down and she was gone pretty quick. And Eric and I were in the water. Captain Eric and I each grabbed this little Igloo bait cooler and we grabbed each other and we immediately went into the Lord’s Prayer. We were by ourselves 90 miles out in the Lower Gulf where there’s not much traffic. Nobody else was around. And from there, that’s where the fight for survival kind of began.

When we finished the prayer, the Anhinga popped back up. But she was up upside down. It was just the air that was in her lazarette underneath the cockpit. So, it was just a small part of her bottom, a small piece of her stern with their wheels and rudders. So, Eric went to the hull, because that’s textbook. We can live out there a long time, but we got to be out of the water. Our bodies are not made to stay in that water. And at the same time, I looked over and that’s when I saw that my surfboard was floating and it was in an old FCS board bag with a Mylar finish.

I saw it floating and I told Eric, “Eric, I think I need to get that.” He’s like, “Alright. Go get it, buddy.” And so I took off for the surfboard and that’s when I hit the diesel fuel, and I’ll tell you what, that’s when I knew where every single cut was on my body. I’d never gone swimming in diesel fuel before. But it was in my eyes. It was in my mouth and my ears, just everywhere. And you know what my first thought was? “Please, Lord, don’t let me throw up. I can’t afford to lose this food that’s in my stomach from breakfast this morning. I’m going to need it to survive.” That was my mindset. It was, “So we got a job we have to do and our job is to stay alive—whatever it takes.”

From there I actually had made it to the surfboard. It was funny, just hopping on that surfboard trying to paddle because the fins are in the bag instead of on the board. So you’re trying to paddle and the tail’s kicking around. It took a little while to get used to that.

So, Eric had climbed onto the hull. But by the time I got the board and was heading back to him, she had already gone back down. She was done. He was able to get ahold of an engine hatch that would’ve been from under the salon floor. That thing was a nightmare to hang on to because there was no way to be comfortable holding on to it because you’d hold on to it and it would be digging into your side. But he was holding on to that and then he was able to get his hands on one of the bridge cushions.

I remember the feeling of just like, “I can’t believe this, how is this happening?” And there was nothing that anybody did wrong. It wasn’t like there was a wall of water that we saw. It was just like you run along and all of a sudden, there’s a cliff that you don’t see. And there’s no fault. So, then, it was just we knew that we’ve got to survive.

And so, we did try to collect things. Eric still had his glasses on, so, he gave me the glasses and I was kind of laying in the water, and we would switch who would hold the surfboard or who would hold the engine hatch cover with the other because it was so uncomfortable. Eric would mainly scan the horizon and I would mainly try to look up into the sky, looking for airplane or something that might see us. One thing we try not to do is look down. It’s pretty deep there. At one point some mahi did come swimming around us a little bit. It was so cool too because it was kind of a glimpse out of the peripheral, this little flash under the water and to see them. And then it was like, “Oh great, what’s going to be behind them?”

When we went down, it was two-to-three-foot seas, beautiful, just perfect, small groundswell and they didn’t have any backsides to them or anything like that. Maybe 12 knots of wind. But that storm would come on us while we were in the water. And that got bad, really bad.

Several hours into it, the boat had formed debris lines just with the current edges. The Anhinga had formed one line of debris that went down sea and then there was a branch that kind of went off diagonally from that off to the left side of that main line kind of cutting across the swell direction. And that was the conversation that we had eventually was related to that. We knew we were going to have to find the EPIRB.

At that point in time, I felt comfortable though with that line of debris going down sea because I knew I could always follow that to get back to Eric. And so, I went out looking for the EPIRB the first time.

I got to that intersection where that diagonal line went off and I remember the fear that I had when I went down that diagonal line and started to make that left turn. It was like, “What happens if this separates?” I had to face that fear—that I could get lost from Eric and not have that directly up and down the sea point of perspective—and go down that line looking for the EPIRB. I had probably paddled out for about a half hour to the end. By that time, I couldn’t see Eric in the distance at all. So, I went down that line, got to into that line and then came back up and cut over to the other line a little bit as I got closer to it. I found nothing. I made my way back to Eric and guess what—he’s got life jackets.

Not only did the life jackets end up floating up to right where Eric was, but also the twist lock flare kits, orange—they floated up to where Eric was, too.

I’ll never forget when we went back to laying in the water watching and I remember seeing an airplane and the hope that was in that airplane and we tried signaling, we used some smoke flares. And watching that plane go out of sight was pretty crushing.

After maybe four hours at sea, we put the flare kit back together and as the waves were starting to increase and starting to cap a little bit, a white cap hit us and hit and busted open one of the flare kits and we lost the bigger flare gun and the flares that were in that kit.

And then more time went by, seas were building and there was a cruise ship that went past us.

We were holding flares up and trying to coordinate what our orange smoke versus our red flares and just thinking about the angle of the ship from the bridge. And then, okay, well the bridge is maybe somebody’s out on the wing or then it’s the side of the ship was towards us and it’s like, all these eyes, there’s got to be thousands of eyeballs on that ship. Somebody’s got to see us. And then from there, then to the stern and then seeing more of that stern quarter, it was like, you know what? People are always looking off the stern or looking at the wash. Maybe somebody’s going to be there. No one saw. That was the biggest blow that started leading my thoughts to a really negative place, of, “you are going to die out here.”

So then we never expressed those thoughts to each other, even though they were prevalent thoughts. When it was probably a good solid six foot and seven foot and the debris line was starting to break up, Eric and I finally had this hard conversation and it was this: “If we don’t find that EPIRB, we’re going to die out here.”

And I knew what that meant because by this point in time, Eric had lost a lot of his feeling in his lower extremities and he wasn’t capable of going out searching.

At that moment when I had to go out knowing this, knowing if I found the life raft, what good was that going to do? It would only do me good. There’s no way I’d be able to get that back to Eric in those sea conditions. But in his gentle way of doing so, I was given an order, a command. And the way it is on a boat, the captain gives you an order, you do it.

I said, “Okay, Cap.” And I explained to him, “Look, I don’t feel like I did a good job of covering that diagonal line.” Now I was already feeling like a failure. Failed with the whole thing with the life raft and the EPIRB. Failed with the airplane. Failed with the cruise ship. I was a failure. And here, and now, what, you’re relying on me, a failure, to go out and save us?

But this last thing I said to him before I left was, “Cap, when I find that EPIRB, and I activate it, we aren’t going to stop looking until we find you.” I knew he knew that that they would come to me. Feeling like I would be abandoning my captain was pretty tough.

Anyway, I took off and it’s probably blowing a good solid 20 now and the wind is going across the swell direction. It’s getting more like a washing machine, basically. So, I got to that point again where I could recognize the split in the debris line and knew that I needed to cover that other line more diligently. And I’d hoped that maybe in that timeframe since I’d left, that it had popped up, and I got to the end of that line and didn’t find it. And by this point in time, things were, because of the wind and the waves and the white caps and everything else, she was really busting up bad. So I was like, “There’s no way, I’m lost.” And I had gone out further this time than I did the original time. There’s no way I’m going to find Eric, I thought. And that’s when I started to allow the thoughts to really dig in, the thoughts of, “You’re a failure. You’re going to die out here, and Eric’s going to die out here because you failed. You’re getting cold.” And that was one of the things. And that’s something that I distinctly remember being in the water. It was like, “Man, you’re getting cold, your core is dropping and you can’t control it.”

I allowed my mindset to carry me down the road where I rationalized killing myself. I made sense of ending my life. I knew, I had two options. One was, I was going to drown. The other was, I was going to get ripped apart by sharks. I rationalized it, I would rather drown than get eaten alive by sharks. I figured that drowning would be less painful. And as somebody who was doing a lot of free diving at the time, I knew my limits, how deep I needed to go, the exhale and shoving myself down even further knowing that I was at my limits. And I just figured it would be that gulp maybe and that convulsion and then that would be it. So, before I did it, I thought about my family. That was one of the hardest things to think about in the water, was just the people I had to say goodbye to.

So, I had said my prayers like, “Lord, there’s the only way out of this and please forgive me for what I’m about to do. I don’t want to do it, but this is it.” And it was in that process, that’s when He showed up and stopped it. Pretty much, God showed up.

As I was in that process of rolling under, all of a sudden, my body filled with strength and warmth. That stopped me. In this miserable sea state, I was able to grab hold of that surfboard, but it was taking on water. It was losing buoyancy steadily. And I grabbed hold of life jacket, just scrambled it back because I didn’t want to lose it. Because I was like, what in the world just happened?

It was in that moment, over my right shoulder, I heard, “John, you spent a lot of time out here, pick your line and paddle it.”

On a rough sea, the ocean consumes all sound. I don’t know how I was able to hear that sound and just the feeling of warmth and strength and power and just faith that overcame my body. Everything in front of me from that point to the end of the day, said you’re going to die. But I knew in my heart we were going to make it. That’s powerful.

I paddled back to Eric. “Sorry captain,” I told him. I felt bad but I was full of joy at the same time. I didn’t find the EPIRB, but man, I found something way bigger than the EPIRB. So anyways, he’s like, “That’s all right, buddy. Look what I found.” And he holds up my backpack. So, in this rough, terrible sea state, my backpack floats up to the one that needed it the most. I’m like, “Eric, have you looked in the backpack?” He’s like, “No, I haven’t looked in the back.” I’m like, “There’s wet suits in the backpack.”

So, Eric put the thicker suit on because he really needed to protect what he had in the core. I put that on the shorty and got down the water and let him get on the surfboard as much as he could.

We made a decision; we weren’t going to separate anymore. And in the surfboard bag there were leashes, we used them to connect each other. So, this is when it was blowing 25, eight-foot seas. There were times where a cap would break on us and send us tumbling underwater and we’d come up, just gasping for air and just one of the things that people wouldn’t think about probably is the Portuguese Man O’ War. What Eric and I would do is we would just kind of lay in the water and we’d just kind of watch each other, and then we’d have to communicate, all right, we got to try to dodge left or right because the Man O’ War would come. We figured, if we got wrapped up in one of those things, it would take a lot out of us.

And then it got to a point where I looked out and I saw a flare floating about 50 yards away from us. And I told Eric, I said, “I don’t know if that’s a good flare or not.” And it was one of the stick flares. He said, “All right, buddy. Go get it.” So I took off to go get it. And that wasn’t an easy process just the timeframe of being at peaks and being in troughs trying to keep an eye on where that was to get to it. So I get to it and it’s good.

So, I’m all excited. “Hey, it’s good, it’s good.” He can’t hear me, I can’t hear him because of the wind. I start making my way back to him. As I got closer, I could tell he was screaming, but I couldn’t tell what he was screaming.

And my initial thought was, he’s getting ripped apart by sharks. So, I just started digging to him as fast and as hard as I could swim.

Fortunately for us, it wasn’t sharks. As I got closer to him, I could hear him screaming, “It’s a fish boat. It’s a fish boat. It’s a fish boat.”

When I got to him, Eric was already in the process of rolling off the surfboard and I struck the flare. All this was in perfect unison. As he rolled off, he reached up, flare, went in his hand, it was one of the red flares, and I went to into the back of the bag and got the last bullet loaded in, and got up on the surfboard. And so this boat was off to a side half quarter mile, run along. And of course, because it was so rough, they weren’t making much time, maybe 10, 12, something like that.

But still, even at that speed when the bow came down, the spray would come up and they wouldn’t be able to see. So, I was thinking about how I had to time this off his front quarter as he’s on a rise, so that he would see that fireball and not have it be covered by spray. And I was just at the point getting ready to squeeze the trigger, and suddenly, I turned around and looked, and Eric and I were right off the very point of their bow.

Next thing was like, “Oh no, we get chopped up.”

And then [the captain] held it off, spinning it around to Eric and me.

They opened the tuna door on the back of that big old Viking and we were making our way there, and I’ll never forget Cap’ kind of broken, just watching me get up inside the boat. And I’ll never forget the feeling of guilt that I had because I went into that cockpit before my captain. I don’t know where the strength came from, but I was pushing across and just scrambling to get back and grab Eric. I helped drag him in the boat. I remember watching the surfboard kind of float off to that side. And Eric just looked at me. He was like, “Hey buddy, I’m sorry about your surfboard.” And I’m like, “Don’t worry about the surfboard.”

It was about to get dark. And even though I had great faith at that moment with what had happened, I kind of knew that we wouldn’t make it through the night. With Eric’s condition of advanced hypothermia, that people had said that he wouldn’t have made it much longer.

So, we get inside, and they had brought us some clothes to try to keep us warm. When the captain came down, the first thing, he asked was, “Well, y’all want a rum and coke?” We were like, “only water, water. We just want water, please.”

From then on, I just remember Eric and me laying there on the floor in the salon in route to Cancun and all I could do was just stare at the ceiling and it was like everything in my brain was blank.

Very rarely would I tell it. There had been a few magazine articles written about it. Nothing to the degree, especially of what we’re going to do now. I guess one part of it is understanding the fishing world and understanding that I did not want to be known because I went for a long swim one day. I wanted to be known because I was a good fisherman, hopefully. Because I had achieved the ranks to be able to fish with some of the best there. Everybody knew what happened, but what I didn’t realize was that there were so many people that didn’t want to ask me about it out of respect. This story back then did not have the power to change people’s lives like it does now. That’s the best way to put it.

* * *

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Savage’s story is the number of lives that it has saved since being told. Savage has witnessed several accounts of individuals ready to end their own lives when they read his book and found the hope to carry on. Savage now volunteers for Valhalla’s Mission Force, a nonprofit that honors deceased veterans and their families, where he uses his own story to give hope to those in grief over the loss of their fallen soldiers.

Listen to our podcast with Johnny Savage here ▶

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This article originally appeared in the November 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/at-sea/lost-in-the-stream