A Mother, a Daughter, and Minutes of Air

A steady sea breeze livened up the low swells just enough for the late-day light to dance and scatter along their curves. Here within the inlet connecting Barnegat Bay to the rougher waters of New Jersey’s Atlantic coast, it hadn’t been a bad afternoon of fishing, so long as you weren’t particularly goal oriented.

Jarett Krause and Gosefina Gonzales were doing what they most loved, which was spending time on the water with their little one, four-year-old Ryleigh, who was less active than normal, thanks to the cast she wore after fracturing her leg a month earlier. At every opportunity, the family took to the bay in Krause’s father’s 23-foot pleasure boat, a Wellcraft with a small cabin beneath the deck of the bow. They’d swim and fish, fish and swim, sweet afternoons passing with the tides and winds and dawdling mid-year sun.

On this evening of 7 August 2022, Krause and Gonzales were entertaining their friend Ryan Gaudet, along with his 12-year-old daughter, Presley, and his girlfriend, Marisa Schwear. Ryleigh and Presley, having gotten their fill of the wide world, crawled down into the cabin to fiddle with their iPads while the men fished and the women idled.

At about 7 p.m., there came a sudden change around the boat. Where a moment before the water had been placid, it was suddenly rough. And where the breeze had blown stiff and steady, now the wind ranged around as if angling for an attack. That unsettling feeling lasted only a moment before the group heard the crunching sound of the boat’s hull striking rock.

Unknown to Krause, a jetty at the north end of Barnegat Inlet does not end where it appears to stop abruptly, but rather continues on underwater, often only a foot or so beneath the surface, depending upon the tide. Although marked, this hazard is frequently struck by boaters.

He reacted immediately, thrusting the throttle forward to get clear of the rocks, but instead the boat surged farther on to the jetty. Now with the Wellcraft’s nose raised and its tail wallowing, it took a direct hit over the stern from a wave that half-filled the boat with cold seawater. The shocked adults froze momentarily, preparing to start bailing. But an instant later, a second wave slopped over the stern, depositing an astonishing volume of water.

“Off the boat! Everybody get off!” the men yelled.

While Krause worked the controls fruitlessly, Gonzales bolted for the opening to the little cabin. “Girls! Get out! Get out!” she yelled.

Presley had come to the entryway, and Gonzales, her glasses and cellphone still in one hand, yanked the girl by the arm on to the deck. “Jump off!”

She could see Ryleigh farther up in the cabin in her purple life jacket, confused and tentative, unable to move quickly because of her cast. Gonzales was ducking down into the cabin, reaching for her daughter, when the world shuddered and shifted. In a few short seconds, the water surged into the cabin until the boat stood nearly on its end and then rolled. It had capsized, with mother and daughter on board.

The others had all jumped clear of the boat. Without life jackets, they swam and treaded the inlet’s waters, which, despite the August heat, were a chilly 15 degrees.

Schwear was almost immediately plucked from the sea by another pleasure boat. Krause held on to Presley as they swam back toward the capsized craft, now drifting clear of the jetty, until they could cling to its hull for support. Gaudet began diving underwater to search for Gonzales and Ryleigh, but without goggles it was impossible to see. He made his way onto the jetty, where he stood on the submerged rocks, awaiting rescue.

Somebody—probably the boaters who had scooped Schwear out of the water—phoned the Coast Guard. They, in turn, reached out to the beach patrol lifeguards, the volunteer firefighters, the EMTs, the state police and even the local Sea Tow operation (a kind of mari­time AAA). Soon, first responders—relaxing in seaside living rooms, kitchens and at backyard barbecues—got a notification popping up on their Active911 app. “Barnegat Inlet. Capsized boat. Five in the water. No life jackets.” They dropped their remote controls, pool cues and dinner forks and rushed to their stations.

What Gaudet and Krause didn’t know, as they stared at the boat’s hull, was whether Gonzales and Ryleigh were still alive. They were. Before the capsize had shut out all light, Gonzales had seen Ryleigh across from her in the cabin, blocked in by floating cushions and other debris, which she’d pulled out of the way to grab her daughter and swing her around piggyback. She stood now in darkness, Ryleigh’s arms clutching her shoulders. With the boat upside down, Gonzales’s feet braced against the ceiling of the cabin while the top of her head touched its floor. There was an air pocket, but not a very big one; the cold water was most of the way up her neck. In terror and shock, Ryleigh whimpered and shivered.

“Don’t cry, Ryleigh,” Gonzales said. “We’re going to get out of here.”

She could hear thumping on the hull overhead—searchers, obviously—and she reached up and slapped at the floor of the cabin in answer. The pounding continued. They hadn’t heard her.Her phone and glasses were still in her hand. She pressed a button and her wet phone miraculously lit up, so she turned on its flashlight. Beneath the floating bags, ropes, poles, clothes and life jackets, the water glowed blue in the evening light.

Was it even possible to swim down through all that mess, get deep enough to find the door out of the cabin, swim through it, go around the gunwale—the upper edge of the side of the boat—and then make it up to the surface? What choice did she have? The boat was moving, drifting away from the jetty—she could feel that. What if it shifted enough that this last little space filled with water and the boat dragged them down there to what looked like a bottomless sea?

“Listen, Mommy’s going to try to take us down,” she said. “Hold your nose.”

She plunged down into the water. She pumped her legs and her arms but did not get far, pushed back up by the buoyancy of Ryleigh’s life jacket. That was not going to work—and there was no way she was taking Ryleigh’s life jacket off her.

“OK,” she said, once they were breathing again in their air pocket. “We’re going to call Daddy.”

Krause was still clinging to the Wellcraft’s hull, thumping his fist against the boat’s bottom, when his phone rang. It was his wife, calling from mere feet away, just on the other side of this mass of fibreglass and metal.

“Can you breathe?” he asked her. “Are you OK? Is Ryleigh OK?”She reassured him that, for now, they were OK. But was anyone going to help her get out?

“The Coast Guard is here,” Krause told her. “I’m going to get on their boat now. They’ll get you out.”

Coast Guard surf station Barnegat Light deployed a 29-foot vessel with a four-man crew, which quickly collected Gaudet, Presley, Schwear and Krause. Several other vessels were also now on the scene: two towboats, a state police launch and a modified WaveRunner with a rescue sled attached carrying volunteer firefighters Andrew Baxter and Hugh Shields.

Aboard the Coast Guard ship, Krause relayed to the crew the unthinkable: His wife was under the capsized boat with their four-year-old daughter, whose leg was in a cast. And, incredibly, he was on the phone with her.

The crew radioed this new information back to land. Coast Guard commanding officer Adam Murray had been 40 minutes away when the call came in, and now, hearing the situation as he raced toward the station, his heart sank. In his 23-year career, he’d responded to several calls with people trapped under capsized boats. None had made it out alive. He shuddered as he drove, replaying in his mind the banging coming from beneath the hull as the victims desperately signaled for help, and then the silence …

For people in that nightmare circumstance, running out of oxygen and succumbing to hypothermia are both serious risks, but certainly not the only ones. Being trapped beneath an overturned boat is not a static emergency; it’s the ticking time bomb, the car dangling over the cliff, the burning building about to collapse. A wave, a bump, a current or simply the passage of time can cause the air pocket—the only thing keeping the boat on the surface—to fill with water. Of course, one can swim for it, but victims often die after becoming entangled in fishing lines, ropes, poles and canvas.

It’s so dangerous beneath a capsized boat that first responders—even the Coast Guard’s elite rescue swimmers—are forbidden to dive under a vessel to access the victims. Too many rescuers have died trying it, becoming disoriented, bumping their heads, getting wrapped in debris. So how was Barnegat Light’s first-responder family going to help these people?

Volunteer firefighter Bob Selfridge was the last to make it to the boat ramp. Something of a legend in the community, 58-year-old Selfridge was the oldest lifeguard on the beach. Barefoot Bob, as he was nicknamed for going without shoes all summer long, managed to combine a laid-back surfer dude persona with that of a rock-solid, highly competent rescuer intensely dedicated to emergency services, volunteering with two different fire departments and as an EMT.

When Selfridge reached the boat ramp, Ocean Rescue Capt. Lee Major was in the process of deploying the team’s second WaveRunner. Selfridge, barefoot as usual, hopped aboard its rescue sled, and the pair raced across the bay to the inlet.

Six months before, Selfridge wouldn’t have answered the call. On a Sunday evening like this, he’d have been drunk, self-medicating to soothe the accu­mulated traumas amassed over four decades of rescue work. On 7 February 2022, he had responded to a call regarding an unresponsive infant. The seven-month-old girl had died in his arms. He went home that evening and drank himself nearly to death. The next day, he checked himself into rehab. He hadn’t had a drop since, but a family history of alcoholism and his continued exposure to trauma meant he was walking a razor’s edge.

Under the capsized boat, Gonzales repeated her assertion to Ryleigh that they were going to get out. Maybe she was only reassuring herself, since the little girl was surprisingly calm perched there on her mother’s back. How much time had passed? Five minutes? 10? Gonzales scarcely felt the cold. All she could think about was getting out. Why hadn’t anyone come for them yet? Should she try again to swim out?

On the Coast Guard ship, Krause put his phone on speaker, and he and a rescuer explained that they were going to try to right the boat using a risky manoeuver called parbuckling. If the move worked, the boat would roll upright. But if it failed, it could de­­stroy the air pocket that was keeping ­Gonzales and Ryleigh afloat and alive.

The rescue crew tied a rope to a cleat on the vessel’s submerged gunwale, ran it underwater to the other side of the boat, then up over its hull and back to the towboat some 20 feet away.

The towboat motored slowly forward … and the Wellcraft’s bow swung around flat, like the hand of a clock, toward the towboat, the capsized vessel neither rising nor rolling. Beneath, Gonzales felt the waterline under her chin move and rise slightly, as if the air pocket was shrinking. She lifted her head higher.

“It didn’t work,” Krause told her over the phone. “But the Coast Guard has got some scuba divers coming.”

“How soon?”

“They’re almost here.”

In fact, the helicopter carrying the divers was coming from Virginia Beach, more than an hour away. Anyway, its divers typically did not rescue people. They recovered bodies.

She turned off the flashlight to save her battery. Under her feet the waning daylight swayed in the blue ocean. Gonzales was sure that the air pocket had shrunk further.

On the surface, Bob Selfridge was getting antsy.

“We have to go down there,” he said to Major.

Major’s mind raced. Rescuers like to have a plan, and then a backup plan, and then a backup-backup plan. How would this work?

“I’m just going to go get them,” Selfridge said, before Major could ask.

The team watched in awed silence as Selfridge pulled on his pair of boogie-boarding fins and bummed goggles off of Sea Tow Capt. Walt Bohn.

This could be a one-way trip, Bohn thought. Everybody was thinking it. Including Bob Selfridge.

He took a few deep breaths, lowered himself beneath the gunwale of the boat, swam down and forward, and then looked up. The overturned craft loomed above him in a weird alien green, everything reversed—steering wheel on the left, cabin entry up instead of down. No sign of woman or child, but as he exhaled, he followed his bubbles to the dark box that was the portal to the cabin and entered with his hands held high, as if diving upward. He shoved aside debris. He pushed past garbage. He brushed against a human body and then felt air on his hands. He broke the surface and exhaled. He could feel the woman next to him in the perfect darkness.

“Hi, I’m Bob, and I’m your lifeguard,” he said.

On the surface, his colleagues watched mutely while their heartbeats marked the time. No one had discussed a plan, but each was forming an idea of what they’d do once too many seconds had ticked away. Hugh Shields and Lee Major planned to dive in after him. If Selfridge, with goggles, had failed, their own chances would be slim. But he was their friend, a member of the family.

“Take my daughter,” said Gonzales.

Selfridge didn’t see any daughter. Then Gonzales turned on her phone and the little girl appeared, whimpering, snuggled against her mother’s neck.

“What’s your name?” Selfridge asked.

“Ryleigh.”

“Do you know how to hold your breath, Ryleigh?”

“You do, Ryleigh, from swim lessons,” Gonzales said.

“I’ll come back for you in just a minute,” Selfridge said to Gonzales.

He grasped Ryleigh’s life jacket, placed his other palm over her crown to protect her from debris, blew into her face to stop her breath, and pulled her with him down into the depths.

Gonzales had no intention of waiting. She dropped down into the water, right on Selfridge’s heels, and dove deep.

For Selfridge, exiting the vessel with Ryleigh was easier than entering it alone. Through his goggles he could see cables dangling in his way, but they were easily avoided. Still grasping Ryleigh’s life jacket and covering her head with his palm, he used his fins to propel himself clear of the boat and up to the surface. But for Gonzales, the descent was a rush of blind bewilderment. Almost immediately, she lost sight of Selfridge and Ryleigh. And because she could see almost nothing, she had no idea what obstacles lay before her, had no good sense for how deep to dive or which direction to swim. Glasses and phone still in hand, she pawed at the water to get herself deep.

She managed to swim out of the cabin. But now, looming in her face was the crossbar of the Wellcraft’s Bimini top—aluminum bars holding up a canvas sunshade. She spent precious seconds stopping and then manoeuvering around it. She swam outward away from the boat, with her lungs burning, then saw the glimmering surface up there through all that water. She kicked and pulled, up, and up, through all that water and light, until it felt as if her lungs would not hold out. And then, at last, she surfaced. Greedily, she sucked in air.

Ryleigh, catching her breath, was already being loaded on to a rescue sled. Someone helped Gonzales swim to the Coast Guard boat. Once she’d boarded, she clutched Ryleigh in a tight bear hug. She and Krause exchanged a long, tender look. Neither could find the words to express their relief.

“Are you OK?” Krause said at last.

“Yeah,” Gonzales replied. “I’m OK.”

Selfridge flopped up on to the second rescue sled and lay there, heaving with adrenaline and emotion: You could’ve killed that little girl, he thought.

“You OK?” Andrew Baxter asked.

“Yep. Yep,” Selfridge said, sitting up.

Relieved, Baxter laughed. “Look at your shirt, Bob.”

He looked down. He’d forgotten all about the T-shirt he put on that morning, the one with a Superman logo across the chest.