from the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34841-2001Oct10.html

'I Either Swam Or Climbed,' Man Says of Escape

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 10, 2001; Page A19


MEXICO CITY, Oct. 9 -- Dinner had just ended in the salon of the Wave Dancer
on Monday night, and David DeBarger went below to his cabin to go to sleep.
Winds were howling outside, with rain slashing horizontally as Hurricane
Iris bore down on the coast of Belize.

Then there was a loud clunk, and then a thump.

DeBarger said weather reports had predicted that Iris would strike about 80
miles to the north, in Belize City. So he and his companions -- 19 others
from the Richmond Dive Club -- had felt safe in the boat, moored to a
concrete pier in the protected lagoon of Big Creek.

"We weren't treating it as anything serious," DeBarger said in a telephone
interview tonight from a Belize City hotel. "I have spent a lot of time on
boats. This was just something that you ride out."

But then things suddenly got rougher. DeBarger said he and another passenger
began taping the inside of the boat's windows to keep them from shattering
in case of flying debris.

As DeBarger began working on the window of the emergency exit, the boat
shifted violently and he was thrown against his cabin door. There was
yelling. "Put on your life jackets!"

DeBarger scrambled into his cabin and reached for his. But before he could,
the boat shifted hard again, throwing him against the cabin's outer wall.

"I felt water immediately. The cabin was filling up," said DeBarger, 57.
"The bunk was vertical, and the cabin door was over my head. I either swam
or climbed -- I don't know -- to the door and tried to get it open."

In the pitch darkness, DeBarger pushed the door open and made it into the
flooded hallway. He swam one way but quickly found himself under water. He
swam back down the hall, trying to keep his head in the air pocket. Ahead of
him, he could see a flashlight. He heard people's voices.

Someone ahead kicked out the glass in the emergency window he had just been
trying to tape. He swam through the hole, about the size of a small
television set, and freed himself from the capsized boat. "I felt hands, and
people pulled me up into a life raft," he said. "I just went on instinct. I
saw a light. I heard a voice call to me. I went to it."

DeBarger didn't know it then, but he and the two other divers in the life
raft -- Richard Patterson and Mary Lou Hayden -- were the only Richmond
passengers known to have survived the wreck.

They spent almost an hour in the raft, covered in diesel fuel and debris,
banging on the upside-down hull, looking for other survivors. Even in the
dark, the rain and mighty winds, they could see that their shattered boat
had been driven 60 yards across the lagoon from where it had been tied to
the pier.

"I've just spent the day watching people fish my friends' bodies out of the
water," DeBarger said. "And now I have to spend the morning at the morgue
identifying them."



© 2001 The Washington Post Company