FISHING TRIP TURNED DEADLY

Friday, March 5, 1999
By RICK JERVIS And ARNOLD MARKOWITZ, Herald Staff Writers

Like day to night, the weather turned on Francisco Ulloa and Angel Gabriel Vera. The bright, blue sky turned black an hour past noon. The air cooled and 46-mph winds hammered the pair's 15-foot motorboat, rocking it like a cradle, burying it under gallons of sea water.

An hour later, Vera, 67, would be dead and Ulloa, 44, would be clinging to an abandoned Stiltsville home, praying for a passing boat.

"I've never seen anything like that,'' said a tear-choked Ulloa from his Little Havana home Thursday. "It didn't give us time for anything.''

The trip started at 11 a.m. Wednesday from Watson Island. The longtime friends sailed past Bayside, under the Rickenbacker Causeway and out to a channel in Biscayne National Park, near Stiltsville.

It was a trip Ulloa and Vera, friends for nearly 20 years since coming from Cuba during Mariel, did at least once a week, Ulloa said. Most times, Vera's nephew accompanied them.

On Wednesday, the two went out alone. The water was a little choppy and there was a light wind, Ulloa said. But they had been out in rougher weather.

They left with a cooler of shrimp and sardines, hunting for cubera snapper. They had been out less than two hours and had reeled in four snapper when they saw the storm in the distance, Ulloa said.

Rolling, gray clouds were racing toward them from the west. They decided to pull anchor and head for the coast. For a moment, they thought the dark clouds and bad weather would pass them to the south.

"Then, suddenly, everything turned black,'' he said.

As Ulloa pulled on the anchor line, wind gusts hammered the side of the boat, pushing it down the channel. Five- and six-foot waves splashed in, filling the boat.

Gust after gust nailed the boat, knocking the passengers unsteady.

"We had no idea it was going to be that bad,'' Ulloa said.

Ulloa and Vera were in the middle of a line of thunderstorms that had formed in the Gulf of Mexico earlier in the week and marched east Wednesday. As early as 4:20 a.m., the National Weather Service had predicted four- to six-foot waves in Biscayne Bay and said small craft should "exercise caution,'' NWS forecaster Bernard Esposito said.

By 10:10 a.m., that bulletin was upgraded to a "small craft advisory.'' Between 11 a.m. and noon, as the system moved into South Florida, gusts were recorded as high as 46 mph. Sombrero Key, south of Marathon, recorded a 69-mph gust.

"If they were in a small boat, that would be pretty horrendous,'' Esposito said.

One gust of wind suddenly turned the boat around clockwise, tangling the anchor rope with the motor's propellers, Ulloa said.

Then the sea came in and the boat began to sink, motor first, bow up in the air like a bucking horse, he said. Ulloa and Vera scrambled toward the bow as the boatsank under them.

They pushed off and swam through the waves and current toward the more shallow waters of Stiltsville, about 300 yards away, Ulloa said.

The current pulled them apart, he said, and when he looked up again, his friend was floating face down in the water. He swam over, pulled him up and noticed Vera's eyes bulging and dead.

Ulloa hooked an arm around him and swam to the nearest Stiltsville home, 300 yards away.

"I thought I would never get there,'' he said.

He did, clambered up a wooden plank then tied his friend to the dock with fishing line and waited for help.

No one passed for hours. About 5 p.m., a motorboat cruised by and Ulloa cried out for help. The driver called the Coast Guard, which eventually came and got them.

In his 12 years of fishing in the bay, Ulloa said he has never seen a storm that rolled in as fast and strong as the one that took his friend. He probably never will again.

"I will never go out there again,'' he said.