Two Fathers
The following is based on a true story. At sunset on Wednesday, August 12, 2020, cousins Sara Feeney and Ellen Glynn were paddleboarding when they were swept off the beach by a freak storm. As the entire nation of Ireland anxiously awaited news, the Coast Guard and Royal National Lifeboat Institution looked in all the wrong places while fishermen Patrick and Morgan Oliver sped out of Galway and found them relatively easily. ‘The girls drifted in a pretty straight line throughout the night,’ Patrick remarked to a television news crew back at the quay, but otherwise he offered no comments about the search effort. Members of the Irish government caught his message, however, and called for an investigation.
The story below is nearly 100 percent fabrication on my part.
The first father stood outside the pub door, a coronavirus mask on his face, having stepped out when he saw the second father parking his car. This was a meeting that never made it to the press, despite the fact that it involved one of Ireland’s most sensational stories in years. The daughter of that first father and his niece, her close cousin, were swept out to sea just a few evenings prior, in a storm that struck suddenly as they were paddleboarding. All of Ireland hung on the news of the frantic search that went through the night, and just as hope began to fade, that second father scooped them up in his boat and rushed them to a waiting helicopter on one of the Aran Islands. In the midst of the pandemic, Ireland celebrated deliriously.
Johnny Glynn figured he owed the man a beer. Though everything was closed, he prevailed upon a friend who owned a pub to let him host this private meeting. As Johnny stood outside the front door, he should have been the happiest man in Ireland. He was troubled to a surprising extent, however. It had been been an admittedly rough week.
He had been labeled ‘The Happiest Man in Ireland’ once before, the day he scored the game winning goal for Galway United as they clinched the Football Association of Ireland’s Senior Challenge Cup in 1991. Glynn was a sports celebrity, playing for Galway United, Cork City, St Patrick’s Athletic, and the Shamrock Rovers in a career that spanned over 15 years. Though his hair was gray, he still had the same tall and rangy outlines of his playing days.
The second father, as he came up the sidewalk with a nautical chart folded under one arm, was 20 years younger, with dark hair and beneath his mask the faint stubble of a beard. He was perfectly amiable yet the kind of fellow who made you look twice and realize he was a pretty tough customer, well shouldered beneath his shirt from a lifetime at sea as a commercial fisherman. He was also prominent in his own right, ‘fishing royalty,’ part of a family that had fished for generations and were anchors in the Claddagh, an enclave of ancient families living in the heart of Galway.
‘Patrick Oliver,’ Johnny began from behind his mask as he extended a hand, ‘it is truly a pleasure to meet you.’ The handshake progressed to a hug on Johnny’s part, as he he drew close to give Patrick an earnest slap on the back. He stood back and looked him straight in the eye. ‘From the bottom of my heart, thank you for bringing my daughter back to me.’
‘It was my pleasure.’
Johnny suggested they get inside before somebody noticed them. They passed a table on which two large Helly Hansen foul weather jackets had been lain, along with a pair of freshly laundered and neatly folded sweatshirts. ‘I believe these are yours.’
‘Yes, they are,’ Patrick smiled.
At the back of the pub, a few employees were readying for an evening of making take-out orders. Johnny and Patrick stepped out to the open back porch, where they settled at a table. The masks came off. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Sure.’
Two pints of Guinness arrived immediately, by way of the pub owner, who was pleased to meet Patrick and quick to say, ‘This one’s not even from Johnny. It’s on the house.’
He headed off, and in the silence, Johnny worked to put his feelings into words. ‘I’m glad you came. Families would have gotten in the way, and at some ceremony or TV show, we wouldn’t really have a chance to talk.’
He drew another breath, trying to remember what he rehearsed. ‘My wife and I went through that long night together, and we’ve had a priest at the house - a couple of times. We’re coming to terms with it each in a different way, or the whole thing affected me more than I realized.’
Patrick tilted back in his chair. ‘I thought so. I heard you on OFF THE BALL,’ where, on the nationwide morning sports radio show, Johnny confessed to fearing the worst.
‘I don’t think I’m over it yet. The next night, even though Sara was home and Ellen was safe and sound in hospital, I still couldn’t sleep.’
Patrick let him talk.
‘The problem is, I can’t picture what they went through. Every time I do, it always comes back to me - desperate, on a beach, facing an empty darkness. My whole world turned just about upside down that night, but the worst thing was not knowing what was happening. I still don’t understand the story. I couldn’t see the game.’ He tried to smile. ‘Luckily, though, you got in there and scored the game winner.’
‘Well, kind of,’ Patrick allowed. ‘A lot of people were searching that night, not just the next morning.’
‘I know. The whole thing blows my mind - the sheer scale of it. God, how do I thank people?’ Johnny folded his arms across his chest and took a steadying breath. ‘You think a stormy, black night is bad? No, the worst, WORST part was getting home to a silent house - like Death was there waiting for me. It hasn’t gone away - which makes this whole thing sound like a therapy session. Sorry.’
Patrick nodded sympathetically. ‘That’s all right. There is a story to this,’ he acknowledged. ‘Parts of it you might not want to hear.’
‘No, I need to hear it.’ For the first time, he put a hand on his Guinness. He gave a shrug and hoisted it. ‘To a happy ending.’
Patrick hoisted his. ‘Amen.’
Wednesday night, August 12th, at Furbo Beach was an ever nicer night than two days before, when 23 year old Sarah Feeney and her 17 year old cousin, Ellen Glynn, had last gone paddle boarding. It was so warm that they were hardly wearing anything - only bikinis under their lifejackets, and the water was so glassy and quiet that for the first time Ellen elected not to put her cellphone in a plastic pouch and tuck it in her waistband. Sarah’s mother would walk the dog while the girls tooled around not far off the beach. With Ireland so far north, the sun had not yet set at 9 p.m.
A gradient wind, one that curves over the contours of a landscape, started to blow from the northeast as the day drew to a close. As it comes off the land and slants down to the surface of the water, it makes what are known as ‘cat’s paws,’ which can be deceptively strong puffs in areas of calm. Apparently, a few of these had caught the girls unawares, pushing them away from shore further than they realized at first - but it was quickly too late to muster enough force to paddle back in. The average paddle boarder can be brought to a standstill by only 10 knots of wind.
As dusk set in, the gradient wind was compounded by wind off the cooling land (since the warm air over the sea was still rising) and wind from thunderstorms brewing in the distance. A powerful nor’easter was forming rapidly.
If you hold your right hand up in the shape of a crab’s claw, though with your fingers and thumb fairly straight, the space between them is the shape of the west-facing Galway Bay. Up in the top right, at the big knuckle where your finger joins your hand, is the city of Galway itself. The Glynn family home and Furbo Beach are down along the underside of your index finger, the beach in a little cove right in the crease beneath your next knuckle.
The force of the nor’easter was slanting down and left from beyond Galway. Sarah and Ellen, when they first realized they couldn’t paddle back in to the beach, called to Sarah’s mother on shore but couldn’t be heard. The darkness came frighteningly fast, as a mass of blackness crashing downward from behind the hills, split by terrifying cracks of thunder and lightning and rain that lashed so hard into them that it hurt. Immediately, however, the girls were smart enough to lash their paddle boards together with their lead lines. The wind was pushing them backwards, they knew, but with an eye on the city lights in the distance, they thought maybe they could paddle hard enough to stay in place.
At 10:00 pm, the cell phones and pagers belonging to members of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution sounded, summoning crewmen, all of them volunteers from the community, to the Galway station. They dressed in helmets and exposure suits, and rescue craft headed into the night. Soon, the Irish Coast Guard launched the first of its helicopters, one of its fleet of massive, 68-foot, 25,000 pound Sikorsky S-92’s.
Johnny Glynn stayed in football after his playing days ended. working through a number of positions to become the head of player development in the area.
‘Wednesday was like any other day,’ he said. ‘I watched a practice and was heading home when a phone call from my wife had me driving to Furbo in a panic. The wind or the tide had carried Sarah and Ellen away. Sarah’s mother had dialed 999 to contact the Coast Guard, and there we were, climbing out on a line of rocks to shout over the water. It was pitch black, either absolutely silent out there, or we were drenched in rain. When we sat in the car, I called a friend who’s with the Doolin Ferry. He said he had a radar plot of the entire bay and could see the lifeboats heading out of Galway.’
‘I had contacts on my phone from football. The first friend I called was actually out further west, in Loughaunbeg. I asked whether he could round up a few of the players from his team and get down to the beach to shine some lights and make some noise. That’s when the Garda [the police] came to Furbo and started shining their lights around, investigating. They said the belief was that the wind would blow the girls south, across to the Clare side, so the Garda over there were alerting the residents to be on the lookout. That first coach was getting the word out to other teams around the bay. I called friends in Oranmore and Ballyvaughan.’
‘I said to my wife, ‘You’re sure they had their life jackets on?’
‘Yes.’
‘They had their leashes, those straps that wrap around their ankles, tied to the boards - they had them on?’
‘I think so, Johnny.’
At first, she said, ‘It’s only been an hour. It’s too soon to get worried.’
Patrick Oliver had not quite fallen asleep at 11 when his cell phone on the nightstand beside him buzzed with a text.
‘You awake? They’re not finding those two girls.’
‘What two girls?’
‘Active case: two 20yo girls paddleboarding - swept off Furbo 90m ago. 3 boats out and a helo - and not a trace. Something doesn’t seem right.’
‘Did they find the boards?’
’No.’
‘Hang on.’ This got Patrick out of bed and heading into the kitchen, dialing his cousin Michael, who was standing watch at Galway’s RNLI station. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘These girls are on stand up paddleboards?’
‘Yeah - lifejackets, leashed up, a pair of beginners. They get pushed off shore, storm lands right on top of them, and they simply vanish.’
‘No sign of the boards?’
‘None.’
‘What does that tell you?
‘We’re in the wrong spot.’
‘Yep.’
‘I thought so. The current’s running east until about 1:30 in the morning.’
‘We don’t care about the current. Where’s the wind?’
’Zero Five Zero.’
‘See, this is what I had to explain,’ Patrick told Johnny in the pub. ‘If they were in a motorboat out of gas and sitting low in the water, the wind would blow them one way, and the current would also take hold and pull them another. You can predict mathematically where they’re going to be, based on the speed of each.’
Patrick reached for the chart he had brought and unfolded it to the size of newspaper front page, laying it on the table sideways. They both turned their chairs. ‘I thought you might like to see this.’
‘Wow,’ Johnny whispered reverently. The land masses were a shade of yellow. Light blue ran along the edges, denoting shallow water. The open bay itself was white, with all manner of navigation marks identified and channels outlined. Spaced an inch apart in the open white were numbers in a tiny font indicating depth. A set of lines had been penciled in, obviously drawn along a straight edge, one slanting down and left from Furbo Beach and another from Galway Harbor. They came together forming a downward point. The line from Furbo Beach extended down the page, but not far past the Aran Islands, and barely off the line was an ‘X,’ and ‘53° 0.713’ N / 9° 29.991’ W,’ along with the time, ’11:07.’
Johnny bent to look closely. ’So X marks the spot.’
‘Yes, and this is where we took them.’ Patrick traced a little arc with his finger around Inish Oirr, (pronounced and often spelled Inisheer). ‘The ferry pier is right at the top.’
Beyond the tips of your finger and thumb in that crab’s claw, the three Aran Islands stand at the mouth of Galway Bay. The largest is up to the left, and then following in a slant down to the right come medium and then small. The last island, Inish Oirr, is five miles off the coast of County Clare. Below the end of your thumb, the Clare coastline runs pretty much south.
That gap, between Inish Oirr and Clare is the South Sound and runs to the open Atlantic.
Johnny looked further up that long slanting line to where the path from Furbo and the path from Galway Harbor came together. Something was written. ‘What does that say?’
‘Midnight. At 11 o’clock when I was on the phone, that’s where I figured the girls would be at midnight. Do you see that for simplicity’s sake I made it directly west of Blackhead Light on Clare?’
‘I do.’
This spot is six and three-quarters - a bit more - nautical miles from Furbo. This line is also the direction the wind was blowing.’ Patrick then made a point of picking up his finger and moving it. He rubbed the open white to the right of the line from Furbo. ‘This is where they were looking. Does that make sense to you?’
Johnny lowered his brows, confused.
‘Paddleboards are big, broad chunks of styrofoam coated in a little plastic. They’re light; they can hold a ton of weight, and they’re easy to move around - which is why everyone likes them, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So if they’re easy for a person to move, they’re easy for the wind to move. The girls are at the beach the other night, and they get pushed off shore in this direction - ‘ he ran his finger along the line - ‘a little bit before they realize it. Then the storm hits, and it’s blowing them right along this line. The wind coming from Zero Five Zero means it’s headed toward Two Three Zero on the compass. The girls were going southwest.’
‘I get it.’
’So why would they be looking over here, to the East? The current has no bearing on a pieces of foam that sit on top of the water, especially in that wind.’
This was a surprise. Johnny could only look at him.
Patrick leaned back and took a drink of his Guinness. ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is where the story begins.’
‘Three years ago, I lost a very close friend, who went over the side while lobstering near your friend’s place out at Loughaunbeg. I can still picture us playing together as boys in school. I was a coxswain on one of the lifeboats in the search, and the pattern was that at a certain set of coordinates, I had to turn back. After hours of no luck, I radioed whether we could go out further west, but the answer was no. The next day, his body was found a mile - west - from where we turned. We didn’t go far enough - I didn’t go far enough - and I knew it the entire time. That led to words about it, and eventually I started scaling back my commitment. Believe me, for years I had done my part, but . . . ’ He shrugged.
‘In their defense,’ he went on, ‘searches are hard enough as it is. You have to be focused and systematic. The operations center can’t have members taking off after every wild idea that comes into their heads. The other night, they couldn’t listen to every armchair expert sitting in his living room.’
Wednesday night, hearing his father come into the kitchen, turn on the lights and his laptop, pull a chart out of a desk and spread it across the kitchen table, 18 year old Morgan Oliver came out of the den, where he had been watching TV.
Patrick’s phone lay on the chart with its speaker mode on. He placed a set of parallel rules over a compass rose on the chart, lined them up to the 50-230 degree axis, and then walked them over to the cove that formed Furbo Beach. With a pencil he drew a long line down the chart. ‘They’re not going to Clare. They’re going straight out the South Sound. Michael, those boards are like stones skipping across a pond.’
On his laptop he opened an electronic chart, clicking on Furbo and typing 230. ‘Is there a boat near Furbo now?’ Get them to go back and then fly out after them along 230.’
‘You know I’m in no position to do that.’
‘Whoa! Whoops - ‘ Patrick had hit a wrong computer key, and suddenly the view backed away from Galway and showed the entire Atlantic. The 230 line slanted down its length, missing the States and even the Caribbean before ending on the northern coast of Venezuela.
Morgan came around the table to the laptop. ‘I got it.’
‘Plan B,’ Patrick said. ‘I’ll give you a shortcut. When did the storm hit?’
‘9:25 or 9:30.’
OK, not quite two hours. They’re moving maybe three knots - probably two.’ He opened the ends of a set of metal dividers and held them against the right margin of the chart, measuring six minutes of latitude, which is six nautical miles. He then placed one pinpoint on Furbo and the other along the 230 line. ‘All right, I know where they are.’
‘You do?’
‘Yep. Better yet, let’s plan ahead.’ He dropped the dividers, and after a quick slide of the parallel rules to a compass rose and back, he put a tiny notch a bit further down the line. Around it he made a five point star and a circle, and scrawled the word ‘Midnight.’
He tapped the laptop screen with his finger as Morgan was seated next to him. ‘On this line, find the spot due west of Blackhead.’ The Blackhead light is at the northwest corner of Clare - the end of your thumb in that crab’s claw.
‘I’ve got a fix for their position at midnight. You want a set of coordinates? Send a boat. The girls will come to them.’
‘Patrick, if I pick up the phone and get the wrong person on the line - ‘
‘Jesus, I KNOW, Michael. Just text one of the guys on staff. Tell him to call you when he takes a break.’
Michael said nothing.
‘I can leave the house right now and be there on time.’
‘Not tonight you can’t. It’s snotty out there.’
‘I’ll take the big boat.’
‘You won’t be there by midnight.’
‘I’ll chase ‘em down.’
‘Go ahead. That’d be just brilliant. You go parading right across the search zone, telling everyone, ‘Follow me!’
‘No, I’ll go out there and stop, and have them explain how paddle boards suddenly develop the miraculous ability to sail into the wind. Strange, though, that when the storm hit, these girls weren’t transported right back to the beach.’
They heard Michael click away. Something was happening.
Patrick took the parallel rules and drew a line from ‘Midnight’ to the end of the Galway channel. He walked them down to the compass rose to get the heading: 072, which meant 252 headed out.
‘They’re launching a second helicopter,’ Michael said, ‘and a fourth boat is coming out of Kilronan.’
Patrick had no reaction. In an odd, anticlimactic silence, he just sat, saying and thinking nothing.
‘That’ll double the search area.’
‘All right,’ Patrick said at last. ‘Text me the good news.’
In the pub, Patrick said to Johnny, ‘For the second time, and I swore I’d never let this happen, I let them convince me, when I knew - I absolutely knew better. I gambled with the lives of your daughter and niece, and for that I will always be sorry.’
Johnny’s face fell open with astonishment. He shook his head. ‘I won’t accept that. It was never your responsibility.’
‘I was the only one who knew where they were.’
It was still light when the first squall line struck Ellen and Sara. They were 200 yards off shore, which was more than twice what they had planned. Their initial reaction was confusion; the sky over the parking lot was suddenly the color of a deep purple bruise and then black, while behind them the sunset still appeared perfect. They had never seen that before, or for that matter the way the green water turned gray and then darkened with the densely packed ripples of heavy winds.
When they first tried to shout to Sara’s mother, it was purely the roar of the wind that blunted their sound, but in a few seconds, a flash of lightning and crack of thunder above the hill in the distance dropped them simultaneously to their knees. On her stomach with her paddle lying crossways beneath her, Sara quickly paddled with her hands to Ellen. ‘Give me your rope! Tie these together!’
Ellen lunged forward to her stomach, fished her lead line from dragging beneath her bow, and quickly tied and tightened, tied and tightened, three, four, five times in a row to make as strong a knot as she knew how.
In another minute, the rain came in huge drops, driving so hard that it hurt. Where it hit the water around them, the surface was obscured by furious splashing. Ellen backed up to her hands and knees and grabbed her paddle. ‘Try to stay in place!’ she yelled, and from their knees they tried to paddle in unison. Far off to their right, the lights of Galway were disappearing. They’d paddle until a clap of thunder - louder than they had ever heard in their lives - startled them, which made them freeze in place, wondering what kind of danger they were in. After a few seconds, they’d paddle once more.
Their skin was raw, which they noticed only when the hard, pelting rain had passed. What followed was wind, signaled by long rolls of thunder from the land, as if the storm were announcing it was on the move. They were 500 yards from the beach, or more, and the wind was blowing so hard that the spray was stinging their eyes. The waves were growing larger, so the girls flattened out on their stomachs once more. They reached over to put an arm around one another’s back, but this presented its own danger. As the boards pitched up and down, the edge of one could get beneath the other and turn it over. They extended their grips, each clutching the nearest shoulder strap of the other’s life jacket, creating in effect a catamaran, with a good six to eight inches of space between the boards.
The wind shrieked even harder, blowing the tops off waves and driving spray in straight lines with whip-like violence. Waves started coming over the fronts of the boards, and both girls caught blasts in their mouths, making them gag and vomit acidic, burning blends of salt water and bile.
When they first tied their boards together, they were saying to one another, ‘Is there a boat anywhere? Did anyone see us?’ Their last view of the beach was of a few families running for their cars when the rain struck. Not seeing any boats made them paddle as hard as they did for a while, but now suffering this lashing, it was easiest to put their heads down and keep their eyes on their boards as they endured the fury.
Soon the thunder was directly above. Ellen happened to glance up and divine the source of a strange sound they’d been hearing. Three hundred yards off to their right, a lightning bolt hit the water. It made a split second hiss, as if a blacksmith were dunking a red hot piece of iron in a bucket. Then came the blast of thunder, as much a shock wave as it was a sound.
The waves grew into huge, rolling, green-grey mountains taller than either of them. As they lay on their boards, rising on a wave wasn’t so scary; it was the sudden, precipitous drops that made them scream. They’d clutch all the more tightly, one hand on the others lifejacket and the other on the outside edge of their board. Their paddles were beneath their bodies, lengthwise along the boards.
Without warning came the biggest drop of all, and then suddenly they were in a silent, heavy world of green and black for one-long-whole-second, as a big wave rolled over them in its entirety.
That was the deepest they’d be all night. They were dunked twice more but only at the level of their heads and shoulders, and only for a split second. The more they hung on and anticipated these awful moments, and the more they didn’t happen, the braver the girls grew.
Asked to describe their ordeal, Sara and Ellen used words like ‘long,’ ‘freezing,’ ‘seasick,’ and ‘boring.’ Despite those few moments of genuine terror, ‘scary’ didn’t come to mind immediately. Their emotions had evolved like the phases of the storm.
When that first thunderclap sounded over the beach, they were both paralyzed with that same dread they had as little girls, when thunderstorms were best watched through the window or their parents had to come calm them in the middle of the night. In the first few moments as they paddled desperately from their knees, they did panic, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God,’ and scream with each thunderclap. Soon, however, in the rush of all the breathing, ‘Oh-my God-ding,’ and paddling, one of them starting urging, ‘It’s OK, It’s OK, It’s OK,’ and the talking stopped.
Bellying down on the boards was the lesser of two evils. They were losing their balance on their knees, but as the rain hit the water as hard as it did and the wind whipped the spray, it actually seemed like it was raining from the ocean up, and they were sticking their faces into it. Side by side, their boards bashed into one another, and Sara’s almost flipped, so the the quick shout of, ‘Spread out!’ and the new grip was purely a tactical adjustment.
Truth be told, they only gagged on waves once or twice. They picked their heads up enough to see what was in front of them and time their breaths, ducking like surfers when waves crashed over.
In the blackness when things had calmed, the distant lights in various directions would come and go as the storm blew through. The girls were aware of a certain duality: one one hand, it’d be perfectly understandable to cry and complain. On the other, the utter preposterousness of sitting on paddle boards, sometimes like they were on horseback, sometimes with their legs crossed in front of them, in the dark out in the middle of nowhere, was balanced by the danger of being struck by lightning or rolled sideways by a big wave. Yes, it was cold, and they couldn’t friggin’ believe this was happening, but they were too busy paying attention.
The sky rumbled almost continuously in the distance, thin bolts crossed high above them, but it was all background to a calming sea. ‘We have to paddle.’
‘Why?’
‘To stay warm. Aim for the waves, so we don’t flip over.’
They synchronized five or six strokes but felt no sense of progress whatsoever.
‘Let’s go back to Furbo. Screw this. I’m out of here.’
‘Good idea.’
After a few more mainly pointless strokes, one of them started belting out Taylor Swift’s ‘You Belong With Me,’ joined shortly by the other:
‘But she wears short skirts
I wear T-shirts
She's Cheer Captain, and I'm on the bleachers
Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find
That what you're looking for has been here the whole time . . . ‘
Sometimes when you’re scared in the dark, all you can do is sing a Taylor Swift song.
A dozen miles off to the east, another storm was running down the length of the Irish land mass. The lightning at the top of the thunderhead was as bright as sunrise, illuminating the massive cloud as if it were a snowy mountain top. Other flashes were hidden below the horizon, and tiny rolls of thunder crossed the water.
The size of the waves picked up again, so they bellied down and rafted up like before, but it wasn’t very scary. They watched the storm roll past.
‘Mom, I’m OK.’ Ellen made the sentence echo in her head, trying to send a psychic message.
‘I’m supposed to go to work tomorrow,’ Sara said.
‘Are they going to be mad?’
‘Probably.’
‘You have the lamest excuse ever. They’ll never believe you.’
Seated on their rear ends a while later, they paddled idly and hollered out another Taylor Swift song:
‘And I remember that fight, two-thirty am
'Cause everything was slipping right out of our hands
I ran out, crying, and you followed me out into the street
Braced myself for the goodbye,
'Cause that's all I've ever known
Then, you took me by surprise
You said, "I'll never leave you alone"
You said, "I remember how we felt, sitting by the water
And every time I look at you, it's like the first time
I fell in love with a careless man's careful daughter
She is the best thing that's ever been mine"
You made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter
You are the best thing, that's ever been mine . . . ‘
‘It’s raining again.’
‘So what.’
‘At one o’clock in the morning,’ Johnny said, ‘I was about to go mad. We had been at Furbo walking up and down that beach, sitting in our cars, or listening to the police car’s radio for hours. I said to Deidre that we have to go around to the Clare side and figure out the best spot to be at first light.
‘It’s hard to get close to the water there. I’ll tell you, though, the most amazing thing: in the middle of the night, lights were on in houses, and we could see dozens of little flashlights in the distance as people combed the shore. We stopped at Bishop’s Quarter Beach, and a bunch of kids the girls’ age had a big bonfire - a signal fire - going.’ His eyes misted up.
‘I have an old teammate in Ballyvaughan, and we went out to the end of the old pier. There were only about five or 10 people there, but he promised me, ‘Don’t worry. In the morning, we’ll have all kinds of folks out to help.’
‘Every hour got worse, but Deidre would say these things like, ‘OK, think for a second. Ellen is a smart, strong, resourceful girl. The two of them would think of something. They wouldn’t just give up - and they had lifejackets on. They wouldn’t just disappear.’
‘I couldn’t answer.’ After a sip of Guinness and a deep breath, he held his hands up beside his eyes, as if to suggest blinders or a narrow field of vision. He had to wrap his mind around a concept. ‘We were looking north, trying to see into the dark, praying that they would just appear.’ He extended his left arm to the side, pointing across the pub. ‘And the whole time, they were miles in that direction.’
‘Right,’ Patrick said.
The dawn broke cold and drizzly. Having exhausted the Taylor Swift library, the girls lay belly down, slanted across the boards, their legs on one, their upper bodies on the other, and with their sides and legs pressed together as they tried to stay warm. Mentally, they had defaulted to conserving energy. They were exhausted and hungry, and their heads hurt, so they huddled on the boards and just waited for time to pass.
A few hours before, a helicopter came as close as 50 yards away and 50 yards up as its crew scanned the area. They waved and screamed with all their might. Knowing they couldn’t be heard, they hoped that a light would catch the reflective fabric on their lifejackets, but it was not to be. A little while later, a big boat crossed not far away. They shouted once more, but no searchlight swept over them, and no one on board could hear over the wind, waves, and probably most of all, their own engine.
Despite those disappointments, they hung tough and sang a few more songs, either as they paddled or into the tops of the paddle handles as if they were microphones.
Lying motionless felt like they were sulking. The cold and wet could make just about anyone feel sorry for themselves.
Already they could tell the conditions had changed. The choppy wave action had stopped, but they rose and fell on large, slow swells, as if they were on the stomach of some enormous sleeping animal. The water was quiet.
The light changed enough to make them raise their heads. For the next few minutes the fog lifted before their very eyes, allowing them to see further and further along the surface where the jagged ends of the mist peeled away from the water. The land in the distance took shape as a dark mass and eventually revealed more detail.
‘Oh my God.’
‘What is that?’
‘Those are the Cliffs of Moher.’ To the other side, ‘That’s one of the Aran Islands.’
‘We are SO far away.’ They had the same thought: this just got really serious. We are totally off the beaten path. That giant, breathing animal was the Atlantic Ocean. The water darkened with ripples from the breeze clearing the fog. ‘Not again,’ came the pang of fear.
Luckily, the zephyr faded.
‘Look!’ Sara said, pointing. Coming toward them it seemed, chugging its way up from the Cliffs of Moher and pushing a little wake against the wind and water, was a little light blue lobster buoy the size of a wine bottle. In reality, they were drifting towards it. The buoy would have meandered right by if the girls, on their knees, hadn’t paddled over to cross its path. Ellen fell to her stomach and reached for the rope that trailed into the depths. She could feel the force necessary to bring them to a stop. When that slackened, she heaved on the line. Sara then ran the line a few times through the black elastic shock cord that criss-crossed the front of her board and then did the same with Ellen’s, as if the buoy were a sewing needle. The two of them kneeled over this configuration, their hands poised to grab the buoy and rope as Ellen released the lower part of the line. The slack disappeared, but the entanglement held. Soon the boards appeared to be pushing their own little wakes against the moving water.
Patrick sat up suddenly and turned to the phone on the nightstand. The screen was empty.
‘Any news?’ he texted.
‘Nada.’
‘Did anyone go down the South Sound?’
The delay in the response told him all he needed to know. Patrick was on his feet, headed to the chart in the kitchen.
‘Not down it.’
He thought of dialing, but instead whirled and headed for Morgan’s room down the hall. He gave a loud knock and opened the door. ‘Let’s go. They’re not looking far enough.’
Idiots, he thought. Whether or not Michael passed that message, they should have known to look down there anyway. He stopped as he passed an open door. After Morgan, Patrick and his wife had six daughters. He looked at a sleeping mass of long blonde hair. Those parents must be basket cases, he thought.
Michael, as it turns out, was in a radio room and texting on his phone on the sly. ‘I did call and go through 050 - 230 - and you’re not finding the boards . . . etc., but they didn’t want to hear it.’
Fucking morons, Patrick thought. Then an image and the smell of incense brought him up short. He was suddenly back in the church for that funeral three years before. I’m the fucking moron here, he realized. If anything has happened to those girls, it’s on me.
Minutes later, Morgan stood at the kitchen table, jeans and a sweatshirt on and carrying a big red Helly Hansen foul weather gear jacket under his arm. His mother was up as well, moving quickly, putting sandwiches and thermoses of hot tea in a cooler. She didn’t say a word (although she kissed them both to pieces in all the fanfare when they returned to the pier later in the day.)
Patrick came out to the chart. He bracketed his fingers at the distance between Furbo and Midnight. ‘That’s seven miles, just about? At two knots, they’re twice that far - more.’ He slid his hand down to mark the next bracket length. ‘Everybody else is flouncing around up here.’ He rubbed the north shore of the bay.
At the quay, they chose their little speedboat, the JOHNNY O, a 7-meter Cheetah class catamaran with a snub-nosed bow, since the little cabin and steering console was far forward, leaving a large, open working cockpit. On the stern corners were racks for lobster traps. Most importantly, the boat was powered by two aggressively sized outboards.
As they pulled away, Morgan was amazed to watch his father glance up at the buildings surrounding the quay, and then, as if daring someone to do something about it, gun the throttle forward and speed down the channel before turning hard onto the main drag. If Morgan ever pulled a stunt like that, his father would have his head. A wave smacked a buoy that said, ‘No wake.’
‘Take it,’ Patrick said, stepping away from the wheel. On the console was the chart from the kitchen table, refolded to show the routes he drew, as well as his cell phone.
‘Trim the bow up.’
Tilting the outboards up and away from the boat’s stern has the effect of adding a downward component to the otherwise horizontal force. This pushes the stern down and consequently the bow up, important in following seas. If a motorboat flying along falls down the front of a wave, its bow can plow in deeply, causing the boat to veer. The wave then rising beneath the stern can roll the boat sideways. A good skipper knows how to keep his boat level and adjust his speed to the swells.
‘When you turn the corner, Two Five Two.’ On the radio bolted to the ceiling, VHF Channel 16 was a mash of conversations between Good Samaritan boaters searching all over the bay. Patrick dialed the cell phone. ‘I’m rolling out,’ he announced curtly. ‘I have Morgan with me in the little boat.’
‘All right,’ Michael said quietly. ‘Good luck.’
Morgan cleared the line of marks outside of Mutton Island and its causeway. ’12 miles to Midnight,’ Patrick said. ‘Let ‘er rip.’
When Johnny and Deidre Glynn stood on the Furbo shore until 1 a.m. and then drove to the Clare side, their three younger daughters, along with the grandparents, had gone to bed without knowing how grim the situation had become. Now, driving back at dawn, they would have to wake the girls and explain things to them. The rest of Ireland was well aware; Sara and Ellen’s disappearance exploded across social media through the night, alerts multiplying about the storm, the search, and eventually the girl’s names. It had become the lead story on every radio station. Announcers were providing updates on locations around the bay where police would be briefing searchers willing to scour the coastline.
The family gathering in a bedroom for two of the girls was as brutal was expected. The girls were silent, shocked at first, but then each exploded into tears in her own way. ’She’s not coming back?’
’She’ll never be in this house again.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Deidre countered. (’She was 100 times braver than I was,’ Johnny told Patrick. ‘Dead level serious. Didn’t give a thing away.’) Deidre insisted, ’They’re still searching.’
‘But where would she be that they can’t find her?’
The girls seemed to give voice to every one of Johnny’s worst thoughts, which is precisely when the doorbell rang and scared him further out of his wits. It was Father David, from their church.
With a thick dread beating through his heart, Johnny went to the door.
‘Hiya, Johnny.’
‘Good morning, Father.’
The two of them regarded one another.
‘You’re not bearing any news, are you?’ Johnny asked.
‘No, no. I just came by in case you needed to talk.’
‘Oh. You scared me to death. Sure, come on in.’
It was all a little much. ‘Excuse me, Father. These clothes are still wet from all the rain.’
Upstairs, he found himself in Ellen’s room, standing still, trying to calm down, breathing quietly to try to sense her there. On a shelf was a program and a dried corsage from a school dance. Further along was necklace she often wore, makeup and moisturizer, and a hair dryer and a brush,with strands of blonde hair still wound in it. He slid open her closet door. I can really sense her, he thought. I can smell her.
She’ll never be in this house again.
How long would this presence linger as they mourned, he wondered.
‘Johnny, Father wants to say a prayer,’ Deidre said from downstairs.
‘You go ahead,’ he called down.
A moment later Father David’s quiet voice came up the stairs; ‘Heavenly Father, guardian on land and sea . . .’
My tall, shy girl, Johnny thought. Seventeen already, but a tender soul and soft-spoken - not savvy like some girls her age. She only has little sisters; no wicked influences, he smiled. After another year of school she would have been off to University.
‘Now we should say a Hail Mary,’ Father instructed.
The girls’ voices murmured in unison. ‘Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee . . ‘
The JOHNNY O, true to the name Cheetah, bounded across the waves, running up the back of one, rising with it, and shooting forward to attack the next. The engines were at a good, hard thrum, but like a cat, JOHNNY O threw no great wake or splashes at each contact with the water. Patrick and Morgan’s eyes moved between a blinking dot on a set of converging lines on the GPS screen over Morgan’s head and Blackhead’s repeating five second light, high on a hill more than two miles off to the left.
‘Blessed art thou amongst women, and Blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus . . ‘
‘Bring it down a little.’
Morgan eased back on the throttle, though they were still moving fast.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . ‘
‘Ready to come left to Two Three Zero.’
‘Ready.’
Through the sight of a hand-held compass, Blackhead was at 100 . . . 95 degrees, shaking.
‘Pray for us sinners - ’
‘Now - Two Three Zero.’ JOHNNY O banked to the left, then leveled off once more.
‘Two Three Zero.’ On the GPS, their trackline snapped into place on top of the line from Furbo. ‘Right on the money,’ Morgan said.
‘Bring it back up.’
The tone of the engine changed. The boat rose on a wave and surged ahead. Patrick exchanged the compass for a set of binoculars and studied the water and then Clare coast, towering walls of rock laid bare by centuries of Atlantic weather. Anything that could be called a beach was really a rockfall for debris blasted loose.
He turned around and leaned against the bulkhead inside the tiny cabin. ‘Here’s where we lay our cards on the table,’ he said speculatively. ‘I don’t think the wind would let the girls get in to the rocks.’
‘They never saw the rocks - from here, at night, in weather?’ Morgan replied.
‘They’ve fooled everyone else; they can fool us.’
With the binoculars Patrick scanned the empty horizon ahead. He turned to look at the row of extra red plastic five-gallon fuel cans lining the back of the cockpit. Hell no, he thought. We’re going to Venezuela.
‘Johnny,’ Deirdre said, ‘the girls want to go to Furbo.’
‘Really?’
‘They have to see it. They want to be part of the search.’
He’d have to face that expanse, that hungry monster that swallowed two souls. But where would she be that they can’t find her?
‘Okay.’
Sara and Ellen were lying slanted on the boards once more, taking turns dozing while the other tried to stay alert. The mild puffs of wind brought cold, but the breaks in between, while not warm, were almost decent by comparison, in that they weren’t completely miserable. Like the night before, when they waited and their worst fears didn’t come true, the trick to enduring the cold was to let a good bit of time pass by, after which they’d realize they weren’t too much worse off. Then they’d repeat the process. They were always shivering, but it was only when they let themselves think about it that they’d get the big bodily shakes.
Ellen dozed with her forehead on the end of one fist, which in turn was on the other hand as it lay on the board. Sara’s head came up as she heard a splash and a breath. Some ways off, a pod of dolphins was passing by. Two big backs and fins arched out of the water and then disappeared, followed in alternating fashion by two others.
Sara brought her chin back down to her hands. The idea was to stay as flat and below the wind as possible. As she looked over to check on the lobster buoy and line, her eye caught a flash of moving white.
She stared at it for several seconds. The speck was getting bigger - and coming toward them. ‘Ellen,’ she whispered. ‘Ellen!’
‘Got ‘em!’ said Morgan.
‘Where?’
‘To the left a little. Hang on. I just lost them. There we go.’ He extended his arm and blade of his hand.
Patrick looked through the binoculars. One girl was on her feet, waving her paddle overhead. The other was trying to get up.
‘Well played, ladies. Very well played,’ Patrick said slowly.
‘I’m sure you were pleased,’ Patrick said to Johnny. ‘I know there’s been a big fuss, but believe me, no one in Ireland was happier to see those girls than I was.’
Patrick had taken the wheel. Morgan dropped down to open the hatch to the V-shaped storage locker in the bow. He pulled out a mass of towels and blankets and then popped up to look at the GPS screen. The blinking dot was separating from the 230 line.
Patrick steered wide of the boards, even going past them before throwing the boat into a wide arc so he could approach with his bow into the wind. Sara followed this, turning in place where she stood waving her paddle. In so doing, she stepped on the other board and sent Ellen reeling with a scream and a leg kicked in the air as she went over backwards with a splash. The lifejacket had her high out of the water, blowing columns of water out her nostrils. They were both pretty wobbly to be standing on boards in the Atlantic Ocean.
As the boat drew alongside, Sara bent at the waist and reached for the rail with both hands. Morgan took the paddle from her hand and flung it clattering into the rear of the cockpit. ’Sit on the rail,’ he said and reached down to tear open the velcro ankle strap on the board’s leash.
Patrick punched a button to snapshot a screen on the GPS and rushed to the rail with arms extended. Having taken off her leash, Ellen was kneeling on a board with her hands on the rail. Patrick tossed her paddle aft. ‘Up you come.’
In the boat, the girls turned around and sat with their backs against the cabin bulkhead as the Olivers eased them down. Patrick reached into the cabin and then dropped the pile of towels and blankets between them. ‘Now, let’s take off those lifejackets and dry yourselves off.’
Ellen pulled the towel around her shoulders.
‘Don’t worry about that.’ He waved the towel away. ‘Here’s a sweatshirt. Put your arms up.’ He pulled it down like he was dressing a little kid. Morgan did the same.
Next came the big, fleece-insulated foul weather jackets and then the blankets. ’Sit on this part. There you go. Now wrap all this around your legs.’
Last of all were a pair of thick woolen hats. He stepped back. ‘Outstanding,’ he pronounced.
Ellen scrunched up her eyes and looked at them. ‘Where are the people who are supposed to rescue us?’
‘Good question,’ Patrick granted.
‘You don’t understand,’ Sara protested. ‘We’ve been out here all night. We got caught in a storm. People are looking for us in boats and helicopters.’
Another thought occurred to her. She turned to Ellen and said, ‘If we go with these guys, now they’ll never find us.’
For the first time all week, Johnny allowed himself a good, rollicking laugh. ‘Even in the hospital,’ he said, ‘they had no idea who you guys were. They knew there was a search, but they figured you were up to something else entirely. You just happened to cruise by and ask if they needed a ride.’
‘Girls,’ Patrick admonished as sternly as a father, ‘you’re safe now. Do you understand me? You’re safe. We’re going to get you home.’
They had drifted from where the paddle boards were still attached to the lobster buoy. Patrick went into the cabin to drive back up. He stepped quickly back into the cockpit, leaned over the rail to untie them, and hauled them into the boat.
Morgan kneeled between the girls and poured tea from a thermos into plastic cups. ‘Loads and loads of people are looking for you. You have no idea. The two of you are all over social media.’
‘Really?’
Back in the cabin, Patrick picked up his cell phone. ‘Michael, we found the girls. They’re safe. We’re headed back to Inish Oirr.’
This caught Michael at the end of a very long double shift, where his moods had swung between hopelessness at the worst moments and divided loyalties at the best. He pressed the speaker button on his phone and cranked up the volume. In a remarkably calm voice, he replied, ‘Where were they, right down that line?’
’150 feet off it. They tied up to a lobster pot.’
Behind him, other station members’ heads came up at their desks. They looked at each other and then Michael.
Michael gave a contented, albeit weary chuckle. ‘You should have gone out last night.’
‘Yeah. Look, I don’t have a lot of time to mess around. We have to make this official. I have numbers. Ready to log this?’
‘Hit me.’ Michael scooted his chair back toward the radio console. He leaned his phone against a computer screen.
‘Mark: contact and recovery at 53 degrees, Zero point 713 minutes North, by 9 degrees, 29 point 991 minutes West. Fishing vessel JOHNNY O has Zero Four persons on board: two crew, two survivors. The girls are conscious, no injuries. Late Stage One or Early Two hypothermia; shivering yet disoriented. They’re wrapped up in jackets and blankets. Recovered the boards, and we’re heading up the East Side of Inish Oirr. Request a helo at Inish Oirr for med-evac, Two Zero minutes.’
A line of station members was now behind Michael, leaning over his shoulders, each tilting an ear toward the phone.
‘Good copy: mark at 53 degrees, Zero point 713 minutes North, by 9 degrees, 29 point 991 minutes West. Vessel JOHNNY O, Zero-Four P-O-B, including two survivors; treating for possible Stage Two hypothermia. Northbound, South Sound; Inish Oirr, Request med-evac, Two Zero minutes. Oh, you slick son of a bitch.’
‘Gotta go.’
‘Well done.’
The line behind Michael exploded into activity, people dashing for phones and computers.
It was a gesture the Glynn family all knew, based on Johnny’s ability to predict a goal well before it happened. As players swirled in front of the net and the ball flew back and forth, his fist would rise to head height, pause for a moment, and then drive overhead in triumph. The Glynns had seen it 100 times on the sidelines. On the beach, that same motion stopped them in their tracks.
His cellphone had rung.
‘Johnny, the girls are safe.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘They’ve been found!’
‘They’re safe!’ he called out, pulling the phone beneath his chin. As the girls ran in from every direction, he held the phone out and hit the speaker button. They gathered in a circle.
It was his friend from Ballyvaughan. ‘I’m still at the pier. A couple of boats are in - people who’ve been searching - and all their marine radios just kicked off with a big broadcast. A fisherman picked up the girls. They gave the latitude and longitude. The girls are OK; they’re conscious, but they have hypothermia. They’re going to the Aran Islands for a med-evac.
‘There it goes again. You hear that?’ A deep, amplified voice echoed in the background. ‘They’re standing down the search.’
‘They were down by the Cliffs of Moher!’ one of the boaters called out.
Johnny and Deidre had thrown their arms around one another. For all her bravery, her body shook with sobs. The girls jumped up and down and cheered as they crashed into a group hug.
‘Thank you so much,’ Johnny said into the phone, ‘for everything - for what everyone’s done.’
’Sure thing, buddy. You take care of your family.’
Johnny looked out at the gray expanse. ‘Not today,’ he sobbed defiantly. His fists came up from his sides, and in a burst of exultation he dropped to his knees, his eyes closed, teeth gritted, and flexing his arms in front of him, the very position he hit in 1991, when with five minutes left in the game and the score tied 0-0, he scored the game winner over the Shamrock Rovers and sent Galway United to the European Cup.
He dimly perceived that somebody shouted, ‘Come on!’ and looked to see the girls and even Deidre tearing at full speed up the beach and back to the car.
The girls’ first inclination was to get home and turn on the television. In the car, radio stations up and down the dial were breaking the news that -
‘missing paddleboarders Ellen Glynn and Sara Feeney have been rescued . . ‘
‘after surviving all night lost at sea, they were found clinging to a lobster pot . . ‘
‘by a fisherman bringing them to Inish Oirr to a waiting helicopter. They will be flown to University Hospital in Galway.’
‘Dad! We have to go to the hospital!’ The girls were bouncing in their seats and shouting, ‘Drive faster, Dad!’
Deidre had a finger in one ear and a phone to the other as she called Sara’s mother. ‘Did you hear?’
They made it to the service road near the helipad and ran to the fence just in time to see the great beast touch down in a deafening roar of rotor wash and blinking strobe lights.
Patrick stared at Johnny. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘What’s that?’
’In all of your years of coaching, have you ever missed a game?’
‘Never.’
‘Yeah, I figured. You didn’t fail her.’
Johnny’s eyes came up. ‘I know, but - ‘
‘In that storm, there’s nothing anyone could have done.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘That was the longest, most helpless night of my life. There wasn’t a damned thing I could do to protect her.’
‘But you did. Beforehand. She went into the biggest game of her life - which would have killed a great many other people - without any coach, and she won. You must have done something right.’
Johnny looked away and thought about that. ‘I’m the one who lost hope.’
‘Yeah.’ Patrick took a drink. ‘Yeah, that’s bad.’ They laughed.
’She never did,’ Patrick said. ‘What did you call her, a tender soul? I don’t think so. That’s a badass chick.’
Johnny kept looking away. ‘I think I’m the tender soul around here.’
A moment passed. ‘You know, neither one of us comes off very well in this whole thing.’ Patrick pushed his chair back and walked to the bar. He came back with a pen. On the chart, he pointed at the white section of open Atlantic Ocean, west of the Aran Islands, away from the 230 and 252 lines and all the notations. ’Sign your name down there.’
He signed next to Johnny’s name. Above, he wrote, ‘To Sara and Ellen, Thank you for saving the two of us.’
‘There you go. You’ll have to explain that to them.’
