The five shipwreck survivors clinging to the eleven-foot inflatable Zodiac were in the trough of a 30-foot swell and looked up into the green walls of water. That’s when they saw the sharks. Brad Cavanaugh, age 21, could clearly see three sharks, and one was larger than the Zodiac. “It was bad enough seeing how large that shark was, but even worse was that the shark could clearly see us,” Brad recalled. This shark knew there was life inside the life raft, and it wasn’t about to leave.
From the moment the sailboat he was on, named Trashman, sank, Brad made up his mind that he was going to live. He thought of his mother and how his death would crush her, so he said to himself, I’m going to take this as far as I can. And because this is now my world, my reality, I’m going to embrace it. I’m going to fight to the end. His reality was bleak; surviving was near impossible, and the world that he tried to embrace included four others—with very different thoughts—and Brad had to be cognizant of them in any decisions he made.
The Trashman had been sailing approximately 60 miles off North Carolina when a violent storm with 100 mile per hour winds and forty-foot seas sank the vessel at 1:30 p.m. on October 24, 1982. John, the Trashman’s captain, Brad, Deb, Mark, and Meg had just two minutes to leave the vessel before it dragged them to the ocean’s depths. There were no survival suits onboard and no time to even put on life jackets: the crew had to escape with the clothes on their backs.
As their boat sank, Mark tried to free the life raft from its canister while Brad untied the rubber Zodiac dinghy from the Trashman’s cabin top. When the life raft popped from its canister and inflated it was taken by the wind and disappeared into the chaotic void of crashing seas. The Zodiac came free of the Trashman as the sailboat was going down, and it too was snatched by the wind and began tumbling away.
Brad knew that if he didn’t corral the Zodiac, he and the rest of the crew were doomed, so he swam after it, kicking off his boots as he went. Somehow, he caught up with the tiny vessel and held onto its lifeline in the raging sea until the others could reach him. The group tried to hold onto to the outside of the Zodiac by clutching the lifeline, but the hurricane-force winds, coupled with breaking seas, sent the vessel rolling end over end. Some of the crew who were able to hang on were flipped with the dinghy while others lost their grip and had to swim after it. They soon learned it was easier to keep the Zodiac from getting caught by the wind if they kept it upside down
