"What happened to us was a long story. I've still got the boat. It had a place in the bow where it wasn't put together very well. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. When we fished in fresh water, it was fine, but when we took it in the ocean, it took in a lot of water. The (bilge) pump burned up, and we had it replaced, then we went out that day, and it did the same thing. We noticed the hull start kind of digging into (the waves), and then we looked under the floor and the whole boat was filling with water. It was a matter of seconds before it got unstable and flipped over."

Besides the crew of the Coast Guard copter, Peeler said that a woman who worked at the Oak Island Inn, where they were staying, was most responsible for their being rescued. "You know, we talked about it while we were out on the boat. We hadn't told anybody exactly where we were going; nobody really knew where we were fishing. Some of my buddies knew I liked to fish at Frying Pan Tower. But the lady at the hotel, she was the one that alerted everybody that there might be a problem (when they didn't return that day). She was able to find out who we were, and she contacted my wife, and that got the search started."

Eleven days later, on Sept. 30, a second search was started by an EPIRB beacon, a device that puts out a homing signal when activated.

The EPIRB had been carried to sea aboard a 31-foot fishing boat, the Still Crazy I out of Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina, carrying passengers Edward Clark, Roger Gardner and Manual Rodriguez. They told Coast Guard officials later that they had been fishing about 40 miles from Cape Fear when their boat had been struck by another vessel, a passing freighter, and had almost immediately sunk.

Fortunately, they had been able to inflate a life raft, climb aboard, and activate the EPIRB. The signal was almost immediately detected by the Coast Guard, which dispatched another HH-65 Dolphin helicopter from Charleston.

Belben, piloting the copter, said the rescue call came around midnight, and after another 110-mile ride through torrential weather, they located the EPIRB beacon and found a raft with Clark, Gardner and Rodriguez aboard at approximately 2:20 a.m. The problem was, seas were even worse than they'd been during Denby's rescue the week before -- and Belben's copter was running short on fuel.

"It was pretty ugly; it was the worst night I'd ever been out in," said Belben, now a lieutenant commander stationed in Miami. "These guys picked a bad night to get in trouble. Seas were kicking up pretty good, 15- to 20-foot waves. Actually, the wind wasn't a problem; but when you went down close to the water, all you could see were waves. We're 25 to 35 feet off the water, and you've got 20-foot waves; we had to have one guy keep a lookout for rogue waves just to make sure.

"We made our approach the first time, and we put on our night-vision goggles, and one of the guys on the raft set off a hand-held flare. Well, everything went white; we lost our visual keys and everything. We had to go around again, and when we got into a stable hover, we really didn't have the gasoline we needed to stay and pick 'em up.

"I'm the aircraft commander, and I had to make the decision to leave them and go get more fuel; that was very difficult to do -- probably the hardest decision I've ever had to make, because we've got three people in the water and it's a 45-minute round trip to get fuel.

Another Coast Guard copter, an HC-130, was on the scene as part of the search, and it remained in the area until Belben's copter returned.

"We called a merchant vessel to assist us, but seas were too heavy. We went back to Myrtle Beach and got some more fuel, and when we got back, the raft had actually rocked up against the side of the merchant ship and capsized. Those guys' luck was running out."