Billy Lafay’s wild ride

by Mark McDermott

It was a calm, sun-dappled Sunday afternoon two weekends ago, and a surprising southerly had just come up behind Hermosa native Billy Lafay and his 25-foot Sea Ray. He was heading home after a weekend in San Diego and with the help of a following sea was skipping along at 25 knots an hour. "I thought to myself, boy, this is going to be a beautiful trip," said Lafay. "I’m going to make record time. I’m hauling butt here."

Within minutes, all hell broke loose. Out of the literal blue came 40-knot winds, blowing up 8-foot swells that smacked over the bow of the boat with a shuddering violence. Lafay, suddenly hanging on for dear life in his cockpit, took a glance at his GPS and saw that he’d slowed to eight knots.

"It was like hitting a wall," said Lafay, a Hermosa native. "It was surreal."

Worse yet, the boat was taking on water, and one of the twin outboard motors died. Lafay scrambled to the stern and began bailing, but with the waves crashing and the water rising, he quickly realized the situation was beyond bailing. He scrambled back up to the wheel and headed full-throttle towards the beach with his one remaining engine, but only a half-minute later the second engine died.

He was five miles from shore in a dead boat at the mercy of a raging sea. The stern was nearly underwater, and Lafay figured the rest of the boat would soon follow. It was time to get ready to swim. He put on a life jacket – "A new experience for me, after 40 years on the ocean," he noted – and dumped the contents from his ice chest. He took off his boots and packed them, along with his heavy coat and foul-weather gear, into the chest, which he intended to use as a floatation device.

"I figured to swim in water like that with just a lifejacket, my odds of making it were real slim," Lafay said. "I was hoping with the ice chest I could use it like a mini-boogie board. I could surf in a little bit better, and I wouldn’t have to swim."

He took rope and quickly tied the ice chest shut and tied three lifejackets to it. He also tied rope handles and attached himself to the chest. All these preparations took less than a minute. He crawled to the tip of the bow, wedged himself in with the ice chest on his lap, and waited for the boat to go down. As he sat there, water washed up past the middle of the boat, past the cockpit, and he saw his flare kit disappear with a wave.

"I was thinking about going in the water," Lafay said. "But then I thought, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa: this is a perfectly good half-sunken boat.’ There is nothing wrong with a half-sunken boat. You still have something to work with. If somebody had come by it would have been a funny sight, seeing a guy with an ice chest on his lap sitting on the bow of a boat watching the waves crash over him."

It slowly dawned on him that the boat was not going under.

"I don’t know how long I stayed on the bow with the ice chest on my lap waiting to go swimming before I realized, God, it’s got a new waterline. The waterline is now inside the boat instead of outside, but it’s not going to sink on me."

He tied his precious ice chest to the rails on the bow, giving himself something to wedge his feet against in the stern-listing boat. He gingerly made his way to the center console and tied down a loose door there, hoping to prevent water from filling up the middle of the boat. He then crawled back to the bow and tried to help balance the boat as it took the waves, shifting his weight back and forth in hopes the boat wouldn’t "turtle" on him and turn over. This was his job for the next 10 hours, as the wind blew unabated and the boat rolled and shook but stayed above water.

The trouble had hit at about 4 p.m., and it wasn’t until 2 a.m. that the weather calmed and Lafay was able to drop anchor. He had drifted about four miles in those 10 hours, and was now less than a mile from shore.

And then it began to rain. Worse, flashes of lightning crackled above. "That’s when I actually got scared," said Lafay. "I thought, Jesus, I’m going to be out here, the highest thing on the water. I’m going to get hit by lightning."

Lightning was one possibility, hypothermia was another. "I was starting to get cold enough where I knew you don’t want to go to sleep," he said. "You go to sleep and you never wake up." Lafay found a 5 by 5 tarp and tied it down across the bow. He also found a pair of pants and a towel miraculously dry in one of the console hatches, and a couple of convenience-store plastic bags that made wonderfully dry socks. Altogether, he had two hooded coats, rain-gear, and a damp sleeping bag, which, all bundled up under his makeshift tent, made for a nearly luxurious abode. He then allowed himself an even greater luxury: he slept. When he woke, he wasn’t sure how much time had passed, and was shocked by what he saw when he peeked from underneath the tarp.

"Wow," he said to himself. "Cool. The sun’s up."

He’d had some water to drink when it had rained, but he’d had nothing to eat since the previous morning. "I found a tube of toothpaste, so I ate a little toothpaste, and thought, that’s not too bad." After breakfast, he assigned himself a new job -- attaching a life jacket to the end of his fishing pole and waving it high in the sky, hoping to attract attention. Thoughout the ordeal, he had been calling for help on his hand-held radio once an hour, but it turned out that there was no reception in the area.

Finally, about 10 a.m. on Monday morning, he heard an approaching engine, and saw the Orange County harbor patrol coming his way. The first thing he said to them was, "Thank God for floatation foam." It was the extra foam packed into the stern of his boat, he thought, that saved him.

He is now hard at work on designing the "next generation" life jacket. He says current lifejackets haven’t improved much in design for 40 years and, though they are of some use for someone who doesn’t swim, are as much for finding a dead body as saving somebody lost at sea.

Lafay said it took every iota of his nearly 40 years of experience on the ocean to survive. He is a former Los Angeles County lifeguard whose first boat ride was on the Baywatch when he was six-years-old, and he is also, ironically, one of the founders of the Vessel Assist organization.

"I couldn’t see dyin’, ‘cause as far as I know, no LA County lifeguard has ever died on duty, nor has any former lifeguard ever drowned in the ocean," Lafay said.

"I’d be damned if I was going to be the first one. My family would kill me. I’d be dead still getting shit: goddamned Billy drowned, that dumb shit." ER