- Antifreeze Head
- Jun 6, 2005
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Pillbug
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Anyone have the lost tape where Myrtle Krebsbach fell off the pontoon boat only to be eaten by a passing Lutheran Shark?
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Jun 2, 2014 16:16
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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Jun 9, 2024 23:08
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- Antifreeze Head
- Jun 6, 2005
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It begins
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Pillbug
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As I recall, that was not a quiet week in Mr. Keillor's hometown.
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Jun 2, 2014 16:16
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- Nckdictator
- Sep 8, 2006
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Just..someone
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Take note: a place called "Death's Head Beach" might not be the safest place from sharks.
quote:Hearing the sound of a small plane overhead, some of the 15 to 20 swimmers in the open sea 20 miles off the Dominican Republic gestured frantically for help. The plane was unable to put down on water, however, and its occupants could only look on in helpless horror at the scene unfolding beneath them. The swimmers, passengers on a sinking people-smuggling ship bound for Puerto Rico, were under siege by dozens of sharks. "In one instance we saw a shark literally throw someone in the air and then attack the person," recalled one of the witnesses, Eugenio Cabral, the Dominican Republic's director of civil defense. "It was just unbearable not being able to do anything for them." As more of the swimmers were devoured, the blue waters around them turned red.
The victims of the carnage were among some 150 Dominicans, mostly young women, who had paid up to $600 each for illegal passage to Puerto Rico aboard a 50-ft. wooden fishing boat. The group had set out at 2 a.m. Tuesday from Death's Head Beach in the town of Nagua, about 110 miles north of the capital of Santo Domingo. The ship was only four miles out to sea when, according to some survivors, its two outboard motors exploded. Since most of those aboard were unable to swim, many probably drowned within a few minutes of the accident. But others, either swimming or clinging to hastily emptied floating gasoline containers, tried to reach shore.
A few made it. At 9 a.m. a man identified only as Rubio staggered ashore in Nagua and provided the first word of the tragedy. Others drifted with the current as far as 20 miles out to sea and into shark-filled waters. Some of the victims might have been saved had prompt measures been taken after Rubio's alert. Yet military authorities, complained Civil Defense Director Cabral, did not respond to his call for rescue helicopters. In a desperate effort to locate the survivors himself, he commandeered a private plane, from which he watched the sickening scene. Said Cabral: "If we had helicopters, we could have pulled some of those people out of the water. Instead, all we could do was watch as the sharks attacked them."
Besides Rubio, at least 20 other passengers were known to have reached shore. Still others may have made it to safety unnoticed. But Cabral estimates that as many as 70 of the shipwreck victims drowned or were eaten by sharks. Given the heavy volume of illegal Dominican immigration to Puerto Rico, a tragedy was almost inevitable. Indeed, hundreds of inhabitants of the impoverished Caribbean nation have perished on the dangerous 90-mile journey across the Mona Passage between the two islands. Most of the dead are victims of fierce tropical storms or unscrupulous sea captains who take their passengers' money only to throw them overboard or leave them on deserted islands to starve. Despite the odds, some 150,000 Dominicans have managed in the past few years to make it to Puerto Rico.
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Jun 2, 2014 18:11
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Jun 2, 2014 16:16
