Boats are washed in “about 50 to 100 yards in the mangroves” on Sanibel Island, and it’s a challenge to reach them to make sure there are no people in the vessels, according to an emergency rescue worker.
“It’s very difficult to enter and search the boats,” Florida Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 4 rescue specialist Percy Del Aguila told CNN’s Leyla Santiago.
“The hardest part has been when we approach the boats, you’re waiting and hoping the people who may be in there are OK,” said the Orlando-based rescue worker.
“It’s difficult to be looking at people’s things that are littered all over, where they shouldn’t be,” said Del Aguila. “It’s weird, finding boats where they shouldn’t be, and looking at people’s property when they have lost everything.”
Many of the vessels are in areas that are inaccessible, according to Matt Jaynes, rescue team manager with Task Force 4.
“We’re taking smaller boats that we can to get back into these backwater areas and then climbing through the mangroves with aerial recon to get to these targeted vessels that are back there” to search and make sure they are clear, Jaynes said.
According to Jaynes, “there’s a large population of commercial shrimp vessels and mooring fields, where people live on sailboats and cabin cruisers year-round,” and many people decided to ride out the storm on their vessels.
“We have a large amount of boats deep in the woods that would normally have people on, so we’re having to go along and find … which ones have been locked and secured,” Jaynes told Santiago.
Jaynes said the team has found some surprises.
“We did run into a gentleman that did ride out the entire storm on his sailboat. He is about 50 feet into the mangroves, sitting probably 15 to 18 feet in the air on top of them. And he has a kayak and means of getting back and forth. He’s perfectly content. And he’s going back and forth getting his supplies and figuring his life out. So we just found him sitting there; he was smoking a cigarette and on his cell phone,” he told CNN.
In a Facebook post Tuesday, Task Force 4 said it continues to conduct search and rescue operations in Fort Myers as well.
“After conducting operations in Matlacha and Punta Gorda, we are focusing our efforts on vessels stranded in and around Matanzas Harbor and Matanzas Pass” in a joint effort with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the task force added.
