“These children are surrounded by water from the moment that they’re born”, she says.
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A boat heads out from the JIB Club Marina down the Indian River, Tuesday, July 28, 2015, in Tequesta, Fla.
The search has gone around the clock since Friday afternoon when the boys were reported missing at about 5 p.m., as they failed to check in with family members who said they were on the boat fishing.
An area roughly the size of West Virginia had been searched for Austin Stephanos and Perry Cohen as of midnight Tuesday. The teens were last seen Friday afternoon buying fuel near Jupiter and were believed to have been heading toward the Bahamas.
Mothers of the teen boys appeared on the Today Show this morning and insisted that the boys have the skills to survive their ordeal at sea. “We are gonna ask them when they get in what happened, because this isn’t normal”, she said. The two teen girls spoke to the boys before they left on their fishing outing.
In an interview on TODAY, their mothers expressed hope and said the boys had plenty of experience on the open water. “If it was another neighbor, if it were a group or somebody else around here, I’d be trying to help”.
The teens’ boat was found Sunday, capsized 67 nautical miles (about 77 miles, or 124 kilometers) off Florida’s Ponce de Leon Inlet.
“Our intentions are to continue to search aggressively…” “If you’re not surrounded in this community or you don’t have it running through your blood, you’ll never be able to understand it. But we can assure everyone that these boys are skilled and knowledgeable and strong enough and have what they need to get through this”.
Coast Guard Capt. Mark Fedor told CNN on Tuesday that “at some point we have to suspend our search efforts”.
The boys have been missing since they set out onto the Atlantic Ocean in a 19-foot boat on Friday as a thunderstorm approached.
The 14-year-old boys’ vessel was found capsized on Sunday morning. Neither was surprised to hear of their solo journey.
“Regardless of how experienced you are in the water, things can happen”, he said.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Steve Lehmann says that ocean drift patterns have complicated the search efforts, but that the Coast Guard has re-calculated its search plans based on the boat’s location.
The families are offering $100,000 for any information, and and their NFL Hall of Famer friend Joe Namath has offered to search for the boys personally. A sighting of an object off the Georgia coast prompted a brief flurry of interest, but it was found to be unconnected to the teens.
The boys went fishing on the white, single engine, 19-foot boat on Friday July 24. It’s unclear if the boys were wearing life jackets, but search-and-rescue crews recovered one life jacket near the capsized boat.
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Water temperatures were warm and not cited as a factor in the boys’ survival.
