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Besides Richard, the crew consisted of Kitty Fox and Ran Villanueva from Placencia, and Robert Gates, Erik Klockars, Michael Marsden, and Duff Chambers -- friends of Richard’s from Connecticut; and Cinnamon and Maya, resident boat kittys. As the Ocean
Gypsy neared Xcalak, Mexico, six miles north of the Belizean border, the
skies grew dark and the winds escalated from 20 to 40 knots. “Something
didn’t feel right,” Marsden says. “We’d been through squalls, but this
was different.” They decided to find anchorage in Xcalak, but 30-foot
waves obscured the cut in the reef which they would have to cross to make
it
What the crew didn’t know was that the tropical storm they’d heard about the day before had changed course while they were out of VHF range. It was now 600 miles wide and a class five hurricane, called Mitch -- spiraling directly toward the Mexican coast. Tim Haas was packing up to evacuate Xcalak when he looked out at the Caribbean Sea and spotted the mast of the Ocean Gypsy. The 46-year old owner of the only telephone and fax in town once flew fishermen and divers to the Yucatan Peninsula. Eight years ago he’d decided to stay in Xcalak, a primitive village of 300 with no electrical power. Over a VHF radio, he called out to the Ocean Gypsy. “What in the hell are you doing out there? Don’t you know you’re sailing straight into a Class Five hurricane?” Tim told the crew that the storm was due to make landfall at Xcalak by noon the next day. They had one choice -- they must cross through the fifty foot cut in the reef to make it to shore if they were to escape the storm. The crew donned life jackets and prepared to make the run. With Tim shouting out coordinates over the radio, Richard lined up the lighthouses. On the pier, Tim readied himself, “How many souls on board?” he asked. “How many women and children?” Tim recalls “I knew that a boat making it through that cut in those conditions would be nothing short of a miracle.” Just a few hours earlier the 282-foot Windjammer Fantome had gone down off the coast of Honduras with 31 aboard. Richard Sugarman punched the V-6 175-horsepower engine during a split-second lull between waves and the Gypsy roared into the cut, riding down a 40-foot breaking wave. The catamaran angled into the passageway, pitched sideways, and threw one pontoon completely into the air. On shore, the half-dozen villagers watching turned and ran to the village church to pray. The port captain grew so frightened he turned his back and walked away. “We knew we were going over,” Marsden says. “But, somehow...by divine intervention, we came back.” Inside the reef, ecstatic that they’d made it, the crew cheered. “Everyone on board?” shouted Sugarman. Michael Marsden, eyeballed the aft cockpit and screamed, “Gates is gone!” Erik Klockars, marine mechanic, recalls, “ I saw him in between the waves at that moment being sucked out to sea. It was all white water, and he was popping up between the waves flailing his arms as if to say, ‘I’m here. I’m here. Then he disappeared.” They tossed an anchor overboard to search for Gates, but the iron cleats broke off like twigs. Tim Haas watched in horror from the shore and shouted, “Turn back! There is nothing you can do for the man! Let him come to you! You’ll all die if you go after him.” Richard reluctantly
steered the boat toward the pier. He beseeched the armed Navy “Marinos,”
who had stood silently by watching the drama, to mount a search for Robert
Gates. Instead, the marinos boarded the Ocean Gypsy and spent an hour and
a half searching for drugs. It was dark by the time they finished, making
a search for Robert that evening impossible. The crew spent
Meanwhile the storm whipped along the Caribbean coast taking out every pier, beach, and dock from Isla Mujeres, Mexico, to Honduras and Nicaragua. In Placencia, Belize, Linda was also evacuated and spent four days and three nights living in a van in the Mayan Mountains where she helped a woman suffering a miscarriage. She had no way of knowing what had happened to the boat and crew until Richard reached her by phone two days after the accident. The crew returned to Xcalak to find the Ocean Gypsy 250 yards from the concrete pier where they’d left her tied and anchored. She was full of mud and water, and sunk in 2 1/2 feet of water with a gaping hole in her starboard stern and a port bow that was split in two. The insurance company flew out a representative who declared the boat a “constructive total loss.” However, Richard believed that the Ocean Gypsy could be refloated and repaired and set about making plans from a one-room cabana at the Costa de Cocos Resort in Xcalak. Linda returned to Connecticut to work until they could resume the trip. November 1998 Richard wrote family and friends from Xcalak one month after the hurricane, “Robert was my best friend. I’ll always wonder what I could have done differently that terrible day.” (Gates’ body was found several days after the accident on the coast of Belize.) “What now?”, Richard added, “After what we’ve been through, will we still want to run a sail charter business 2500 miles from home? When you do everything you can to breathe life into a dream, and it becomes your worst nightmare, all bets are off for what happens next.” I met Richard two months after the hurricane at the Costa de Cocos where I was escaping my own storm -- a nasty divorce. The large, ruddy-faced man with a gray braid snaking down his back rowed me out to see the sad, partially sunk Ocean Gypsy, which he referred to fondly as “she.” The Sugarmans wowed me. They were going for it. No matter what. Class five hurricanes not excepted. And I was worried about a few sharks at home... A few days
later, Richard wrote to loved ones in his first Christmas card from Central
America, “Remember, life is precious but it can vanish in the wink of an
eye. Hold on for all you’re worth. And whenever you can, hold on to each
other.”
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