Miracle Files: The Mystery Boat

Andrew stared back at the approaching boat in disbelief. It was closing in on them, now less than 50 yards away. How could they not see his boat?

If they didn't change course soon, Andrew feared they'd collide in the middle of the ocean. This is The Miracle Files. I'm Emily Jones.

And I'm Holly Worthington. We're two sisters who love a captivating true story, but we're also seeking more light in our lives. So we're on a mission to find and share unforgettable, uplifting stories of God's miracles.

We hope you'll join us on this journey. Welcome back to The Miracle Files. This story is a really good one. Yeah, I love doing the interview for this one. I always think that, you know, our most recent episode is my favorite, but this one is just really, really interesting. Yeah, it's full of twists and turns. And it's called The Mystery Boat for a reason, because this has a lot of mystery in it too. So we won't give away any more details.

Right. So here it is, The Mystery Boat. It was a perfect day to go deep sea fishing off the coast of North Carolina.

The sun shone brightly in a nearly cloudless summer sky. Andrew Sherman and his 21-year-old son Jack headed out like they had done many times to troll offshore near a place called 23 Mile Rock. They cruised along slowly with several baited lures hung from their boat, but found no fish. They decided to head out further and further. They eventually worked their way about 37 miles offshore, the furthest they had ever gone out to fish.

Hoping to change their luck, the father and son duo decided to take a break from trolling and dropped some lures to the bottom of the ocean. Their boat drifted along, bobbing above depths of 110 to 115 feet of deep blue water. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary on this beautiful summer day until Andrew spotted a distant boat heading straight at them. I looked out in the distance and heading dead center towards our boat was another boat. And I was like, what is going on here?

We're in the middle of nowhere and this guy is just running towards us. At that point, the stranger's boat was about 200 yards away from them. Andrew looked down at his rod to reel it in. I looked up again. The boat is still right on our path, 150 to 100 yards. I look back at Jack to see where he is in terms of what he's doing and I'm like, hey, are you almost off the bottom? And he was like, yep, yep, I'm almost off the bottom. Andrew looked back at the boat. It was closing in on them, now less than 100 yards away and still heading straight at them. And I say to Jack, you're not going to believe this, we have some yahoo and he has no idea we're here and he's going to run straight into us. The mystery boat closed in on them.

Jack finished reeling in his lure. Andrew knew they had to move quickly. And I went to turn the boat on and there was a brief moment where I thought to myself, I really hope the boat doesn't have a problem and it turns on no problem.

Because if not, this guy is going to run into us. Andrew turned the ignition. To his relief, the engine fired up.

We put the motor in gear and we started puttering forward. And as we puttered forward, this boat just passed within 10 yards or so of our stern. In disbelief, Andrew and Jack watched the boat drive past. They thought it was strange that they hadn't noticed the boat sooner and wondered why the boat had almost run straight into them. But stranger still was what they observed as the boat drove past. Here's Andrew's son, Jack, explaining what happened next. As the boat drove by, you could hear the radio was playing on the boat.

There was like music. You had like five rods out or something that he was trolling. As it goes by, we look in the cabin and there was no one behind the steering wheel and we're like, what the heck?

That is like super bizarre. The two men wondered if the boat's owner could be down in the cabin, unaware of how close they'd come to colliding. So as it goes by, we yelled at him to try to get his attention and there was no response. So we put our rods in the rod holders and we took off after him.

I think he was going like eight or nine knots, so like 10 miles per hour. And we were coasting up alongside him and we had an air horn and my dad dug that out. And he starts blasting the air horn and kind of drowned it next to him and there's no response. And we were like, oh my gosh, like what if someone like had a heart attack or a stroke below deck? So we'd talk and we're like, if there's no response the next two minutes, we should probably go ahead and try to board the boat. Minutes ticked by with Andrew and Jack coasting alongside the boat, trying to get someone's attention with no response. So a debate ensued between the father and son about who would make the treacherous leap onto the mystery boat to investigate.

Jack, a midshipman at the Naval Academy, was younger and felt he would be better to make the leap. Andrew feared what Jack might find aboard the boat. You know, as we're having this joking conversation about who's jumping in the boat, I actually did say to him very seriously, are you prepared for what you may find when you go on this boat? Jack assured his father that he was prepared to deal with whatever lay beyond the deck of the boat. But he still couldn't help but wonder what he was about to face. We came up alongside and kind of like matched the waves and everything. That was definitely a big adrenaline rush, just jumping in like somebody's boat 40 miles offshore.

And you didn't know like anything. I was like, for sure there's got to be some dead guy down here. Jack made the leap and was stunned at what he found, or perhaps more accurately, what he didn't find. So we jumped on board, and look, there's nobody in the deck.

I'm like, all right, cool. I like ease my way to the cabin, expecting to find something, and the cabin's just completely empty. So I put the boat in neutral, turn everything off, reel in all the little lines. I called my dad and I'm like, the boat's empty. And my dad goes, are you sure? Like, check again. It's like a 20 foot boat. I'm like, Dad, it's like 20 feet. I promise there's like nothing here to see.

There's no secret doors. But Jack did soon find some items that alarmed both father and son. A wallet and a life jacket. These articles spelled out one thing for Andrew and Jack, man overboard. And even worse, man overboard without a life jacket. Had this man been fishing and somehow fallen? All they had to go on was an empty boat with some eerily important belongings on board. Beyond that, the two men had no idea how long ago the boat's captain might have gone over.

It could have been hours ago. If the boat's captain had survived the fall, it must have been horrific to watch his boat drive off into the distance without him. Andrew and Jack had a sinking feeling that someone was likely out there, 40 miles from shore, fighting for their life if they were even still alive. The father and son hurried and tied the boats up together and radioed the Coast Guard.

Here is the actual call Andrew and Jack made. Coast Guard Station, Wrightsville Beach, Coast Guard Station, Wrightsville Beach, come in. Russell Hayling, Coast Guard, go ahead. Coast Guard Station, Wrightsville Beach, we just found a boat at 3351, 362 North, 7710, 177 West.

There is no one aboard. Roger that, Cap. Can you see a description of the vessel and the vessel name? We will check for vessel name. I can give you the ID we found on board. Scheller, F-C-H-E-L-L-E-R.

When we found the vessel, it was doing about 8 knots. Roger, Cap. We copied Scheller as the last name. Can you say again first name? First name, Sasha, S-A-S-C-H-A. Roger, Cap.

This is Sasha Scheller. I request you say again, was the boat moving when you came upon it? The boat was moving. It almost ran us down, so we moved out of the way, followed the boat, hit it with 4 or 5 blasts on an air horn, waited about 10 minutes. My son found no one on board. Boat vessel number is NC2683.

He is an Echo and is a Nancy. Roger that, Cap. Other than the ID on board, did you see any other sign of any other persons on the boat? We went over the entire boat. It's a 23-foot Parker Cuddy Cabin. No one on board that we can find. Lines were all deployed like he was fishing a spread.

Roger that, Cap. The Coast Guard encouraged Andrew and Jack to access the GPS system on the boat to see if they could give any coordinates of where the boat might have come from. With the two boats tied up and drifting together, Andrew boarded the mystery boat and joined Jack in the cabin where they radioed the Coast Guard again with the GPS history.

Yeah. So the boat leaves like a track essentially. So you can see where the boat left, where it started, where it came up. And then he went like 23 miles offshore, actually the same place that we initially were at. And then he began pushing offshore further and further.

So we could see where the boat went. We were able to like report those coordinates to the Coast Guard. We probably talked to the Coast Guard for 20 or 30 minutes on the radio. And the Coast Guard was like, okay, like, Roger, thank you. And I was like, he had a conversation and we were like, well, hey, there's a dude out here with no life jacket on.

What do you mean? Like, thank you. So we were like, golly, like we got to, we should go try to find this guy.

We can't just let him drown out here, which we knew was pretty doodle. Like, I mean, the chances of, I was convinced the whole time that we were probably going to wait for like a body to gas up and then float back to the surface because the chances of like floating out there with no life jacket for a while is not too high. There are critical moments in life. Forks in the road, some call them. And this was one of those moments for Andrew and Jack. They could go home and leave everything in the hands of the Coast Guard. Or they could search for the man overboard.

This stranger, now known to them as Sasha Scheller. The ocean is vast and endless. Only those who spend time out on the ocean truly understand how vast it is. And these two men understood it well. They knew any attempt at rescue would be almost impossible. Like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

But they weren't the type of men to just give up when someone could possibly still be alive and in a desperate situation. In fact, as soon as the Coast Guard said thank you, Jack said, we're going to go find him. They ended the call with the Coast Guard and immediately devised a plan. So we ended up looking at the GPS. We deemed he was making normal fishing patterns that are trolling around. And then at one point we saw the boat kind of go straight for a while. And then it just kind of veered off into this like weird abnormal pattern where it intersected our boat a few miles later.

And we're like, that seems like where he may have fallen off and he did fall off. So to give this some more perspective on his GPS, he saw this dotted line, a trail that came out, fished around a little bit, fished around a little bit, fished around a little bit, got out to the area that we were in. And then what it did was it made this looping turn, crossed back on itself, curved back around and then headed back towards land and encountered us like right there. As Andrew and Jack mapped out the coordinates, they also noticed that Sasha had several waypoints on the GPS system. A waypoint happens when the GPS is manually touched and is a point of reference, kind of like dropping a pin location for navigation purposes. And not far from where we were, it had a waypoint.

So we knew that he had touched the screen there. So we came up with a plan that I will run Sasha's boat and Jack will run mine. And I can see the GPS for Sasha. And I said, Jack, I'm going to take you back to his last waypoint where we knew he was on the boat. And when we get to that waypoint, I want you to make ever enlarging circles from that waypoint. Just keep going out from that waypoint. I'm going to go back over here to where the boat made this big loop. And I'm just going to criss-cross through that whole area. I mean, I had no idea why I was doing it that way.

But anyway, that's what we did. Jack traveled to the last waypoint. For several minutes, he made concentric circles around it. And then he spotted something in the water.

Yeah, so he started to search. And I guess like 20 or 30 minutes in, I don't know how I saw this in the ocean, but I found a pair of boots floating in the water. Just regular deck boots he'd be fishing with.

So I scooped those up, raided them in the Coast Guard, raided them into my dad. And I thought, oh my gosh, did his boots slip off from when he drowned or something? While Jack saw the boots as a bad sign, Andrew had a different thought. So I was about three-quarters of a mile from Jack, searching through this big loop.

And I don't know why. It wasn't based on anything really concrete. But I just thought, if I had fallen overboard, I would take my boots off because I could swim easier with my boots off. And so that said to me, he fell off and he was still alive. And then for some reason, that said to me, between where he had touched the screen and there was a straight line before it made this big curve, I don't know why in my mind I thought he fell off somewhere in that straight line. He fell off somewhere in that straight line.

Andrew drove his boat back to the start of the straight line and let his boat drift. It drifted south, which made Andrew think that Sasha may have drifted south as well. He crisscrossed over the line slightly to the north and then back towards the south, scanning the horizon for any signs of life.

He took another turn and went northward over the line and again headed south. And that's when he saw it. I all of a sudden saw this big splash on the surface, probably like 300 yards away. And I thought, that is either a big fish or that is somebody. And I sped the boat up as fast as it could go, cut the distance, and then I just saw this hand come out of the water and reach across in a big arc like that. And I just came on the radio and I was like, Coast Guard Radio Station Wilmington, I have found them.

I have found them. Earlier that day, Sasha Scheller, an experienced swimmer, surfer, and fisherman, had been out fishing on what started out to be a perfect day. Sasha heard over the radio that other fishermen were catching gaffer mahi-mahi, which are very large mahi-mahi's, and he saw several boats heading that way. The waves were unusually calm, so he decided to drive out further than normal until he reached about 40 miles offshore.

Sasha had always been very safety-minded. However, he let his guard down just for a moment. And a moment was all that it took. I was out fishing, and I set up all my rigs. I was trolling them behind me.

And it was so calm and so beautiful. I'm going to take my life jacket off for just a little while and get some sun. And that was the biggest mistake I ever made. So I'm just cruising along, listening to some music, and this is a part that a lot of people kind of make fun of. So I was standing right here by the steering wheel, and I had to basically relieve myself. So I turned to the side of the boat right next to the steering wheel, did what I had to do, and when I was turning back around to face the steering wheel, my foot slipped, and I just rolled right over the side of the boat. He first tried to grab the side of the boat without success. He had one last chance to grab the back platform of the boat, but it was impossible with the boat moving so quickly. That boat was gone in a matter of a minute. I mean, when your whole body's in the water and your head's sticking up and you're watching that boat go, it's a minute or two and you can't see it anymore.

It's gone. Sasha watched in horror as his boat got further and further away. So much went through Sasha's mind in the moments that followed. At one point, he saw a boat in the distance. He tried yelling and screaming as loud as he could, but his hopes were quickly dashed as the boat captain didn't see him and drove out of sight.

He was left alone with only his thoughts in what felt like an endless sea. I was pretty angry, pretty upset with myself. When I started to talk about the details is when it kind of floods back. You have a bunch of different thoughts that go through your head.

The first one was kids. You're going to leave your kids. You think about your children growing up without you. Now that I'm older and mid-forties and you start thinking about, man, I don't have enough life insurance and realizing what all this would do to them. Then you start thinking about long-term what your actions did and what the consequences are. So that's why all the anger was there. It was really anger at myself for the one simple decision I made that risked everything. After several minutes of treading water, Josh's fear and anger gave way to thoughts of survival.

I think your mind automatically turns itself on to preservation mode. Pretty fast, I would say 15, 20 minutes. I was like, you know what, I know I'm about three miles away from where those other five boats were, and that's where I remembered the swell direction. So I started swimming in the direction of where those five boats were. Every 10 minutes or so, I'd duck my head underwater and listen. Sound travels much better underwater, so I'd listen for boats.

Every now and then, I think two times I heard a boat, but they were way off in the distance. So I just kept swimming, and after about an hour or so, I started trying to spot some sargasso seaweed. If you're not familiar, it's a seaweed that floats.

It has little air sacs in it. So I was going to take my shorts off and stuff them with as much sargasso seaweed as possible so I had something to mentally hold on to if it went into the night. Agonizing hours passed before he saw another boat. After two hours, I saw a boat coming towards me at a high rate of speed, and then it started leaving again, and I thought that was quite strange. But then about five minutes later, it was doing it again. It was coming towards me.

And then when it happened a third time, I just started kicking my legs as much as I could and waving my arms and splashing water, just trying to get anything to get attention. And then next thing you know, the boat's speeding straight towards me. And not until it was probably five yards away from me, I realized it was my boat, and it was Andrew driving my boat. This is the point where Andrew called into the Coast Guard. Coast Guard, this is Parker.

Over. I have found him. Coast Guard, this is Parker.

I have found him. And then at that point, Jack heard all of that on the radio, and he raced to where we were. I raced up to Sasha in the water, spun the back of his boat around to him, shut the motor off, ran to him. He was cramping up pretty badly, pulled him up onto the swim platform on the back of the boat, initially just laid on the swim platform and recovered for about 30 seconds. And then he was able to get up and come into the back of the boat and sit on the back transom of the boat. At that point, Jack was there. He tied up to the boat again. I asked Sasha if he had anything on board like Gatorade, and he was like, yeah, he had a cooler, and we got him a Gatorade.

We just sat on the back of the boat for like 10 minutes and drank a Gatorade and kind of recovered. And, you know, we were just like, I'm so happy to see you. And he was like, I'm so happy to see you. It was pretty special. We asked Sasha how he felt when he realized he was going to be rescued. This was his response.

I don't know. It's a crazy good feeling. I don't know if I could put it into words. I mean, it's just to be able to relax and not realizing how tense you actually were. Until I could grab a hold of that boat. I mean, I'm in good shape, but as soon as I grabbed that boat, my legs cramped up. I mean, who knew how long I could have lasted? It could have been another five minutes and my legs cramped up.

Who knows? But yeah, it's just such mixed emotions of relief, ecstasy. It's kind of hard to describe. As thin as my legs became uncramped, man, I just, I bear hug Andrew. It was truly a miracle that Sasha had been found. Part of this miracle is that Sasha's boat had driven directly at two men who were willing to do all it took to find him. But even more miraculous is how the boat ended up turning without a captain steering it from its original trajectory to drive straight at Andrew and Jack. I think the coolest part of the story for me is what Sasha got back home. He called us and he said, hey, I just got back to my boat.

Like, I don't care at all because you guys just saved my life and everything. But did you guys take one of the rods off the boat? I was trolling six rods when I had fallen off.

And we were like, no, we didn't take any rods. So he went back at his GPS and back to my dad was talking about the way the boat was moving initially, where it made this big arc and then kind of shot on the straight line where it had gone straight towards us. The rod that he was missing was on his left outrigger, which is where the boat turned towards. And the only possible explanation for why a rod would just randomly fall off an outrigger is if, like, a huge fish beyond belief grabbed the bait that he was trolling, pulled all the line off the rod, like, three, four hundred yards, tilted to the side so the rod went some abhors out of the water, and was able to pop out of the outrigger and the boat straightened out again directly on a course straight towards us.

So I think that is, like, the craziest part of the story. Yeah, I'm a math major, so I've, like, ran the numbers on the chances that we would have seen his boat out there. The chance of his boat going close enough to ours, much less on the direct trajectory where we had to move our boat out of the way, was, like,.00s, like, 9 or 10 zeros, like, 1%.

So that's just, like, completely unbelievable that that would have happened. Sasha agrees that this is the only way his boat could have turned the way it did. So the interesting part is about three quarters of a mile or so after I fell out of the boat, my boat started turning to the left. And then, all of a sudden, it made a 90-degree turn. The interesting part about that is that I was missing a fishing rod, one of the ones I was using to troll with, and it happened to be on the same side that that boat turned to on the left side. You know, it's not like a river or a lake, and there's not a whole lot of debris out there, and a little bit of seaweed is not going to be able to pull the boat. So the only real kind of explanation is that I actually caught a fish, and it started taking line out and drag, causing it to drift to the left. And then when it got to the end of the line where it's tied off on the reel, it was enough to pull the boat. That changed the direction of my boat to make it go towards Andrew and Jack, which is pretty crazy. Sasha didn't grow up a religious man. He feels more connected to nature than anything, and attributes his survival to both nature and the courageous men who saved his life.

Andrew and Jack see things a little differently. It's like there's no way that would have happened without a miracle or divine intervention. It just wouldn't have happened, you know?

No way it would have happened. It's like, why do some miracles happen while other super tragic, horrible things happen? You have to press the I Believe button and have a blind seat. And just know there's a higher power and a higher plan that you don't fully understand.

You may be using that higher power and higher plan like we were used and put in the right place at the right time. I don't think any moral mind can comprehend why a miracle happens. Andrew, Jack, and Sasha have all shared this experience with the media and in various settings. Sasha has gone on to emphasize how important safety gear is.

He knows that even the most experienced sports enthusiast can get into trouble if they let their guard down when it comes to safety. His hope is that this experience may very well save others' lives. Both Andrew and Jack received commendation medals from the Coast Guard, but these two heroic men are also incredibly humble. Both men said, far more than any medals, they're grateful for how this experience has changed the course of history for not only Sasha, but Sasha's family. I will tell you the most profound thing that came out of this entire thing for me was it was about a week later that we had Sasha and his family and his parents to our house. And they came and it was really funny. Sasha brought some gifts with him, one of which was the castaway volleyball.

So that sits in my house now. But his wife during that visit said, and I may, I can never get through this easily. She said, you know, that day you didn't just save Sasha, you saved our family.

I'm just thankful that we were put in the right place at the right time, you know, and had the right skill set that we were able to do something. Oh man, can you imagine being out in the ocean without a life jacket and knowing you're almost 40 miles away from shore and no one in sight? Oh my gosh, I would be so scared.

Terrifying. I get scared in a lake thinking the fish is gonna bite my toes. Like Jaws messed me up. I still am traumatized by that movie. And when you're in a lake, there's no shark.

Thinking about in the ocean, you're like, what is beneath me? It would be so scary. Yeah, at that point, you are completely helpless. Right. And he was in really good physical health. But still, I mean, you can't just swim 40 miles into shore against the current. And in those two hours, he only had gone a mile. And if he would have kept swimming, everyone would have been gone for the day.

There was no hope, really. Yeah, he knew that too. He knew that the boats were probably all gonna be heading in soon and that the chances of getting to them before they left were pretty slim. And if they had left, I mean, Yeah, he was really smart.

I do have to say like when he was talking about getting those seaweeds that he could use to kind of help him feel like he had something to hold on to. I thought, what a smart thing to do. I don't know that my brain would have ever gone there. Yeah, kind of reminded me of that show alone. If you've seen it alone, and it's the survival show how creative people get when they're in a survival situation. Yeah, I thought I would never have thought of that. But who knows what you would think of when you're actually put out there?

True. One thing that was really important to him was to give a message about safety and to make sure you use your safety equipment. Yeah, and we have a soundbite that we want to play to honor his wishes of the message he wanted to get across.

Yeah, the reason why I like to talk about it is to make people aware. I've got every accreditation behind me. I was a surfer, I was a lifeguard, I went coast guard. You know, I knew all the safety protocols and had every kind of safety equipment you can imagine.

It was just one really stupid decision. If I would have had that life jacket on and I took off, there was a whistle. That boat would have heard me with a whistle. I had a VHF radio. All the boats within five miles would have heard me on the VHF radio. You know what I mean?

It would have been a 15-minute ordeal. So it's the big thing I really want people to understand when I share it is, regardless of what you're doing, if it's snowboarding, if it's fishing in the ocean, if it's hiking in the mountains, safety equipment is relatively inexpensive to the actual toys that you're using out there. So get it and use it.

Don't just have it so you can say you have it, but actually use it. I know he's gone around to several trainings and meetings and has presented about his experience. Well, and he very well could be saving lives by sharing that message, so we definitely want to help him spread that message. Yeah. You know, without that life jacket, the only way he could have survived in the vast ocean is through a miracle. Yeah, I agree.

And I just want to say, don't you think it's incredible how this father and son went so above and beyond? Oh, yeah. I think that there are lots of people who would just call in the Coast Guard, report it, and feel like, OK, I've done my duty.

Well, and who knows if the Coast Guard would have found him? Yeah. In that instance, minutes were so crucial. And I thought it was so cool that when the Coast Guard said, Roger that, thank you, and just hung up, that they were like, we're going to go out and find this guy. Yeah. Wasn't it so cool to have the Coast Guard call?

Yeah. I feel like I'm eavesdropping listening to this call. You can hear the elation in Andrew's voice. They were really smart, too, the way they went about things. But I'm also sure that they were given divine guidance to find Sasha as well. Well, whether you attribute it to luck or you attribute it to divine intervention, I'm grateful Sasha's alive.

I am, too. And I'm sure his family is so grateful to Andrew and Jack. Yeah, they're heroes. They really are. If you'd like to support us on Patreon so we can produce more episodes like this, go to patreon.com forward slash The Miracle Files. You'll get exclusive access to photos, videos, articles, and other content you won't find anywhere else. We'll also have live chats and we'd love to interact with you there. Thank you so much for your support.