A “ghost ship” that recently washed up on a Florida Panhandle beach has been traced to a Texas man who will likely lose much of his savings after purchasing the ship he hoped to sail around the world.
Francine Farrar couldn’t believe her eyes on the night of June 18, when a 45-foot sailboat with no one aboard floated eerily toward her family’s beach rental in Pensacola.
“I saw a tattered sailboat, it looked ghostly, kind of coming in,” Farrar, a 46-year-old housewife in Meridian, Mississippi, told NBC News last week.
The vessel reached shore and the strange sight of a sailboat on the sand quickly became a source of fascination in the neighborhood, said Allie Garrett, a 35-year-old Pensacola resident.
“We called it the ‘ghost ship.’ It quickly became known as the ‘ghost ship’ on Pensacola Beach,” said Garrett, a meteorologist and storm chaser who took numerous photos and drone footage of the downed ship.
Wayward boats are common during hurricane season in Florida, when ships succumb to high winds and are pulled from moorings.
“We think this sailboat got loose from the marina and someone didn’t tie it down well enough,” Farrar said.
But this stranded ship had a much more complicated journey to where it now sits in Pensacola.
Shortly after locals posted images of the craft on social media, those images caught the attention of 39-year-old Michael Barlow, whose life was saved weeks earlier during a harrowing Coast Guard rescue in the Gulf of Mexico.
Barlow immediately recognized that the images and video were The Lady Catherine III, which he purchased in Fort Pierce, Florida, in May.
“I knew it was her,” Barlow said.
The Catherine departed Fort Pierce on May 21, Barlow said, with plans to dock in Rockport, Texas, where he was closing up an excavation business and selling belongings to begin a new wandering life.
“We were just going to explore the world,” Barlow said of his wife and 9-year-old son. “We are normal people. We have normal, very, very basic finances. And this is the only way I can take my son and show him that there is a whole world out there, beyond what exists in America. It’s the only way to realistically do it until that happens.”
Barlow and a friend were returning to Texas when high winds and huge waves that would eventually become Hurricane Alberto hit the Catherine and rendered it inoperable.
“We went through one storm after another, after another, after another, and then that last storm just hit us and blew out my front sails,” Barlow said in an interview in Honduras, where he temporarily lives and teaches scuba diving. “We lost the headsail, we lost the engine and we were capsizing. It was unpredictable and it was devastating.”
He added: “The seas were the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve been on the water all my life, worked on offshore fishing boats and seen rough seas. But that was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
A Garmin satellite communications device was one of the few electric or gas-powered tools that was not destroyed by seawater collisions, and Barlow was able to warn authorities on land that he was trapped in dangerous waters.
“We were fine now, but we have no control of the boat and the situation is getting worse,” Barlow said, recalling his message to the Coast Guard. “We are starting to get sidelined. The waves rocked the boat. There wasn’t much we could do.”
The New Orleans Coast Guard said it was alerted to two boaters whose “vessel was disabled approximately 190 miles south of Panama City” on June 1.
A Coast Guard helicopter and surveillance plane found Barlow and his friend on the Catherine, authorities said, but a boat-to-boat rescue was out of the question in these unstable waters.
“’We can go get you right now, but you have to leave the ship,’” Barlow said, recalling the choice Coast Guard rescuers gave him. “’You’ll definitely be rolling the dice of your life if you stay.’ It was just a bad situation and it was getting progressively worse.”
Barlow chose a rescue on the boat he bought for $80,000.
“Crews arrived on scene, the helicopter crew hoisted the two people aboard and transported them to Panama City Airport in Panama City, Florida,” a Coast Guard statement said.
Barlow said he was reasonably confident that Catherine would appear again, and it did 17 days later and nearly 200 miles away.
“We did our best to get her in the best condition to survive the storm,” Barlow said. “We strapped everything down and hoped she could handle it.”
Now the sailor has nothing but bad choices ahead of him.
He could pay $20,000 to have the Catherine taken to drydock for repairs that could well total more than her pre-Alberto value.
Or he could shell out around $28,000 to simply remove and demolish the ship, which at least stop the financial hemorrhaging.
“If we’re talking commercial numbers, it would make more sense to scrap the ship,” Barlow said. “That’s just the absolute truth.”
He is now talking to state and local officials in hopes of finding a solution in the coming weeks.
As the owner of a “derelict vessel,” Barlow will have to remove it or possibly face a third-degree felony, punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and even jail time, authorities said.
“Yes, our officers have been in contact with Mr. Barlow,” Faith Fawn, spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said in a statement. “He has 30 days from the date the uniform navigation citation was issued to bring his vessel into compliance.”
Barlow said he won’t give up on his dreams of sailing the world, even if Catherine’s misadventure costs him much of his life savings.
“I said I can make another 80 thousand dollars and we can get on with life and try again or we can sit here and try to be tough and really lose everything,” Barlow said of his final moments in the water aboard the Catherine.
“It definitely didn’t shake my resolve towards sailing. I love the ocean. I respect the ocean. It’s relentless and beautiful at the same time.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
