Not Without Hope

Almost exactly a year ago, four men shoved off on a chilly morning to spend a relaxing Saturday deep-sea fishing about 75 miles off the coast of Clearwater, Fla.

All were finely tuned athletes in their prime. Their powerful bodies were their livelihoods, their personas and their connection — they had trained together and become friends.

Nearly two days after they were expected back home, the invincibility of the modern-day warrior had been stripped to this: Three were dead. The lone survivor was Nick Schuyler, who grew up in Chardon and starred on its high school basketball team.

In “Not Without Hope,” out today, Schuyler writes that he hung on past endurance, haunted by the image of his mother standing over his 24-year-old corpse, laid out in a casket.

“This is the way I remember it,” he writes. “If I get some things wrong, it is due to the frailties of memory and the horror of what I experienced, not any intention to amend or deceive. This is what I recall after being in the water for forty-three hours, frigid and aching and scared, so hungry and thirsty that I felt I was eating my teeth. This is the best I can do after having three friends die, two of them in my arms.”

With the help of sports reporter Jere Longman, Schuyler writes a repetitive but compelling memoir.

He tells of the accident in surprisingly horrific detail:

When it was time to head back to shore, the anchor wouldn’t budge. Instead of cutting it free, they tied the rope to the back of the boat and tried to yank it up by gunning the engine. The 21-foot boat lurched up, quickly took in water and flipped.

Two of the four men were NFL players — Oakland Raiders linebacker Marquis Cooper, 26, and Detroit Lions defensive end Corey Smith, 29. The fourth was Will Bleakley, 25, a former University of South Florida football player and Schuyler’s best friend.

With such high-profile passengers, the accident became a national story for days. Rumors surfaced that the men were drunk and messing around. Or that survival somehow pitted the men against each other.

So Schuyler also wanted to set the record straight.

One by one, the men slip away, none more painful than Bleakley, a last-minute replacement when another fisherman couldn’t make the trip. Schuyler and Bleakley were so close that Schuyler, a health club pro, and his girlfriend reserved a bedroom for him at their Tampa home.

Bleakley was the tragedy’s hero, repeatedly diving beneath the boat to retrieve life jackets, cell phones (that had no service) and scraps of food. Until, like the two men who went before him, he could hold on no longer.

In “Not Without Hope,” interviews with the victims’ families and scenes from the Coast Guard add depth, although the central characters aren’t entirely developed. The book’s grueling, blow-by-blow description of what feels like every slip off the overturned boat and every heaping wave carries on too long. But the story compels, even though the reader knows its ending.

“Unlike Marquis, Will didn’t sink right away,” Schuyler writes. “I could barely look at him. It was eating me alive, tearing me up. I’d look at him for a second and have to look away. I cried and kept screaming, ‘Why?!’ ”

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