GILROY
– For the rest of his life, Scot Smithee is going to be telling
people what he did on his Hawaiian vacation.
It’s quite a story.
GILROY – For the rest of his life, Scot Smithee is going to be telling people what he did on his Hawaiian vacation.
It’s quite a story. When a tour boat overturned in the Pacific Ocean on March 8 amid high winds and 10-foot waves, the Gilroy police captain stayed calm and bravely helped his seven fellow passengers – including his wife, Brenda – escape from underneath.
Their air pocket had shrunk to almost nothing and was being polluted with gas fumes. At least one of the passengers couldn’t swim, and the rest were scared. Smithee, with the captain and first mate, swam down to the cabin and guided the passengers out with a rope tied from various two- and three-foot cords. Some of them said afterward they would have died if Smithee hadn’t risked his life to save them.
In the four days since the 39-year-old Hollister resident came back to work at the Gilroy Police Department, he’s spent a lot of time telling the tale over and over again. He tells it vividly, with a cop’s memory for every detail.
“There’s a lot of people that work here, and pretty much most everybody wants to know the story,” Smithee said on Friday. “I’ve been trying to tell it to groups of people so I don’t have to tell it too many times.”
He’s been getting a lot of handshakes and pats on the back. His co-workers welcomed him back by decorating his office with colorful foil fish. As a joke, they tied a rope from his doorknob to his chair – to guide him to his desk.
His co-workers are proud of him, to be sure, but that doesn’t stop them from ribbing him about the publicity he’s attracting. Smithee says he’s lost count of the newspaper and television interviews he has given, and now magazines are starting to contact him. It’s become a running gag around the station.
“I bet this story gets better and better every time,” said a grinning Assistant Police Chief Lanny Brown as he poked his head in the door during The Dispatch’s interview with the captain. “I swear to goodness, 10 years from now, he’ll be sitting around going, ‘So, you remember when I saved the Titanic? You remember how many thousands of people I saved?’ ”
Smithee says it feels weird being called a hero all the time.
“I’m not typically one that seeks the spotlight,” he said. “I’d just as soon do whatever I need to do and move on.”
On the other hand, there’s the frank adoration of the three couples he saved: Craig and Andrea Hilty of Medford, Ore., aged 23 and 22, who had been married two days before they near tragedy; Patricia and Tim Duffy of Leavittown, Pa.; and Richard and Mila Payne of Costa Mesa.
“The other passengers were actually making a big deal out of it,” Smithee said, recalling how the couples met for dinner after the crisis to recount the story. “I don’t know, I didn’t think that much of it. The Hiltys were talking that they were going to name their first-born son after me. The Paynes were just like, ‘We wouldn’t be alive it wasn’t for you.’
“A lot of those people thought they were going to die under there. … It’s a pretty emotional thing, just to feel their energy and feel what they’re feeling and how thankful they are.
“I’m glad I was there. I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t have wanted to die there, but … I’m glad I was there.”
Nobody died, but some of the survivors were battered by the time a tourist fishing boat rescued them off the coast of Lana’i, a sparsely populated Hawaiian island. Patricia Duffy suffered a broken collarbone, the first mate’s knee was injured, Brenda Smithee had a deep cut on her foot, and Scot’s arms and legs were extensively bruised.
The Smithees were on their belated honeymoon; they had never gotten around to taking one after their wedding two and a half years ago.
It wasn’t for three days after the high-seas adventure that they told anyone back in California about it.
“We didn’t want our kids to worry,” Scot said, but they changed their minds when a Salinas television reporter called them at their Maui hotel. The Smithees wanted to be the first to tell their family the news.
Scot and Brenda already told the tour boat company they rode with that they will be back. They want to ride again on the same catamaran that flipped.
“Everybody would talk to you in Hawaii all over the place and (say) they’ve never heard of one of those (vessels) going over like that before,” Smithee said. “So I think it was just a freak accident. If none of them have ever gone over before, what are the chances it could happen to me twice?”
