Read Not Without Hope for Free Online

athletes; we had relied on teamwork since we were kids. Maybe together we could get out of this mess. Corey swam back toward the motor, which had stopped running. I swam with him through the swells. Will and Marquis moved toward the front of the boat, on the left side.
    We counted down, one-two-three, so that we would be working in unison, not pushing and pulling against one another. We tried to grip the little ridges along the hull and use our body weight to flip the boat. We tried to time it so maybe a wave would roll underneath and help us turn it upright, but we couldn’t get any leverage.
    The waves were smashing us against the boat, and it was hard to grip anything. Everything we could grab on to was now underwater. We would try to grab hold, but we would slide off the hullin slow motion. My heart was jumping out of my chest. “Are you fucking kidding me?” we kept saying.
    We had started out the day to celebrate, and now we were in the water with no life jackets, trying to prevent a tragedy.
    “Oh my God, oh my God!” I kept saying.
    After we flailed about for about five minutes, Will noticed the anchor line was still attached to the back of the boat. “We’ve got to cut the line,” he said. “It’ll flip when we cut the anchor loose.”
    We thought the boat was being held down because the line was still supertight. We drifted the boat over to get a teeny bit of slack on the line, and then Will and Marquis cut the rope on the propeller, which was sticking out of the water. Floating at the stern, they grabbed the rope and shaved it back and forth like they were cutting wood with a saw.
    It took them five minutes. Once the line was cut, the back end of the boat came up a little bit. We started drifting immediately, but my first reaction was, We’re gonna be able to flip this boat now that it’s not tied down. It’ll be fine.
    It wasn’t fine. It was déjà vu from a few minutes earlier. Corey and I basically lay across the stern, kicking down with our feet and trying to yank the boat toward us with our arms, hoping a wave would roll underneath and help us flip it. Marquis and Will tried to yank the boat from near the front, then they got in the water and tried to push upward from the starboard side. There was no way. Physics made it impossible. No one could get any leverage. The more Will and Marquis pushed upward, the deeper they plunged underwater. And the center console was now below the surface acting as a giant, resistant rudder. It wasn’t like we barely missed flipping the boat over or like we might have done it with a little more strength or one more guy. As strong as all of us were—and together we could bench press a ton and shove aside or block or tackle even the biggest human impediment on the football field—that boat didn’t come within 5 percent of flipping back over.
    “I can’t believe we can’t fucking flip this thing,” Corey said.
    Will kept trying to think of things. Nothing worked.
    “I’m so sorry, you guys,” Marquis said after about a half hour in the water. He must have said it ten times. I think he felt it was his fault because he was the captain. He was in charge. He held the responsibility. This was his boat, and he thought he would lose it and lose us and himself, too.
    “I can’t believe this,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
    “Dude, don’t worry,” we told Marquis. “It’s not your fault. We’ll get out of it.”
    Not long before we flipped, we had seen a giant cargo vessel hauling shipping containers. You could make out the colors of the containers, but the ship wasn’t close. It was in the distance and it definitely hadn’t seen us. Or if it had, it had given no indication. Besides, it could not have predicted what was about to happen.
    “Where the fuck did that boat go?” we asked a bunch of times. But it was long gone.
    There were nearly two hours of sunlight left when we first turned over. But the day began to exhaust itself. By now, it was about