A boat and livelihood is lost, but crew and cats fortunately survived:
“She was shouting, ‘Get off the boat! We’ve got to get off this boat!’ Finally it was enough — she was yelling at me,” Mark said. “And then we just sat there and watched 27 years go away.”
In the water, watching their boat sink — and all they could think about were two things.
“I just thought, ‘We can’t leave my kitties! Can’t leave my kitties! We cannot leave my kitties!” he said.
Their companions at sea, Jasper and Topaz were lost in the chaos.
Until…
“Topaz come out past swimming those totes, and we saw her and screamed at her and she started swimming towards us,” Mark said.
Topaz was rescued first. Jasper nearly went down with the ship, riding on the bow as it slowly sank.
“Slowly it started sinking and it went right out from underneath him, and it just disappeared and then he started swimming,” he said.
Reunited, the family was rescued by a nearby ship minutes later. The Coast Guard wasn’t needed in this instance, since their fishing-boat friends rescued them.