When the Native Son Kat went aground Sunday night, two native sons went quickly to the rescue of the 84 passengers who had been headed from St. Thomas to Tortola on the 71-foot catamaran.
Kirst Fedderson, born and raised on St. Thomas, got a call from his father, Walter Fedderson, who had seen the accident.
Kirst, who lives on the East End, called another friend, Craig Hendricks, who keeps a 28-foot cigarette-type vessel named Zero Tolerance at the St. Thomas Yacht Club, and the pair made their way through the moonless night and churning seas to the scene of the accident, not knowing what to expect.
Hendricks and Fedderson both said they didn't know it was a ferry that had hit Calf and Cow rocks south of St. Thomas's East End.
"I thought we were going to help a sailboat with six passengers," Hendricks said.
Once there, "We proceeded to approach the ferry with a flashlight," watching all the time because the rocks are surrounded by reef.
"We were able to get a few people off and took them into the yacht club," but in the roiling waters, Fedderson said, "we saw that method wasn't going to work." Hendricks said his vessel even hit the bottom a few times with the swells, and he felt it was too dangerous to continue that plan, he said.
Huge easterly swells of better than 9 feet have been coupled with high winds over the area the past couple of days, though the National Weather Service said Monday morning that seas had begun to subside somewhat.
The pair returned from the yacht club with an inflatable dinghy. They tied one end of a line to the stern of the crippled catamaran and the other to Hendricks' vessel's bow, and Fedderson spent the next three hours physically pulling the passengers, four at a time, in the dinghy – from toddlers to a "very pregnant woman"– from the catamaran to the cigarette boat using only his hands and arms and the line for momentum.
The barge Roanoke, which had tried and failed earlier to get in close enough to rescue the passengers, shone its floodlight on the scene, which was of great assistance, Hendricks said.
Another barge, the Capt. Vic, was reportedly also at the scene along with the P'ti Bleu, and some of the passengers were boarded onto the barges and taken to the yacht club, where coffee, food and makeshift blankets made from tablecloths awaited them. Native Son vessel Caribe Sun was also at the scene moving passengers.
Calvin Thomas, who works at the Caneel Bay shipyard, also provided transportation for the rescued passengers, according to Hendricks.
Most of the people aboard the catamaran were members of a Christian youth group from Texas who were headed to Tortola where they were to commence a Windjammer cruise.
Hendricks said the first people they got off the catamaran were the children. All those aboard the vessel made it safely to land.
Stephen Thornton, a childhood friend of the two rescuers, also responded to a radio call for help. "Those two (Hendricks and Fedderson) were the key players" in the rescue, Thornton said.
In fact, two of the passengers who were not part of the Christian youth group spent the night at Hendricks' house.
