The pressure on the cleat pulled the side of the vessel down and it began filling with water.

“Speece described it as about three, four seconds and the boat was full of water and going down,” Sherbahn said.

Speece told Sherbahn that he was able to leap from the boat as it was sinking. Charles Speece reported going into the boat’s cabin to grab life jackets, but had to crawl through a hatch at the top of the cabin to escape the quickly sinking vessel. Gene Speece was underneath the boat when it capsized.

“When he (Charles Speece) came up, he told his dad that he grabbed hold of Speece’s uncle, but he wasn’t moving and he couldn’t get him up,” Sherbahn said. “Then, they couldn’t find a piece of rope long enough to tie themselves off to go down and get him.”

Capt. Chad Kiesel, skipper of the Silver Fox 1, was taking clients halibut fishing when something on the horizon caught his eye.

“I saw what looked at first like a big tree floating in the water. I didn’t know what it was and we see a lot of them so we don’t pay too much attention to them,” Kiesel said Saturday.

When the spot moved, Kiesel changed his assessment from driftwood to sea kayakers, but that didn’t seem right considering the distance from shore and the day’s big tides which would make kayaking dangerous, Kiesel said. So, he moved in for a closer look.

“It turned out to be two men straddling the top of the bow of a capsized boat. They looked really cold. They were wet,” Kiesel said. “We asked them how long they’d been sitting on top of their boat and they said half an hour.”

Kiesel’s first reaction was to get the two aboard the Silver Fox 1 and into dry clothes, until they told him someone was still in the boat.

“I was like, ‘Is there air underneath the boat? Do you think he’s alive?’” Kiesel said. “We were pounding on the hull and yelling to see if we could hear any signs of life from under the boat. We couldn’t hear anything.”

Realizing they were in a rescue situation, Kiesel called the United States Coast Guard. A small boat from the USCGC Roanoke Island in Homer and two helicopters from Kodiak were dispatched. One of the helicopters headed to Soldotna to pick up a dive team, but landed in Homer after encountering bad weather, according to information provided by the Coast Guard in Juneau. The second helicopter went directly to the scene where a rescue diver retrieved Gene Speece from under the hull.

Gene Speece was brought to Homer aboard the helicopter. Emergency medical personnel from the Homer Volunteer Fire Department transported him to South Peninsula Hospital, where he was reported dead.

Coast Guard auxiliarists from Homer responded with the auxiliary’s SAFEBoat, as did State of Alaska Public Safety personnel aboard the P/V Augustine and Capt. Dave Cloninger of Seatow in Seldovia. Cloninger towed the Speece vessel to Seldovia.

“Everybody is devastated,” Cloninger said.

Speece was not new to boating, according to Sherbahn.

“He said he’d come up here several times, but decided instead of going out on charters, why not get his own boat,” Sherbahn said. “This was the first year he’d taken it out, but he mentioned having several boats in Washington.”