John Savage: Lost in the Stream and the Story of Two Fishermen Lost at Sea

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 723, with guest John Savage, author of Lost in the Stream.

Growing Up on the Water in Virginia Beach

Tom Rowland: Johnny, how are you doing, man?

John Savage: I'm doing great, how about yourself?

Tom Rowland: I'm doing fantastic, I'm glad we could do this, I just finished your book while I was on a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands, and it was really good, man, really good book.

John Savage: Thank you very much, the reviews I'm getting, I never expected it to be touching people the way it is, but so thankful for it, that's the most valuable thing, the messages I get from people and how it's changed their life.

Tom Rowland: Well, that's really cool, bigger than me. So the book is called Lost in the Stream, and it says the miraculous story of two fishermen lost at sea, and it's a crazy story, so I'd love to go into that, but before we get into how you ended up on that boat, I'd like to know your background and how you found your way to being a mate in the beginning, what was it about, how did you navigate that?

John Savage: Well, I've always had a love for fishing as a young boy, I grew up in the southern end of Virginia Beach, a rural area with lots of ponds and waterways leading out to the intracoastal, fishing every chance I got. If my parents hollered for me to come in for dinner, my dad would just tell my mom, look, he's not coming home while the fish are biting, but I loved it, a great way to grow up, everything was based through the local church, lots of parents, didn't matter where I went, they knew what I did before I even got home. At a young age my father took me fishing quite a bit, and we had a next door neighbor who was a lieutenant commander with a SEAL team, his son and I were best friends, inseparable, lots of fishing together whether on a base or locally in Blackwater Creek or Blackwater River. I'll never forget, one October we had a Northeaster come through, which shoves the water out and makes the level drop, a wind tide, and our dad told us we weren't gonna catch any fish, we tried anyway, went down to the creek and sat under the bridge where the water was so low, and my buddy's father said he'd clean everything we caught, we came back with a stringer about three feet long, full of bluegill, flyers, crappie, and bass, and he had to clean all those fish. It's amazing I even got into saltwater fishing considering what my parents did to me as a kid, I was born in 1972, and in 1975 the movie Jaws came out, and they took me to see it, I remember as a toddler peeking through the cracks of the seat because I was so terrified, and I never saw the end of the movie, so I thought that thing was still out there. Then that fall my parents took me to the CBBT fishing pier, and I remember sitting in the middle of that pier the whole time, peering through the cracks in the boards looking at the waves break underneath, absolutely terrified because Jaws was down there somewhere.

Tom Rowland: Man, that movie was so, it's hard to even relate it to my own kids, when that movie came out everybody was afraid of sharks in the swimming pool, it was so influential, now we've got Shark Week I guess.

John Savage: Yes sir, up here it seems like we started a Shark Week every single day out there, but from there, there was a picture my grandfather had in his garage that I always looked at as a kid, of one of the original charter boats out of here called the Gannet, a big white marlin stretched across the back of it, and I used to stare at that picture. Later in life, I was probably twelve years old, my grandparents and aunt and uncle lived in Palm Beach, so we were visiting, and my dad took me on a head boat out of Boynton Beach, and my mother told me years later that when I came back I said, I'm gonna work on a boat one day. It just so happened the gentleman in that picture with my grandfather was Captain Fred Feller, and I went to him one day and told him my interest, and he said, be down there Saturday at 6:30 in the morning, and that's how I started, catching sea bass out of Virginia Beach on a head boat.

Tom Rowland: Were you already good at untangling lines and tying knots, or did that come quickly once you got on the head boat?

John Savage: It came really quickly, especially learning about when people are hooked up with each other underneath the boat and yanking side to side. One of the things we used to do is reach into a bucket, grab a beer can or soda can, crumple it up, put it on the hook and drop it down, run to the other side and watch them fight it, thinking they had a fish, and then everybody would laugh because they knew what happened. Working on the head boat really brought me out of my shell, broke my shyness, and even today when I look for mates I like ones who've worked on a head boat, not only for the people skills but because they're on an inspected vessel, so they're more in tune with Coast Guard regs and safety requirements, and they know where the life jackets are.

Tom Rowland: So for somebody who doesn't know what a head boat is, how many people would be fishing on one?

John Savage: On any given Saturday you might have sixty-five people on a sixty-five foot boat, so you can do the math, not a whole lot of room, packed in there using conventional reels, little pin long beach outfits, a loop system, a perfection loop on the bottom and figure-eight knot loops on top so you just slide the hooks on, an eight or ten ounce sinker on the bottom, cutting up lots of squid for sea bass bait, and we'd go out twelve or thirteen miles off the beach to piles of rubble, artificial reefs where the sea bass congregate, pull over top of it, drop the lines down, and watch them have fun.

Tom Rowland: You can catch a lot of fish like that, there are head boats today that go out to places like Pulley Ridge with a little more room, but the commonality is there are a lot of people, a lot of knots, a lot of tangling, a lot of people who've never fished before, and a mate is running around like a one-armed paper hanger trying to fix everything. But it's kind of cool that it pulled you out of your shell, because if you can get somebody knowledgeable and passionate about something into a conversation, you can pull almost anybody out of their shell.

John Savage: And there's a lot of comforting too, because when they get a backlash they're upset with themselves, and you tell them it's not that bad, we can fix this, give them a little hope, and they tuck their thumb better next time.

Tom Rowland: How long were you a mate on a head boat?

John Savage: I guess I did that three or four years, and the whole time I had the urge to get offshore because of that picture I'd seen with the white marlin, I wanted to get out there. The worst part of the head boat back then was the stern, those old engines made it black and nasty at the end of every trip, and no mate wanted to clean it, so I said I'll do it, because I knew when I was back there scrubbing that stern with pride, all the charter boat captains were watching me do it.

Tom Rowland: That's some of the best advice you could give anybody, take the worst job and do the best job at it. Is that what happened, some of the charter boat guys took notice of your work ethic and gave you a shot?

John Savage: Yes, I was just blessed the way it all came about, I was going to a local community college and there was a girl in class whose boyfriend was a captain, just got his license, he'd been a mate down at Oregon Inlet, which is a tough place to fish out of, a lot of talent there, and I figured if I was gonna make the jump I wanted to jump to a captain who could teach me how to be the best mate I could be, his name was Kenny Sexton, and there's a funny story about him playing the part of the other boat in a reenactment video I sent you, I'll tell you that later.

Tom Rowland: When you met with Kenny, how did you make the jump from the head boat to his boat?

John Savage: I'd say the scariest thing was telling my captain on the head boat I was making the switch, I had a tremendous amount of respect for him, he was a family friend, my grandfather fished with him all the time, he was a big tough guy.

Tom Rowland: Well, he's also the guy who gave you your shot, that's a hard thing for a young person to do, when somebody gives you an opportunity and you do well and it's time to move on. How did he take it?

John Savage: He took it great, he just smiled and laughed, he said, I knew it was gonna happen. He did a good job of mentoring me, for example there were four head boats out of Rudee Inlet and he had three of them, and on Saturday mornings we'd fish, and here I was sixteen or seventeen years old, and he'd say, alright John, you're going on the Miss Virginia Beach, the boat with the worst tackle, and I'd always get the new customers to go along, and I appreciated that because it put me in a difficult situation, I had to problem-solve how these people were gonna have a good time, how we were gonna catch fish, and how I was gonna lead these guys at that young age.

Tom Rowland: That's a great opportunity, it's interesting you saw it that way, because not everybody would, some people would think, dang, I just got put in the worst situation, he must not like me.

John Savage: Going for a long swim will make you look at things differently.

Working the Docks From Palm Beach to Oregon Inlet

Tom Rowland: Well, we're gonna talk about your long swim. So you're on Kenny's boat, a forty-three foot Sonny Briggs, how long did you mate on that one?

John Savage: I was with him a couple years, we ran and the owner fished a fair amount, kind of getting into it, didn't have a whole lot of charters but fished fairly steady. An opportunity came to move to a bigger boat, a fifty-five foot Gaultney called the No Problem, and the gentleman who owned it, ironically, was the father of the man I run a boat for now, a sixty-six Weaver, kind of full circle, neat history. I fished that boat about a year, and then an opportunity came to fish on the boat that fished the most out of Virginia Beach, called the High Hopes, we'd book a year in advance and fish May through October every single day.

Tom Rowland: What are you fishing for up there, what's the season, does it start in May?

John Savage: May can be tricky, it depends on how the eddies are coming off the Gulf Stream, sometimes water circles in from above the Washington Canyon and Norfolk Canyon and pushes down, sometimes it comes onto the back side of the Cigar, which is offshore about sixty miles right about where the Virginia-North Carolina line is, because once the Gulf Stream gets off Hatteras it shoots out, that's beyond our range. So we start off with bluefin offshore when they show up, then bluefish mixed in, then more steady yellowfin fishing, occasional blue marlin, and come August our white marlin start to show up better, September is when we really switch gears to white marlin fishing, and wahoo fishing gets better that time of year too.

Tom Rowland: White marlin fishing, that's like your whole year, you're waiting for that, like our tarpon season.

John Savage: Yes sir, you get jacked up over that.

Tom Rowland: I've never fished up there, but my friend Captain Scott Walker has done a lot of white marlin fishing up in that area, and even my TV partner Rich has some history there, he was a mate up at Oregon Inlet for a short time before he came to The Keys. It's legendary with the captains and the talent and the boats up there, kind of like deciding you're gonna be a flats guide in Islamorada or Key West.

John Savage: I was thinking about that the other day, exactly, there's so many guys, you gotta back up to the slip at the end of the day and it sucks getting stacked up, I'd compare Oregon Inlet to grad school, you learn different techniques wherever you are, whether it's Palm Beach, The Keys, Bermuda, but when you fish out of Oregon Inlet that's a blend of some of the best, and fishing against those guys every day makes you a better fisherman.

Tom Rowland: Real fast, super fast, that's the ultimate learning ground, surround yourself with people so much better than you, you don't realize it but you're getting better quickly, you still feel like the worst one there, but sooner or later you realize you learned a thing or two, it's frustrating and sometimes depressing, but eventually you have a big day and think, I guess I can hang with these guys.

John Savage: It starts just crossing the bar to get out to where you fish, back when everybody still had their keels you'd go out after a big storm not really knowing where the channel was, I remember one boat would pile up and the next would go around the other side, and that's how you knew where the channel was, but after people started cutting their keels off, things got more cautious, and we weren't going that fast back then either. But some great fishermen down there, I really enjoyed my opportunities fishing out of there.

Tom Rowland: And that leads you to your next boat in your career?

John Savage: From there I went to Old Dominion University and got my bachelor's degree in environmental health and safety, my senior year I did a project with the Department of Defense doing noise testing along the flight line at Oceana, the master jet base for the East Coast, saving the government about thirty years worth of work with a comparison study. I finished that project and graduated in December, and DOD offered me a position as an industrial hygienist, and I told them I'm going fishing. So I packed my truck and went to Sailfish Marina in Palm Beach, had some friends down there but no job, got one within a couple days on the dock, at Palm Beach Marina on the offshore fishing side, which was the hub for the world back then, before it spread out so much. At Sailfish Marina the charter dock, the best mates would show up every December, I was fortunate to fish with guys who are crushing it now as captains, we formed a great brotherhood there, with the guys at Oregon Inlet and even the guys at home, learned a lot of techniques.

Tom Rowland: So when you packed your truck up, you'd already been to grad school in a sense, what did you expect the next place to be?

John Savage: I didn't know what was gonna happen, it was kind of scary, I was going on a whim, either I get a job or I pack my truck back up and head home. I was fortunate to have family I could stay with, and learning the techniques down there with kite fishing and live bait was definitely different than what we did for billfish up in Virginia Beach. It was scary in a way, because once I got on a charter boat down there, I was used to a book full of repeat customers wanting the same day next year, and there weren't that many like that yet, but we still fished almost every day. I learned a lot of techniques I use today for tight maneuvering on fish because of live baiting, because up here tuna fishing we want to keep our spread out to keep the bites coming, we might troll fifteen rods just for that one bite, being in the right place at the right time. Down there I learned I could apply that to billfishing too, just not quite as many rods, but I didn't want to get off the school.

Tom Rowland: That's interesting, I'm curious, we've talked about showing up in a different place and working your way up boat to boat, and when you show up at a really high-end place with legendary fishermen and the best mates ever, and you're a kid who just graduated college, a lot of kids listening to this podcast are in a similar situation, they want to make a living fishing and be a mate, how do you do that? Just walk the dock, talk to the mates, talk to the captains, how does that process work, and how would it work now, what's changed?

John Savage: That's a great question. Number one, you show up and you show respect, some other captains and I have talked about this recently, that respect isn't there like it used to be. Just show up, be there, show your willingness to ride or do whatever it takes to get on that boat and show yourself, don't stab your friends in the back, be open and honest, don't fall into the trap of talking mess about people, keep your head on straight, and when I say that, watch the partying. I've seen so many mates fail because ego and pride take over their life and they go down the wrong road, one of the best fishermen I know went down that road and it was painful to watch. First, you gotta be there, there's no reason for you to be there at four-thirty in the morning up here, but there's a reason to show them you're gonna show up, because for me, one of the most important things is knowing my mate is gonna be there on the dock when I walk down, and he should be there before me, starting to take the rods out and take care of my stuff.

Tom Rowland: And then one day somebody doesn't show up, and maybe you get your shot.

John Savage: That's funny you said it, because that's how Oregon Inlet has worked for so many years, they have a big porch at the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, and guys stand on that porch every day waiting for their chance for somebody not to show up, and typically what causes that is they partied the night before and had a little too much.

Tom Rowland: That happens to a lot of people, but then that's your shot and you gotta be ready to take it, it's the same in so many different places, you just keep showing up, help clean the fish, help clean the boat, don't ask for money, just do it and do a good job, and sooner or later you might get an opportunity.

John Savage: Come on right along with us today, that's so hard to get that invite, myself, I love finding a mate who just wants to learn, last summer we had a main mate who was pretty good, and another kid who just came along, always on the boat, always trying to help, and I enjoyed the opportunity to teach, so that's another thing, be teachable. My attitude is, this may be your first day ever offshore, but there's probably something I could learn from you, as long as I'm open to that I'm gonna get better, because there's no way to know it all, the day you think you know it all, you get humbled real quick.

Tom Rowland: Isn't that right, that's exactly right, that's a white belt mentality, we talk about it on this podcast all the time, when you walk into a martial arts gym on your first day, or your first day of wrestling practice, there's not a single person you can't learn from, everybody's kicking your rear all day, and sooner or later you get better, maybe you're the one teaching a little, but you should try to maintain that white belt mentality, the same mentality you came in with on day one, looking around, how can I learn from them, what are they doing. Even if you're the best one there someday, keep that white belt mentality, an open mind, always trying to learn something from somebody. So from Palm Beach, how did you end up down in Key West?

John Savage: The only times I'd been to Key West in that timeframe were vacation or fishing trips, but coming back to Palm Beach once that season ended, I went to Mexico, fished Mexico and The Bahamas, came back to Hatteras for a new boat that had just been delivered, fished there May and June, then came up through the winter chartering out of here, then it was Christmas time again, back down to Palm Beach, got a job on a boat called the Major Motion with Jimmy Garner, a great captain, taught me a lot. Then the boat got listed, when the owner decides to sell, big question marks, and he told me, John, I don't blame you if you go look for something else. Through a friend of mine, Gary Richardson, a great captain, I heard about a boat up in Stuart that needed a mate to go to Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, went up there, met Eric, great guy, from Australia, awesome accent, fell in love with him from the get-go. It was a fifty-six foot Jim Smith, nice fast boat, owners were from Texas but it was based in Port Aransas, and we went to The Bahamas first with the owner's wife and daughter, kind of to feel things out, because we were gonna be together three months on a fifty-six foot boat, that gets pretty tight pretty quick. Things seemed to gel well, and we went back to Stuart after the Chubb Cay tournament, packed her up, bound for Stock Island, Oceanside Marina, to stage for the crossing.

The Crossing and the Wave

Tom Rowland: So the big part, the real story, is when you're at Oceanside Marina, which I used to work out of too, getting ready to cross, expecting to cross in one day, the weather looking beautiful. Walk us through what happens next.

John Savage: Before we get into that, in 1997 there was the strongest El Nino on record, and the after-effects were still lingering into the spring of 1998, with the way storms would come up. Before I even left, a gentleman up here, a captain who also worked for DOD, his son was about twelve at the time, wanted the boy to make the crossing to Mexico to experience it, and I said sure, he can ride with us. That week was a terrible winter, blowing like crazy, a lot of rough days, and when I was in The Bahamas I told my friend Milton I thought it'd be a bad idea, I wanted the boy to have the experience but didn't want him stuck in Stock Island if we couldn't make the crossing, because the weather window wasn't as reliable back then as it is now, though Eric had gotten a weather router. Being at the marina, you can't fish in the marina, so once the marina staff left around eleven or midnight, it was time to tarpon fish, so I was out fishing till about one in the morning, then crashed. We wanted an early start, out by five so we'd be pushing up when we were in the main channel, and that's what we did, Eric pushed her up, beautiful ride, absolutely gorgeous, following sea two to three feet, big rollers, couldn't ask for a prettier ride, hardly even ten knots of wind. We were going along, and all of a sudden we heard this bam, like, what in the world was that, and on that boat the refrigerator would sometimes pop open when it rocked and everything would come flying out, so I'd sometimes lay against it to keep it closed. I went downstairs and saw the double doors in the middle, like barn doors on a track, with a cable and tightener that had come loose, so I fixed it, climbed back up to the bridge, which had a tower and just an up-curtain in front of the console, no full enclosure like some Florida boats. I was standing at the front bench, telling myself no problem, got it fixed, and Eric was pushing the throttles up, we were kind of looking at each other, laughing, joking, and then I looked forward and saw something, Tom, I've never seen anything like it before in my life, and I've fished a lot of days. It was like a hole, I don't see how a wave could be so steep without breaking, that's haunted me over the years, writing the book helped with that. When she went down the face of that wave, it was a sharp enough angle that I free-fell forward, and I grabbed hold of one of the tuna tower legs and a rail across the front of the bow to keep from going further. Eric, at the wheel, pulled her out of gear real quick as she went down that wave, and when she hit the bottom it was the most godawful sound, hearing the bulkheads breaking inside.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

John Savage: I remember ducking down in that corner and seeing a crack start where the cabin meets the front deck, running from starboard across to port. I was expecting to feel her ride up, but she just stopped and kept going down. From where Eric was at the helm he couldn't see the bow deck, so he didn't know what was going on down there, and that's when I turned to him and said, oh my gosh, she's going down, and the moment I said that, Eric reached to the console box for the radios, and they were already dead, which shows what kind of impact happened within that vessel. That's nothing against the boat, I've never seen a force like that, I don't know what boat could have survived that wave.

Tom Rowland: I read this in your book and was trying to visualize it, was the wave in front of you coming toward you, or coming from behind?

John Savage: It's like a hole is a better way to describe it, a hole in the ocean, we may have been climbing, I don't know, but it wasn't like a big wave in front of us where you go up and the RPMs go down, it was like driving off a cliff. I can't tell you how big the wave was because I was falling forward and my focus, and Eric's, was forward.

Tom Rowland: It's really a weird thing, all of us have been offshore a lot and never seen anything like this, a big sport fish boat is a durable boat, I was trying to visualize how in the world that could happen, and you even have a chapter about trying to figure out what it was, do you have any ideas, could it have been a tectonic shift or an earthquake, a once in two thousand or ten thousand kind of thing?

John Savage: I wish I had the answer, that would bring so much closure, but the way I look at it, it doesn't matter what caused it, because of the good that's come out of that wave. When I did the research, I realized they didn't have the first rogue wave recorded until around 1995 on an oil rig in the North Sea when that wave passed by, before that it was always chalked up to mechanical issues or operator error because it didn't fit the logarithmic equation for what a wave could be, it was outside that box. Watching documentaries about it brought me a lot of healing, realizing what I saw out there wasn't what I was taught a wave was, because they didn't even know it existed when I was in school.

Tom Rowland: That's so bizarre, you talk in your book about a certain tower that recorded a rogue wave, tell me more about that.

John Savage: It was an oil rig in the North Sea with sensors on it, there were hardly any buoys in that lower Gulf region back then to get data. The logarithmic equation said a wave could only reach a certain height, and anything outside that was a one in ten thousand year event, so after that wave hit the rig it threw the marine architecture world upside down, insurance companies panicked, because ships out there could get stretched out on a rogue wave and break and sink with usually no survivors. So they took satellites and scanned pass after pass, and when the data came back they were blown away how many more rogue waves were out there. By definition this might have been more of an extreme wave because it was so much larger than anything around it, which is why I think maybe something happened on the bottom, because where we went down is close to a thousand fathoms with shelves that come up, something could have happened down there and pulled it, I don't know for sure. They even looked at restricting shipping routes to keep ships out of those areas where they were seeing more of the waves.

Tom Rowland: It's worth noting this is only ninety miles off Key West, southwest, closer to Cuba, but this isn't some crazy middle-of-the-ocean thing, that's where center consoles are going on a daily basis.

John Savage: Yep, we were in the Gulf Stream in deep water, but that thing's gonna come up to shallow water at some point, and how far are you gonna be from that, especially fishing on that southeastern side, you're right there at the edge. I don't know what happened beyond it being with us, I did hear a story about a rogue wave hitting somewhere down in the Keys around then too, so maybe something else happened related to what got us, it wasn't like Duval Street was covered in water, I don't remember anything like that.

Tom Rowland: Your book goes into far greater detail than we can here, but so you go down, from the time you fixed that door to when you're down, what's the timeframe?

John Savage: It happened this quick. When I turned to Eric and said she's going down, he said get the life jackets buddy, so what had we done, we'd packed our tents and gear on top of the life jackets because it was a daytime crossing, and our EPIRB and life raft were inside the salon, which is common, we'd even discussed that morning whether to move them to the cockpit and decided no, nothing ever happens during the daytime, we were always more worried about running at night. So, alright buddy, get the life jacket, I go around front pulling stuff out, can't get the tent, maybe things had shifted, and then I look and see that within a minute or two the water's getting close to the level of the house, because when she went down she listed over to port, bow down, water all the way to the top. I'd just seen the movie Titanic before we left, so I thought, I don't want to get sucked in, I gotta get out of here, so I knew I had to abandon ship, I didn't have time to get the life jackets, I stepped from the bridge cap down into the water and swam around to the cockpit. When I got there I saw Eric up inside near the door, punching it as hard as he could with his fist, those panes of glass in the double doors are small and pretty strong, and as she buckled, the doors got wedged locked shut by the pressure of the twisted boat.

Tom Rowland: Do you ever think about what if you'd had to fix that door while running, and hit the wave at close to thirty knots?

John Savage: I'd never thought about that till I was writing the book, and when it hit me I thought, oh dear lord, thank you so much for that door being messed up, because can you imagine the impact.

Tom Rowland: It's honestly hard to imagine any of this, a crazy hole in the ocean that your captain had never experienced, that I doubt anybody listening has experienced, but nobody's denying it happened, it's just hard to fathom how quickly it happened, and the fact it happened just ninety miles off Key West, you guys were just getting your sea legs under you, things seemed to be going okay, you fixed the door, and wham.

Surviving in the Water

John Savage: That was the thing too, doing the research and watching documentaries, there's something in each of them you can see, for me to this day it's hard to hold my composure because it was that terrifying. This book helped me realize there's a form of post-traumatic stress associated with it, but the words aren't really there for how terrifying it is. Even now when I'm running, certain things happen that feel similar to that day, and my whole body locks up for a second, I have to snap out of it and pay attention. I did hear of a boat out of Oregon Inlet whose captain saw something similar and was shook by it. That's what brought me to this whole project, I prayed, God, it's not gonna be easy, I had to give up fishing for a summer to write it, that stunk bad, but please put the right people in the right places. A friend of mine was a Marine in Kosovo, and one of the stories in the book is about his grandfather at the end of World War Two being in a typhoon, he had post-traumatic stress and they didn't know if it was from the war or from losing his oldest son early in Vietnam, but it turned out, when they finally sat down and told war stories, it wasn't anything in battle, it was a storm where he had to secure landmines on deck, and his best friend, also securing gear, got taken by a wave, they couldn't search for him in those conditions, it wasn't the battle, it was the wave that rocked his grandfather's world.

Tom Rowland: The ocean is so big and out of your control when you get into that situation. As a captain you think about weather a lot, what's safe to leave the dock, and inevitably you get out in something a little bigger than you should be, maybe you made the wrong call, you learn from it and it scares you pretty bad.

John Savage: Think about that with what y'all do, at least y'all have some shed water, y'all don't have that opportunity if you get into a couple of bad ones.

Tom Rowland: It could easily happen even in a place that seems harmless, you could stuff two or three waves in a seventeen foot skiff on a nice day and go down, or a bay boat, but this is something entirely different, a very strange thing. The story goes on to your survival in the water, which is the main part of the story, these crazy things that happened that allowed you to survive, like bringing your surfboard, and it somehow made it to the surface to give you something to hold onto.

John Savage: When this happened, you could go to any dock in the world and tell the story and hear the same thing, regardless of personal beliefs, people would say God saved those boys out there, and that's the truth. So when I started to re-explore this, that was kind of the basis of it. When Eric and I cleared her, I was over near the tuna tower and he was beating on the door, and one of the halyard lines on the outrigger caught my shoulder, pulling down, and I looked up and saw the outriggers and tower, and thought, that's a lot of stuff we could get hung up in, we gotta get away from this thing. You'd think with the boat listing to port bow down, it'd be easiest to clear off that low port side where I was swimming, but for some reason we both cleared directly back off the stern, and the moment we cleared it, she rolled. That's something else for people to keep in mind about our abilities in the water, we think we can do things that are beyond our control, ten or twelve knot winds aren't very strong, but you can't swim that fast. We had a lot of stuff on that boat for three months out of the country, poly balls for Mediterranean-style dockage and larger coolers up high in the water, and when that little bit of wind caught them, they were gone so quick we couldn't catch them, we were able to grab hold of one little bait cooler. Maybe the first miracle was the boat rolling over and us not being underneath it. Then the next thing that happened blew my mind, when we each grabbed the cooler handle and grabbed each other, we didn't discuss it, but we said the Lord's Prayer in perfect unison, like a choir singing a song, our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, because we knew without a distress call, without an EPIRB, without a life raft, without life jackets, we were gonna die.

Tom Rowland: Because all that went down with the boat.

John Savage: Yes sir, and we knew God was the only thing that could save us where we were, there really wasn't a whole lot of traffic in that lower Gulf back then unless a boat was making that crossing from Cancun or Key West, we knew it was a dire situation. It's funny you brought up the surfboard, I didn't even ask the captain if I could bring it until the morning we were leaving, and the worst thing that happened is he told me to leave it, I came walking down the dock with it anyway, and he's like, what in the world, I'd only worked for him a week and a half, two weeks, but he said, alright, bring it, but it stays in your bunk, up in the v-berth where I slept, because Cancun could have pretty good surf sometimes. Getting to that surfboard was tough, when we finished the Lord's Prayer she popped back up, capsized, upside down, with a little of her bottom and the wheels and rudders showing, the air still in the lazarette. Eric went to that, that's why we lost the cooler, because textbook-wise you can live out there a long time if you're out of the water, we were hoping she'd float and we'd sit there till somebody rescued us. I saw the surfboard floating and told Eric I needed to get it, he said go ahead, buddy, and going to it I hit the diesel fuel, that sting is hard to put into words, in your nostrils, mouth, and eyes, but I had to persevere, I instinctively knew I needed that surfboard. My first thought going through the fuel was a prayer, dear Lord, please don't let me throw up, I can't afford to lose the food in my stomach, that's a question people ask about the survival mindset, what's it like, because you don't know until you're put into the situation. The biggest thing you can do to control it is be prepared, on our long sixty-mile runs out of Virginia Beach, back then going twenty-one knots, I had a lot of time, and rather than lay there idle I'd run drills in my head, if this happened what would I do, I was mentally prepared for it, but not to the degree I'd really need. Anyway, I got to the surfboard, got it back to Eric, and something felt different with it, I'll just leave that for readers to find out how critical that was, it was in a board bag, a brand new bag I'd had to buy.

Writing Lost in the Stream

Tom Rowland: Last year my wife and I went down to The Keys and towed our center console with us, and the book was about to be completed, and you went to Oceanside for the first time since it happened.

John Savage: Doesn't look the same, does it, holy mackerel, man, it doesn't, I'm like, are we at the right place, where's the ship store. We walked out to the end dock where the seawall is, where we were tied up, showed my wife the slip, and that was pretty cool. Coming back, at the second row where the charter boats are, there was a guy, I don't know if it was a twenty-seven or thirty foot center console, he looked at me nicely, asked if there was anything he could help with, and I said, is there a ship store here, and he said they don't have anything anymore except ice and fuel, no more tackle. I told him I'd just written a book and wondered if they might carry it, since it includes Oceanside Marina, and he said, really, what's it about, and I said, in 1998 I left from here and was lost at sea, and Tom, he looked at me and said, that was you? I said, yeah, that was me. It was so cool because my wife supports me a lot, she's heard the story many times at different places I speak, it's the same story but different every time, and she's seen my friends at tournaments come up and hug me, I have to tell my mates, if we're at a tournament you're gonna see other dudes come hug me, it's okay, they were there then and were impacted by it, we're just glad to see each other. But for that guy to say, you were the one with the surfboard, and I said, yep, that was my surfboard, and he said, you changed my life with that, there isn't a time I cross anywhere without having my EPIRB out. Tom, it changed the industry, because we never thought a wood boat or composite boat could go down so quick, and, well, she did, but I was so thankful my wife heard it from somebody else who didn't know me, to know that all this struggle has helped people, and I'm seeing it more now, it's humbling.

Tom Rowland: The book is a really big step, it's one thing to tell your story, but another to have it in print where it can be shared, and even to tell it here where a lot of people can hear it at once, that's a big deal. There's probably some cathartic experience of writing it down, I can't imagine, since I haven't been through that or written something like that. But when you finish the book and it's published and out there, is there a feeling of closure, or more unanswered questions?

John Savage: There was some closure initially, based on a conversation Eric and I had on the airplane on the way back. I knew my life back then, I wasn't living the way I should have been, and I'm thankful for this accident, I don't know where I'd be if it didn't happen, because pride and ego were taking hold of me and I was going down the wrong road. There's more humbleness and thankfulness now, because we all go through struggles, we're in a fallen world, and it's about what you're gonna do in that struggle, are you gonna weasel your way out, or go through it to see what you can learn, because one reason we go through struggles is to help others through theirs. So the closure comes from knowing other people are being helped, I constantly get messages, the other day I had to pull over and cry for a minute because of a message from a lady about terrible things going on in her life, and how now she has peace and direction. Tom, it's not me doing that, I'm just a guy that likes to fish, safety guys are technical writers, our stuff is bullet points, not very creative, but this book is able to open doors within people, it's beyond me, just like getting back to Eric and searching for the EPIRB was beyond my capability, this has happened the same way. So yeah, there has been some closure, it doesn't take away the pain, but there did come a point out there where I thought all hope was lost, with the hypothermia and being lost, thinking I'm a failure, I'm no good, to the point my life wasn't worth living because I knew I was going to die, and at that point when I decided to end my life, that's when an amazing miracle happened. If I could give everybody in this world just a drop of that faith I had at that moment, that's why every book I sign says, never give up, never, ever give up, God is not going to put you into something he didn't prepare you for. Just like that week in The Bahamas, what would possess me to swim to a rock at Chubb Cay, but something did, and I did that every day, cleaned the boat, went swimming, usually with a mask and fins on a surfboard, but never just swimming to be swimming, my body was getting prepared for it, just like you with your workouts and teaching people how to train, it's all preparation.

Tom Rowland: There's a story about that too I'll share another day, somebody told me it helped in a similar situation, it's funny how it all works like that. Your story is incredible. Let's talk about when you decided to write the book, had you been thinking about it, or did you feel compelled to finally put it down, and how long had it been since you'd really revisited the story to that degree?

John Savage: Initially after it happened, Eric and I would share the story, and I wanted to be known not because I went for a long swim, but because I'm hopefully sometimes a decent fisherman, that's what I want to be known for. We have no pride in what happened to us out there personally, we're just thankful to be alive every day, there's a joy that comes from knowing, whether you're a cancer survivor or whatever you've been through, hey, I'm alive, I'm on this earth for one more day, it's a plus, thank you.

Tom Rowland: Can I ask something real quick, this has been since 1998, and of course you feel that way, I'm so thankful for another day, but having never been through a near-death experience to that degree, I wonder, does that ever wear off? You achieve a milestone and think you'll feel that way forever, and two weeks later it's onto something else, does it ever wear off for you?

John Savage: It can fade day to day, but I think it's easier to get back to it. In the writing process, my editor said, John, you've been avoiding this, you gotta tell this part of the story, you don't want to, but you gotta, that was the part about committing suicide, and my wife told him, he woke up screaming three times last night.

Tom Rowland: So while writing the book you were revisiting this at night.

John Savage: I know four lives that were in the process of ending, that stopped because of this story.

Tom Rowland: Hey, that's awesome.

John Savage: Every nightmare, every bit of it is worth it for one soul.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. So now that the book is out, what do you see as your purpose for the next few years, is this gonna change anything with your life and how you live it, do you have hopes or dreams for the next five years, or is this just another chapter?

John Savage: This is the scariest time of my life because I don't know what my future holds.

Tom Rowland: None of us do, you're just admitting it, you're the one saying, I have no idea, it's gonna be good, whatever it is, you've really experienced this, put it into words, and you're telling your story, it's an amazing story, and I thank you for telling it here.

John Savage: We're in the process of the hardcover now, and this has opened so many doors. One of the things I had a hard time with, I mentioned my neighbor at the start, I spent a lot of time with those operators, a very tight world, and everything in the book related to them, I had guys look it over, it was recommended I not include the chapter about the SEALs and what they go through. I own the rights to the book, and I said, it's gonna be in there, these are real issues we're dealing with, real people, similar situations, so the reason I went to that world to write is because of how it laid out. The letter to the reader at the beginning was actually the first thing written, in order, I found myself at a local base with a job starting late in the evening, the government rep wanted to meet at three-thirty in the afternoon, and rather than drive all the way home and back I went to a park I used to play at as a kid, called Seal Park, where the heritage center has a prayer on the wall, and I got to see some of the unique things those guys go through, the evil they deal with regularly, police deal with it every day too, and I have some numbers in there about the critical incidents the average person sees versus what they see. If it weren't for some of those operators coming to me and saying, John, tell our story, I would have never included that whole realm in the book, out of respect. When they took out Osama and it came out where these guys were based, our mayor here was pretty vocal about it publicly, but most of those guys are humble and try to live a normal life with their families. I'm actually picking up a boy tomorrow whose dad is one of those operators, jacked up about going hunting so they can bond, because it's a unique strain they face to keep the rest of us safe, so you can take people fishing and I can go out and enjoy myself. I had the privilege of helping get support for a gentleman, a former commander with the teams, who has a charity mission called the forge, where first responders and military come build knives and shields as a form of therapy, that came about through the officer in the book calling me in tears, that's kind of his therapy now as he retires. On Monday there are three Gold Star children doing builds, their fathers were lost in Extortion 17, and I just want them to have the book and know, your daddy's gone, but there's another daddy that loves you, and he loves all of us.

Tom Rowland: Wow, that's incredible. One thing in the book I thought was interesting, very shortly after all this, one of the first things you did was go surfing and get back in the ocean, what was that like, did you feel drawn back?

John Savage: Definitely, when you got that saltwater running through your veins, you can't get far away from it. It's funny, when I was working for Ford Motor Company as a safety engineer on a half billion dollar project, the contract company offered me the vice president position, but they were based in Louisville, and I told the owner, that's an awful lot of salt to put in the Ohio River to get me to come there. When you love the water, you love the water.

Tom Rowland: You are drawn to it like that, but it's interesting that almost immediately after everything you went through with the surfboard, you felt like what I need right now is to go surfing.

John Savage: I think that was so funny, when Eric and I got in the boat and I got him situated, and the surfboard went off, he said, oh man buddy, I'm sorry about your surfboard, and I said, that's the least of my worries, don't worry about that thing, we can get another one.

Tom Rowland: No doubt, man. Well, this is a great book, Lost in the Stream, the miraculous story of two fishermen lost at sea, really awesome, I really enjoyed it, and Johnny, I thank you for coming on here and telling your story, it's really incredible, I'd love to have you on again and see what happens once this book gets out there a little more, you're gonna get a lot more messages, it's gonna be impactful to a lot of people's lives, so let's do it again in the future.

John Savage: That sounds great, I really appreciate the opportunity, I have a lot of podcasts and I just love your format.

Tom Rowland: Oh, well, thank you.

John Savage: Relaxing, it's cool, you got fish in the background, and I even like the one where you're going down the road in your truck answering questions, I need to get whatever tires he has because they're pretty quiet.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that was a pretty quiet truck. But anyway, thank you for telling the story here, and thanks for being part of the family. If you want to read this book, where do they go, anywhere books are sold?

John Savage: Amazon's probably the major source, just look up Lost in the Stream, it was the number one new release for boating ships, survival biographies, and coping with suicide grief, and got the number one seller tag for a while in boating. Also I have a website, lostinthestreambook.com, with links to my Facebook and Instagram pages, I'm just getting into the marketing side, new territory for me. The program I wrote the book through is called the Creator's Program, publisher New Degree Press, a very unique situation, it's crowdfunded. When I went through my divorce, crushed, I started telling the story, and there was a moment, you gotta write a book, I'd been hearing that for years, and I thought, only writers write books, I'm not a writer, but it came about because of a dinner where one of my wife's friends had written a book through this program. My big fear with standard publishing was they might try to take the miracles out of it, because it's such an amazing story, and if someone offered me ten million dollars for the rights I wouldn't sell, because I'm not giving anyone the ability to take the miracle out of my story, and Eric's too, he feels the same way, I called him before doing any of this and he said, do it, buddy. It was crowdsourced, that's what paid for it to be produced, our big tournament here, the Virginia Beach Billfish Tournament in August, is when the final funding drive happened, and the book got fully funded through ebook, paperback, hardback, and audiobook.

Tom Rowland: The audiobook should be interesting, are you gonna read it yourself?

John Savage: I don't know how you do what you do with this podcast, because when we hear ourselves talk we always think we sound ridiculous, but a lot of people said I need to do it myself because only I can put the emotion in it.

Tom Rowland: I go back and forth, there are professional narrators who do an incredibly good job, and authors who read their own books who do an incredibly good job too, the narrator makes a huge difference. I think you should at least give it a shot and see how it feels, let a few people listen and get opinions.

John Savage: Alright, so your vote's down on that side. I think it'd be cool if my friend Kat Merrick did it, he's got a neat Australian accent, we're all drawn to that anyway.

Tom Rowland: Maybe you could put out two versions, the Australian version and the regular version, I've seen that done before. But when any of these versions come out, let me know and I'll push it on the podcast. It's really a fortunate story.

John Savage: Incredible story. I work for a Virginia paving company as well as working on the boat, part of a large construction company doing road work throughout the country, and my boss a couple years ago said, this book is part of your professional development, part of your work, you have to get this done.

Tom Rowland: Really good for him, what did he say when you asked why he thought this would be good?

John Savage: We were in a meeting talking about professional and personal goals, and I've learned so much through this process, that program did a great job teaching how to talk to people to get information for writing, and it's opened new doors, using new tools at work. Mental health issues are tough in every industry, and tough in the construction world, and I was able to learn more to help our employees get through their tough times. There's a story in the book, I was telling a kid a fish story about going for a swim, next thing I know he's balling in the office, he'd tried to end his life that night before, sometimes it's the good Lord putting the right people in the right places.

Tom Rowland: Man, that's awesome, well, good job on the book, and thanks for coming on today, we'll stay in touch, and I'd love to have you back on in the next couple of months to find out how everything's going.

John Savage: Cool, sounds great, I would love to, sir.

Tom Rowland: Alright, Johnny, thank you, and again, the book is Lost in the Stream, the miraculous story of two fishermen lost at sea, definitely highly recommended, you can get it at Amazon or go to Johnny's website. Alright, Johnny, thank you today, and we'll talk to you soon.

John Savage: Cool, I appreciate it.

Tom Rowland: Alright, see you.