Joey Redmond - My Blog » Blog Archive » My Fourth of July DISASTER with the Coast Guard or lack of rather

Well around 8am we left for Daytona Beach from Port Canaveral. It’s about a 77 mile trip and our tugboat was going to travel around 7mph. So I was pretty much prepared for the worst day of my life before things went horribly a muck. Well I don’t even really want to bother writing to much about the journey and relive it….but here are some pictures.

For those of you who are totally confused, let me go backwards and explain. I have worked for Melrose Pyrotechnics for a while doing pyrotechnics. I actually do the Brave’s games on Friday nights for those of you who were not aware. Well, someone from the city of Daytona Beach came to the game and requested us to shoot their show. This should be a great weekend at the beach but of course…..I fail. So basically Floridafail (a nice subculture reference for some Florida Drifters).

This is what I lived on for over a day…

This was about 9-11 hours into the trip when we saw the storms coming and pretty much expected our imminent death…

This is right when it started to get pretty bad…..Mark was sitting on the ground because he was sea sick all day. In fact, the best memory of the trip is when Mark was vomiting right next to me eating my lunch….he turned back after puking and offered Jason some pickles for the sandwich he was making. Note, the slant of the barge in this picture…..

So about 15 minutes before it was time to fire, huge waves come crashing over the barge. We have no where to go really because the barge has no shelter. We get soaking wet and the firework setup gets knocked over.

So in an eager state to get off the ship Mark makes some phone calls. The tug boat cannot come rescue us because they are afraid when they swing the ship next to the barge it would hit it and flip us over…..at the current time this doesn’t seem like a total loss to me but whatever. A helicopter rescue is not possible due to the fact we are on a ship full of pyrotechnics and the possibility of a spark charging the fireworks and setting them off. So, our last alternative is the coast guard who REFUSED TO RESCUE us! So this is a lesson to not believe Hollywood, remember that movie with Ashton Kutcher rescuing all those people at sea, it’s a sham! The Coast Guard didn’t want to lift a finger to help us as we were trying to remain on board this barge….

Well we ended up taking a 15 hour trip back home to port while hiding inside a clear plastic wrap fort we built to keep dry. It was terrific! Here is what our barge looked like once we returned to port.