At midnight on April 12, 15-year-old Alex Keys exited his family’s boat to find out that his day had gone from bad to worse.
Just days ago, the young captain had used his small Palm Beach skiff, a gift from his father a few months earlier, for an emergency tow of the 53-foot Gulfstar trawler. With failing engines and holes in the hull from striking an unknown object underwater, the larger boat eventually came to rest in the shallow waters off Bahia Honda at 4 a.m.
For Alex, the boat he called his family’s “utility boat” suddenly became a lifeline, connecting his father Joseph and sisters Gemma and Alexa to the land as they worked to put lift bags under the big boat and repair the hull.
But after a day of battling the tides to complete repairs, when he went outside that night, the knot holding the skiff to the trawler had come undone, and the smaller boat was nowhere in sight.
“We were getting ready to try and use it to pull us off, and I went outside and it was gone,” Alex said. “I grabbed the light I had, looked all around, and couldn’t see her anywhere.”
Reporting the missing vessel to FWC and the U.S. Coast Guard, Alex said he knew the two agencies, combined with a cry for help on social media, would be his best shot at recovering the skiff. Noting the winds and currents along with a detailed description of the boat, his posts in local Facebook groups soon earned hundreds of shares and hundreds of thousands of views.
“I knew I got a good word out, and I just thought, ‘It’s gonna float by someone eventually,’” he said. “It went out quick – within hours. I was pretty confident, but I knew the wind and current could do whatever it wanted, and it could have floated anywhere.”
Alex’s “eventually” came just a day later, when charter captains in Key Largo saw the boat five miles offshore in 350 feet of water. With a call to the Coast Guard, a vessel on patrol in the area intercepted the skiff and started it on its journey to shore, passing the torch to TowBoatUS captain Mike Hutchings to finish off the final two miles to a marina in Key Largo. That’s where family friend “Trawler Tom” Korinek met the prodigal vessel, loaded it up and towed it back down to where it belonged.
“I had seen the boat already (on social media), because TowBoatUS in Big Pine had shared the post from a Marathon locals page,” Hutchings said. “I thought, ‘I wonder if that’s the same boat.’”
“Alex is 15 and one of the best captains I know,” said Korinek, who is temporarily housing the youngster and his siblings while the trawler repairs are finished.
Though he’s not old enough to drive a car yet, Alex was visiting the southernmost island chain by boat for the first time after successfully captaining the family trawler from Merritt Island to West Palm Beach, then continuing further south.
“I actually hired him to help bring my 47-foot boat down from Bradenton, and he drove halfway for me,” Korinek said. “He’s just an extremely impressive person, and he’s going to make a great leader and professional captain when he can. … I was ecstatic that I was able to run up and get the boat. As young as he is, somebody with that kind of potential, I try to help them in any way I can to help him improve his skills at a young age.”
“I was really relieved when I got that call from the Coast Guard and TowBoatUS,” Alex said. “It felt good to know there’s a good community down here.”
