Pirate Blitz: The sinking of the Captain Jack

A little after two the next morning Knowles was taking his shift at the helm. He was alone in the wheelhouse when he noticed something strange.

"We always had two radars," he says. "I could see this boat really moving fast ... and then it stopped. Then it starts picking up speed again. And then it gets going really, really fast."

He woke the captain. For the next hour they tried to reach the other vessel by radio. Perhaps this was the Honduran military out to get them. But the ship didn't respond to their hails, and it was running completely dark.

"They wouldn't turn any lights on," Knowles says. From the deck on the back of the Captain Jack the visible horizon was, at most, five miles away. The radar contact came as close as two miles, but the crew couldn't see the other ship at all.

Even Captain Clark began to worry when another contact showed up on their radar. And then another.

He gave the order to change course. All three ships changed course with them. That was when Clark slammed the yacht's engines full ahead, burning fuel in an attempt to outrun them.

"She had two 3408 Caterpillar engines in her," Knowles says of the Captain Jack with pride. They were commercial power plants — sturdy, reliable and easy to maintain. "She was not a really fast boat for a sport fish, but she could hop out of the water. Depends on the fuel you had in her."

With the tanks half-empty, the yacht rose up at more than 20 knots. The huge engines roared until dawn, and when the sun rose, the mysterious ships were nowhere to be seen. The experience left both the crew and passengers alike shaken.

When they arrived at the Panama Canal, a professional pilot came aboard to guide them through the locks. To pass the time the crew told him the story of the ships that chased them off the coast of Honduras.

"The Panamanian we were talking to," Knowles says, "is like, 'Man, you guys are crazy! Nobody comes that way [south of Cuba], and especially nobody travels that way at night. You're gonna run into drug dealers, pirates, all kinds of different people who will board you and try to rob you!'"

The pilot said they would be a lot better off if they had some guns on board. At the very least, they could fire them into the darkness to scare off pursuers. Not long after he left them, the yacht's satellite phone rang. On the other end was the pilot's friend, a Panamanian arms dealer.

"I see [Mr. William's friends] coming back on the boat with these towels," Knowles says. "They had this shotgun and a 9 millimeter pistol. ... I felt more safe with them, to be honest with you."

But those guns wouldn't be a comfort to Knowles for very long. In fact, they proved more dangerous to the crew than anyone expected.

It was late November, 2006. The Captain Jack, then with only Knowles and the captain on board, was cruising north from Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic toward Grand Turk Island. It would be Knowles' last trip.

"I had already told Mr. Williams that I was leaving," he says. "The captain asked me ... to do him a favor and help take the boat back as far as Nassau where I could get off, start a different chapter of my life."

This would be a long, overnight run. They were sailing straight through to meet Williams, who was flying in from Orlando, Fla. for a winter cruise in the Caribbean.

The Captain Jack's course put it along a narrow corridor through the Silver Banks, a massive coral head in the Caribbean Sea famous for two things — breeding humpback whales and wrecking ships. Knowles had been at the wheel since 10 the night before. Around 8 a.m., the captain came to relieve him, and he shuffled off to his cabin for some sleep.

"You know you just get these feelings certain times," Knowles says, "these feelings that something is just not right? And I kinda got up because I felt that way. Captain Clark was at the wheel, and as soon as I got up out of bed she hit."

There was a horrible rending noise of aluminum giving way. The whole yacht rose up out of the water and came to a complete stop. Knowles was thrown against the walls inside his cabin and then backward into a closet. Wine bottles and glassware exploded on the floor of the hallway.

He pulled himself up and made his way, barefoot, to the wheelhouse. Captain Clark was there, frantically racking the engines forward and back, trying to pull the boat back off the rocks or ram them through.

The U.S. Coast Guard scrambled a small passenger jet. It reached the Silver Banks in the early afternoon. The sight of the plane pushed the fishermen back. The mothership gathered up its smaller boats and moved itself further away.

Knowles and Clark were bobbing in the lifeboat a few hundred feet from the wreck, which was now in danger of rolling over as the tide began to rise. They huddled in their tiny boat as the storm swept in and the waves picked up. There was lightning on the horizon.

Through their radio the pilot of the jet told them he was out of fuel. He would have to turn back.

Night fell. The fishing boat quietly circled them. Hours passed.

Then a bright orange U.S. Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter thundered into view from the east less than 100 feet off the waves, sweeping low with a powerful searchlight over the tops of the waves. Knowles fired off a flare and the chopper orbited over them, called out with a loudspeaker, and eventually lowered a diver into the sea on a cable.

One at a time the rescue swimmer helped the two cold, frightened men into a basket to be winched up into the aircraft. They'd gathered clothes and valuables from the yacht, but the only thing they were allowed to carry into the basket were their passports. The diver showed them how to hold them in their teeth.

"It's amazing because, when you get pulled up in that basket, you're relieved. You're starting to get some relief, starting to feel a little bit better. And then you're going up and then you're looking at this rotor that's spinning. And the breeze from that rotor that's pushing down is almost like a fucking hurricane. I was going up and up, and then falling down, and oh my god what am I doing in this! I'm freaking out, thinking I'm going to go into this rotor now and it's going to chop me up. My day can't get any worse, you know?"

After they pulled Clark, Knowles and then the diver on board, the helicopter turned and made one last pass over the wreck. When they last saw the Captain Jack, the beams of a dozen or more flashlights moved along it as the fishermen began to loot the floundering ship, right there in the middle of a storm.

A few days later, when a salvage crew flew over the wreck, they found the Captain Jack had been towed off the reef and purposefully sunk in shallow water nearby. Looking down on it from the air, they could tell the boat had been carved open, its giant Caterpillar engines hauled away.

Its empty hull still sits along the Silver Banks to this day.