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The smugglers were halfway to Key West, Florida, with a boat full of bad weed when the winds turned against them. The winds had not been kind the whole trip, and when you’re running weed in a 61-foot steel-hull sailboat, you need the wind on your side. Harvey Prager had been on watch for hours, steering through lashing rain and 20-foot waves in the Yucatan Channel. Watches were four-hour shifts, day in, day out. Belowdecks, crew members tried to sleep despite the violent pitching of their ship, called The Escape. On deck, Prager knew he had to be vigilant. The passage was a good place to get snatched by the Coast Guard, or worse, get run over by a cargo ship. The Escape had a powerful engine that recharged the batteries that powered the crew’s rudimentary lights and equipment, but it was struggling, chewing through diesel as it pushed the ship up and down through mountainous waves. The end was in sight, though: If they could grind their way through the channel, dodge the container ships and cops, they’d catch the Gulf Stream winds and be able to shoot straight north to the coast of Maine, where they’d tuck the boat into a quiet little inlet, offload the weed, and rake in the cash, living like kings in New England just as the summer of 1976 came to a close. That’s what Prager was dreaming of, at least, before the radio crackled below.

The radio, a battered old Zenith Trans-Oceanic, was their only link to the outside world, bringing them occasional weather reports and little else. They had no cell phones, no radar, no satellite uplink. They navigated by sextant and map. If they went down, no one would ever find them, and the radio told them the weather was about to go from bad to worse. A hurricane had formed north of the Bahamas, swelling in size and hooking west, cutting off their route to Maine and leaving the smugglers adrift at sea with no port to call home.