'I started to give up hope': Inside the Coast Guard rescue of Chris Smelley, former South Carolina QB

Twice, Chris Smelley saw a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter fly nearly right over him as he drifted in a kayak in the Gulf of Mexico, thinking he had finally been spotted.

One helicopter came so close that Smelley, a 37-year-old former American Christian Academy quarterback and football coach, began to throw his hands up and celebrate what he thought would be his rescue only to watch the helicopter continue to fly by.

"At that point, I started to give up hope that I was going to be spotted," Smelley told The Tuscaloosa News. "It was starting to get dark."

The sun began to set off the Florida coast, and the wind calmed. Smelley paddled for an hour straight trying to get back to shore. He knew he was moving in the right direction, but slowly.

Smelley had set out at 7:30 a.m. the morning of March 28 on what he expected to be a routine fishing trip of an hour or so off the shore of Grayton Beach, located between Destin and Panama City, where he was vacationing with family: paddle out and catch a few fish, paddle back.

It turned into an ordeal that left him on the water for almost 12 hours and touched off a search-and-rescue effort that involved more than three dozen people and multiple law enforcement and government agencies. The mission mobilized five boats, two helicopters, an airplane and multiple jet skis.

Smelley knew after his fruitless, hour-long paddle that he still had a long journey to make shore, so he decided to throw his line back into the water to catch a fish in case he needed to eat. It was right about that time, Smelley said, that he was finally spotted by the Coast Guard.

He had been reported missing at 1:24 p.m. by his family when he had not returned and couldn't be spotted from the shore. It was not until 7:12 p.m. that he was located by a Coast Guard plane, nine minutes after the sun had set.

First sign of trouble as waves, wind pick up

The morning was normal for Smelley and his family. He rented a blue-and-black kayak and did what he had done often over the last 15 years: went fishing.

"I grew up on the lake, on the water, so I'm very comfortable around water," Smelley said. "I've probably for the last 15 years or so been kayak fishing about once a year. I usually do it when I'm on vacation down there with my family."

Smelley, a former South Carolina quarterback who is now head coach at Sylacauga High School in Alabama, said it was the first morning on the trip that the water appeared calm. Thirty minutes in, though, he noticed he had drifted about 400 yards from shore.

"I turned to start paddling in a little bit," he said. "As soon as I started my first attempt in, I knew I was in trouble."

Smelley found himself in water that the Coast Guard says had 2- to 3-foot waves with winds approaching 10 mph, pushing him farther out into the gulf.

"It seemed real calm, but right as I got off, the wind was real strong the further I got out," Smelley said.

Smelley made three attempts to get back to shore but was still moving backward.

"I just knew I had to wait until eventually there was a lull in the wind or a change in the wind direction to give me a chance to at least paddle back in," he said.

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The search begins by land and sea

When Smelley hadn't returned after a few hours, his wife, Josie, notified authorities. The Walton County Sheriff's Office was contacted.

"Originally it kind of came out as a welfare check," said Corey Dobridnia, public information officer for the Walton County Sheriff's Office. "Like 'Hey, we have not heard from him, but we are not sure.'"

A Walton County deputy was dispatched to Grayton Beach, and the situation escalated when a search of the coastline turned up no sign of Smelley.

The department set up an incident command center on the beach where Smelley originally entered the water and shared information with surrounding law enforcement departments, the Coast Guard and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

"It really was a team effort," Dobridnia said. "Every agency, we were all talking to one another."

Once notified, the Coast Guard took the case into the "distressed phase," said Lieutenant J.G. Carson, public affairs officer for Sector Mobile. That meant the Alabama-based command unit issued a broadcast saying Smelley was missing and asking for the public's assistance. The Coast Guard created a search pattern and launched a 45-foot response boat from Coast Guard Station Destin. It also diverted a Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter to take part in the search.

In addition, two South Walton Fire District jet skis and one Walton County sheriff's jet ski hit the surf to take part in the search. Others on jet skis also assisted.

Fish and Wildlife sent two boats to the scene and had deputies patrol the shoreline. The Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office sent a 28-foot Ambar boat – a rigid-hull inflatable boat used by many fire and rescue departments – with two officers and issued an AQUA alert. Similar to an AMBER alert, it notifies everyone who has the Okaloosa Sheriff Office's app when someone is missing and believed to be in the water.

Aboard the Coast Guard's 45-foot rescue boat was Petty Officer Third Class Garrett Hedspeth, the boat's coxswain, or leader, along with another crew member and an engineer. They were notified at approximately 2 p.m. Thirty-eight minutes later, they were en route from Destin to Grayton Beach, about 18 miles east.

The first thing they did upon arriving, Hedspeth said, was use a life ring to get a "set and drift" reading.

"What that does is, we measure how far it drifted over a given amount of time and then we look at the direction that it went to do quick calculations to get the speed," Hedpseth said. "By doing that, we can say, 'OK, well, this life ring was floating half a mile per hour in a direction of south.'

"So that kind of gives us an estimation of where that person might be given the amount of time that they were last known."

Hedspeth and his crew got their search started approximately four miles off the beach. They followed Coast Guard search patterns, using binoculars and radar to try to locate Smelley, but were unable to find him.

Once the searches with the helicopter and response boat came up empty, the Coast Guard requested an EADS HC-144 Ocean Sentry, a medium-range, twin-engine turboprop airplane.

The search area expanded, at one point, to 10 to 15 miles out from the coast because the wind was blowing so hard, Dobridnia said.

Authorities were not the only ones looking for Smelley.

Longtime family friend Eddie Morgan, owner of Harbor Docks restaurant in Destin, was also called to assist. Aboard a vessel named Hey Baby, Morgan joined the search. Kevin Moak captained the 1974 30-foot G&S boat owned by Charles Morgan, Eddie's father.

Finally, the rescue

It was at approximately 7:12 p.m., in the last leg of the search pattern, that the Coast Guard plane spotted Smelley in his kayak. He had drifted about 8 miles from where he was expected to be and 2 1/2 miles offshore, according to the Walton County Sheriff's Office.

A helicopter was diverted and employed a rescue swimmer to make sure Smelley was OK. Morgan's Hey Baby was closer than the Coast Guard vessel, so it got there first to recover him, along with his kayak.

The Coast Guard boat rode side by side with the Hey Baby on Smelley's trip back to Destin. Authorities confirmed Smelley's identity and assessed that he was not in need of medical assistance.

"It was getting very close to becoming very dark," Hedspeth said. "... It was great timing for him to be spotted, because once the sun sets we are still going to be out there searching but that definitely adds a whole different ballgame."

How much danger was Chris Smelley in?

Search and rescue missions are common for the Coast Guard. In 2023, statistics recorded 14,008 such missions with 5,532 lives saved across all Coast Guard operations, according to Carson.

"This is basically what we are trained to do, provide that search-and-rescue coverage," Carson said.

The outcomes are not always happy: In the years 2000-18, an average of more than 685 deaths per year were recorded in Coast Guard-conducted search-and-rescue operations, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation.

The search and rescue of Smelley provides lessons.

"The Gulf of Mexico is beautiful, but unpredictable," Dobridnia said. "And it's very important for anybody that goes in the water to have a life jacket and/or a cell phone, a way to contact you – a beacon, a light of some sort, because Chris had neither one.

"If a bad storm had come in, we could be looking at a very different scenario. So boating safety is huge. Lifejacket, cell phone, some sort of homing device that we can use to locate is absolutely critical."

Anna Snyder covers high school sports and University of Alabama softball and football recruiting for The Tuscaloosa News. Reach her at asnyder@gannett.com. Follow her on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, @annaesnyder2

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Chris Smelley: Inside how Coast Guard saved former South Carolina QB