Chad Earl
Paul found himself ship wreaked on the island of Malta (Acts 27:14-44) and God's hand stayed with him and the 275 persons who survived. . We read the account and even though Paul was in chains God was not through with him yet.
Such as this modern day account of a missionary in Papua New Guinea, Chad Earl. Below is parts of the account told by Chad himself and his sister who pieced together the story from Chad. This happened on Sept 19, 2012...told you it was modern.
I’ll start this
little conversation by saying that I just got off the phone with my brother,
Chad, and he told me he is a little taken-aback that everyone is making such a
big deal of this.
“All I really did
is float in the ocean all night. There’s not really anything too amazing
about that.” I think what my
brother is really saying is that he is a little embarrassed by all the hype and attention that his story is getting. He sees himself as very ordinary;
and he truly is a simple man, a man that loves God, a man that loves to work, a
man that loves people – and a man that consistently puts others before
himself. Even when no one else
is looking.
So I thought I would
attempt to write out his story for him – as he told it to our family the night
after he was found, while we were all peppering him with questions. He was on a
boat with a company called SOLWARA MERI, heading out to another island to begin
21 days of island-hopping People-Group-Assessment work. His plan was to
meet up with some national believers out there who would accompany him on his
travels. The ocean was fine, the sky was bright when they shoved off from
Kokopo around 1:30pm. There were a couple boats traveling together;
he was on one of them with 7 other people. The rumor was that an hour or 2 into
the trip, a big storm blew up. Chad said, “It
wasn’t really a big storm … just wavy, bad seas most of the time. The sea
continued to get rougher; there was a big rain ahead in front of us, and we
were getting wet from the waves for most of the trip.” Soon, massive waves started to sweep over
the sides of the boat. Chad said it all happened so fast … one minute they were
jerking up and down on the waves; the next, an enormous wave swept over the
front of the boat, and they immediately began to sink. “I couldn’t believe how fast it happened. Literally I
think it was 15 seconds and the boat was under.” People were thrown off and cargo was
floating all around in the water. He quickly surfaced; noticed his shoes
floating. Note that Chad is a man of few possessions – so these were his one
good pair NIKE BROOKS tennis shoes that our bro-in-law sent him. He grabbed
them and tied them to a plank on a pallet of floating wood. Just then he
noticed the 3 women from the boat who were screaming and frantically grabbing
at the top of the sinking boat, bobbing up and down in the rough ocean. He
said, “I noticed the women before getting my
shoes…that’s why I felt so bad that I took the time to grab the shoes when I
couldn’t see them for a minute and thought they had drowned.”
Looking over, he had a sick feeling like, “Oh
shoot! Here these women are sinking and I just spent time tying my shoes onto
this pallet. That was so worthless of me.”
He quickly swam over to help them. All thof is time, they knew another boat
had been just in front of them and saw them go down. Chad’s thoughts were that
surely this boat would come back and pick them up, and this would be no big
deal. The other boat was also rocking on the fierce waves, and while it did
drive back and circle around them; it did not pick anyone up. It seems
they feared the same fate. Neither did the other boat think of throwing
any floatation devices over the side to the 8 folks bouncing in the waves. The
boat drove away, with intention to come back and help – but they never came
back.
The seas got rougher;
the sky got darker, but no one came back.
The boat driver,
Febi, was a very helpful, assertive guy; he and Chad began to scramble to
grab the cargo that was floating in the water. They grabbed the red
plastic gas tank and a pallet of wood that had been in the bottom of the
boat. Then they drained the gas out of the tank by squeezing the little black
squeeze bulb that is on outboard , we just slowly squeezed the gas out by pumping the bulb, so
there’d just be air left in the tank and it would float better.”
The tank had a handle, so they used the shoelaces from Chad’s shoes to tie the
tank in the center of the pallet. “We couldn’t just unscrew the lid and dump it or we could have gotten water back into the tank , it wasn’t my
idea. I just helped.” All
of this was done while being pounded by the waves and treading water.
The 3 women that were
with them could not swim. These women sat on, clung to, and clawed at the red
floating tank, each one kind of straddling the tank and the pallet of
wood. There was also a young boy, maybe 16 years old, who could swim but was
not very helpful. Chad and Febi hung on to the pallet and tried to kick
the group toward shore. “We could see the
shoreline far in the distance, but it was really far away. The sea
was rough.”
Backtrack: when the
shipwreck happened, 2 of the men on the boat drifted away and began swimming
for shore. They were picked up somewhere and made it to the Bom Village on the
New Ireland Island, where they told the villagers that the rest of the crew was
still out at sea. Ryan; Shelbi Webb and Madonna Yates, missionaries on
that island, had called in around 7:15pm reporting Chad missing since his boat
never showed up. Around 11:00pm, Ryan called again to say that these 2
men had shown up and told the story of the 6 still in the ocean, clinging to a
pallet. They said there were women, a child, and a white man. Needless to say, that rumor of a
white man and 5 nationals in the ocean gave all of us a glimmer of hope. We hoped he had something to hang onto for the long,
dark night. We held that hope while still crying out to God to spare the
lives of these people and give Chad strength to tread water all night.
Chad said he watched
as the sky grew darker and realized no one was coming back for them.
It gets dark in this
country between 6:30 -7:00pm, and with no watch, no light, and no end in sight,
the night in the sea felt pretty long. Chad said his head continually bobbed up
and down, in and out of the water. He had one arm slung over the pallet some of
the time, but they treaded water and kicked most of the time, trying to stay
afloat.
Chad and the others saw another boat pass by at a distance and hoped to get its attention so it would come pick them up. He took off the white shirt he was wearing and threw it into the air, yelling for help. “We all did a lot of yelling for help.” No one saw them or heard them. “We saw the boat right after we had gotten all the gas out of the tank so threw the red tank in the air a couple times for the boat to see, but they didn’t see us. Then we tied the gas jug to the pallet and so I took my shirt off to use as a signal snaker. Febi thought he saw another boat way off in the distance a little later so he asked for my shirt to throw up…he tried to stand on the tip of the sinking boat and throw it but whatever boat he saw was way too far off to see us…” Then Chad tied his white shirt to the thick rope hanging off the front of the sunken boat that was still sticking out of the water vertically. They hoped someone would see it.
“I really need to work on my breath-holding skills,” Chad told me, “because we thought if we could unhook the motor from the bottom of the boat, perhaps we could flip it over and then we could all sit in it.” The motor on the back of the boat was holding the boat down into the sea. Chad held his breath and dove under. The first time he didn’t make it to the motor and had to come up for air. Imagine the adrenaline pumping and trying to dive down 21 feet or so in the ocean to try and unfasten an outboard motor on the back of a boat. The second time he swam under the sunken boat and touched the motor. The third plunge, he was able to touch the bolts on the motor but realized they were screwed on too tight and there was no way he could release them. Up he came, gasping for air and wishing there was another way. All this time the 3 women had intermittent periods of screaming and freaking out, and the boat driver along with Chad kept trying to calm them down. The driver kept saying, “Just relax. Just relax. We will get there soon. It will all be alright. We will be there soon. Relax.” Over and over he repeated these words, and that was a real morale booster for Chad. Febi also reassured the women, saying, “Hey, just think of it like we are goin’ for a swim…it’s no big deal. We’re just goin’ for a swim. They saw little flickering lights
off in the distance and wondered if they were people’s flashlights. “I did a lot of yelling to try to get help, but it didn’t
seem like anyone ever heard us.”
At
one point in the night, the laces came loose and they thought they had lost
them; and the raft came apart. The women of course started panicking and were
grasping and groping at the men, trying to use them as flotation devices. Chad
said that a woman grabbed on to him and was pulling him down a little
bit. He is not sure if it was the same woman or another one who grabbed
the Gumi rubber necklace (Chad has one on in the picture) that was around his neck and was using that to hold
onto. Chad grabbed the woman’s hand off his neck right away, but he started
going under from the weight of this woman trying to hold onto him to
survive. In a matter of seconds, these thoughts flashed through his mind,
“I knew these ladies were pulling me down. I
couldn’t let them drown, but it kept flashing through my mind how a flayling
person could cause a strong swimmer to drown by frantically hanging onto them
and pushing them under. I had to think of an idea pretty fast, and I didn’t
want to get myself in another position where the lady would grab me and not let
go. So I threw her off me … and then quickly grabbed her shirt in a
bundle from behind her and balanced her on my knee to float. That way I could
hold her up, but hold her away from me so I could still swim and she couldn’t
grab onto me. I was afraid she would keep pushing me under if she kept
grabbing at me.” He held onto her until she calmed down
and could grab onto the gas tank again. As Chad was telling the story he said,
“I don’t think I held onto her very long at
all….this part is a little blurry. I can’t remember if I just let
her go and went and got the gas tank and had her hold on to that or if she
grabbed the pallet or if I just let her go real quick to start tying the jug
off… honestly I am not 100% sure what happened at that point….” This part of the night was frantic, blurry,
and dark.
At this point they
also had to try to fix the raft. Chad remembered that he had a drawstring
in his board shorts and quickly pulled that out. “I
was so frustrated because it broke in half when I pulled it out. I
thought it would work, but it didn't … it broke into such small sections it was
useless. I told Febi that and he said he had the shoelace…I guess he found it
cause I had asked if it was still there when the jug came off and thought he
said it was gone. Then we snaked the tank and the pallets together again.
Even that was tricky because the women kept freaking out and we were trying to
get them to hold still and not put all their weight on the wood so we could get
the thing balanced again. It got a little hairy there at one point in the night
when they were all screaming and we were trying to talk them through it as we
fixed the raft.” Remember that the entire night’s conversation
would not have been in English, but in Melanesian Pidgin, the local language of
Papua New Guinea. The string was now gone from Chad’s shorts; he lost them as
they floated away; he was now down to his under-armor. The official
statement released by NTM said he was left with only his shorts … but he was
actually in nothing but his grey underwear. He had thought a couple times
earlier that he was glad he still had his wallet in his pocket with his
license, cards, and “700 Kina of
People-Group-Assessment money. It wasn’t even my money, so I feel bad that I
lost it. But I didn’t even think about it when my shorts floated away. I didn’t
realize it was even gone till later. It got pretty hairy there in the middle
part of the night and I wasn’t thinking about much else.”
I asked Chad if he
tried to pass the time singing or talking. He said he did try to sing a little
bit and at one point he tried to ask the people some questions to see if they
knew their eternal destiny. “But it just was not
that kind of a situation where you could even have a decent conversation. The sea
was rough; the waves were rocking us; you would hold your breath, go under, and
then bob back up. You had to repeat yourself again and again because the guys’
heads would be under water often. So pretty soon I realized that conversation
was not going to really work. I prayed that God would make the night
shorter. I prayed that the light would come quicker. The night did feel really
long.”
And so they weathered
the night that way. The 16-year-old kid that was with them kept trying to sit
on the front of the raft, and when he would do that it would make the raft
start to sink and the ladies fall off. This would throw them into complete
panic and chaos again. “I think it would at
times make the raft unbalanced when he would do that but the main reason was it
would push the raft too far under for me to keep my hand on it and still keep
my head out of the water, and keep the raft balanced without pushing it further
underwater.” Chad kept telling
the boy not to sit on there, to just hang onto the pallet to float. At a few
points, “He just wouldn’t listen so I had to
push him off the front and tell him to stay off it and just hang on.”
“The ladies’ teeth were chattering and I knew they were
cold. I never did feel cold, but I was in the water moving the whole time and
they were up on the raft.” The
good thing about the waters in the South Pacific is that they are quite
warm. We asked Chad if he thought about sharks or anything like that. “It did cross my mind a couple times, but I just didn’t
let my mind go there.”
He kept seeing these
flashing lights that he thought were coming from the shoreline way in the
distance. A few times he wondered if he was dreaming or if this was really
happening. Once or twice it crossed his mind that he could swim for the
shore and he would probably make it, but he never even considered this thought.
He stayed with the women and the other 2 at sea. “It was dark, pitch black, dark skies with dark clouds,
raining off and on. I tried to open my mouth and catch some of the
rainwater, but I would just get a mouthful of saltwater instead. We kept
trying to kick to shore. We tried to kick to the shoreline all night long, but
the current was strong and we did not get anywhere. The night did feel
really long.”
The head of the Marine Pacific command on the phone with
100 marines ready to be mobilized. All night long, so many folks worked
and planned towards getting Chad and the others help. The NTM doctor,
nurse, pilot, and a search team formed in the middle of the night at our
mission center and rallied at 4:00am so they could leave at daybreak.
At daybreak, boats
launched … and you know the rest of the story. He was picked up by local
villagers and they headed toward an aidpost on another island. The guys
in the rescue boat had to pull them all out of the water. Chad tried to get
into the boat but couldn’t, so they pulled him in. The boat driver,
women, and other boy just c
All the while, there were hundreds of people that soon became thousands of people, who began rallying to pray. It started with calling our immediate family. There are 6 of us siblings currently spread across America and PNG and we, along with my mom and dad, and lots of friends, began rallying people to pray. Within hours the news was all over Facebook and the internet. Churches gathered to pray, school classes stopped to pray, little bands of believers all over the world came together to pray. We knew Chad and others were out at sea. We knew there was no rescue attempt being made until dawn. We knew that he would have to keep swimming for another 10 hours or so until daybreak. Missionaries, Ryan & Shelbi Webb and Madonna, at Bom Village, tried to rally the villagers to send out a search party that night, but a large squall wind had blown up and was gusting strongly toward shore. No one had good lights or equipment and the reality was that they probably feared for their lives as well with going out at night. Shelbi Webb reported, “We just kept going and never got any sleep that night; we just didn't want to leave him out there for the night; we wanted to do all that we could so that he knew we were doing absolutely everything. Ryan kept going village to village offering anything to get Chad that night; no boat drivers would go, so we knew we had to wait till daylight”. Ryan was able to set up a boat and gas and planned to leave at daybreak along with the villagers, to try to find Chad and the others.
Not too many people slept that night; everyone called upon the God who made the wind and the seas and those people, to please save them. Many, many phone calls were made; many people were awakened in the night including the US Embassy, the PNG Maritime service, ANY helicopter company within a decent range of the ocean in which they were lost; we even called a couple resorts on the coast and talked to the night manager to see if they had any search boats they could send out. Our bro-in-law & brothers contacted our cousin Nathaniel Brock, who is a US Marine.
Chad
said they were all limp and could not think straight. They couldn’t
walk. The boat took them all to the shore of another island, and the
people gave them coke and crackers. They offloaded the national survivors
to head to a nearby medical aidpost. Chad told them he needed to go the
village where the missionaries lived, and they took off that direction.
Missionary Ryan Webb came on the scene very shortly and put Chad into his boat,
taking him back to his home on the Bom village island. As soon as Ryan got Chad
into his boat, he placed a call to the NTM director, Keith Copley. We were
standing in Keith’s house as he got this call. There was a lot of
background noise, but Ryan was yelling, “I have him! I have Chad in my boat!
I can’t hear you because of the outboard motor, but he is here in my boat!
We’re going to land!” Let me tell you that rejoicing and tears took
place in a big way. We quickly began calling the family to let them know
that Chad was alive. Bless Ryan & Shelbi Webb, Madonna Yates, and all those
wonderful villagers at Bom & the surrounding villages! So many people
rallied to help.
The NTM helicopter,
with doctor onboard, picked Chad up at the Bom Village and took him to the
mainland. Chad doesn’t have any big injuries. He has chaffing on the
insides of his arms from where he hung onto the pallet and the wood and
saltwater rubbed at his arms. His legs are extremely stiff and sore from
treading and kicking for so long. His eyes were red and bloodshot for a couple
days and he has some bruises, but otherwise he is just fine. The others
that were lost, Febi, Cris, Rose, Olivia, and Grace are also
okay.
I asked Chad what he
was thinking during those hours in the sea. Was he afraid of dying? Did he
think this would be the end? He said the thought went through his mind a few
times. “It did cross my mind. I thought,
‘Oh, maybe this will be how I go. Maybe this will be it for me.’ But I
was content. I didn’t question why we were out there. We just were. You know,
all my life I have struggled with doubt. But in those moments in the sea I
didn’t have lots of questions. I knew my eternal destiny. I knew I was spending
my life exactly the way I wanted to be spending it, doing something that
mattered in God’s kingdom. I didn’t have any regrets or wish that I was
somewhere else, doing something else.”
(God is not through with Chad, there are more villages to survey, more missionaries to help move into a tribe without the gospel. I (Betty) pray this has encouraged you to continue on with your walk with the Lord even if you find your self in your own sea of problems. Reach out to your lifeline, He will be there for you. )
