[ad_1] Carter Viss wants to tell you what it was like to get run over by a 36-foot motorboat in the Atlantic Ocean last Thanksgiving Day. He wants to show you the damage inflicted on his four limbs by propeller blades powered by a 400-horsepower engine. He wants to share the horror that gripped him
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Carter Viss wants to tell you what it was like to get run over by a 36-foot motorboat in the Atlantic Ocean last Thanksgiving Day.
He wants to show you the damage inflicted on his four limbs by propeller blades powered by a 400-horsepower engine.
He wants to share the horror that gripped him as he watched his right arm, freshly severed above the elbow, sink to the bottom of a reef.
He wants the public to have some sense of the gut-wrenching toll his accident has taken on so many lives — not just on him but on his friend, Andy Earl, who was the first rescuer to reach him, the stranger on the paddleboard who used her hands as a tourniquet, the doctors who debated whether to amputate his legs, his parents who have chronicled their son’s ordeal in an emotional online journal, even the Palm Beacher who piloted the triple-engine Yellowfin that nearly killed him.
More than 10 months later, after seven surgeries and 68 days in the hospital, Viss is getting used to his prosthetic arm and he walks with a slight limp from lingering aches in his scarred legs.
But his spirit is stronger than ever, buoyed by a comforting moment of faith right after the crash, as he embarks on his next chapter: to use his experience as a platform to lobby for laws to protect swimmers and marine life.
“I’ve got to really embrace what happened to me,” Viss, a 26-year-old marine biologist who grew up in the Rocky Mountains, said. “This is God’s plan for me. I’ve got to go out and talk about it, tell the story and make sure a lot of people are educated from it.”
His main goal is creating a no-wake zone over the popular reef system near The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, where a boat named Talley Girl struck and maimed him even though he was snorkeling with the required red-and-white dive flag.
To accomplish that, he’ll have to relive over and over the horrific details about a traumatic event most people, had it happened to them, would rather forget.
He doesn’t mind. He accepted his new path not long after he regained consciousness at St. Mary’s Medical Center about a week after the accident.
“All right, I survived. I made it through that,” he remembers thinking. “Now I’ve got a lot of potential to make an impact on ocean conservation and boating safety. That’s what I want to do. I’m going to use this to its fullest.”
Life under the sea has fascinated Carter Viss for as long as he can remember, which might seem odd for a guy born and raised in the mile-high city of Denver.
Growing up, he and his brothers, Chase and Levi, were the kids neighbors called if they wanted a snake removed from a yard. Young Carter, though, took a special liking to fish.
He looked forward to going to the doctor’s office and pressing his face against the glass of a saltwater aquarium in the waiting room. He was 10 when he snorkeled for the first time on a vacation in Hawaii. And before long, the basement of the family’s home was crowded with saltwater tanks of varying sizes, one with a pet stingray named Chad.
Viss also shared his parents’ passion for music and faith. He started playing piano when he was 4 and bass guitar while attending Denver Christian High School, often performing with church bands.
In 2013, he came to West Palm Beach to study marine biology at Palm Beach Atlantic University, a private Christian university.
It didn’t take long before he discovered The Breakers reef and its abundance of colorful marine life — from stingrays, sea turtles and octopus to spotted eels, sharks and sergeant majors.
One of Palm Beach County’s most popular snorkeling and diving spots, the reef is about 150 feet off shore from The Breakers hotel on Palm Beach, formed from the remains of a pier demolished by the 1928 hurricane.
Part of a reef system stretching parallel to the shore for nearly a mile — from just north of The Breakers to the Worth Avenue clock tower reef at the south end — it became Viss’ underwater playground.
“I’ve probably dived that reef around 100 times,” said Viss, who is 6-foot-3 and an excellent swimmer.
Until last Thanksgiving, he’d never had any kind of mishap or accident.
Viss took off work that final week of November to take advantage of the ideal ocean conditions for snorkeling — flat water, 100-foot visibility and sunshine.
“All those days were perfect,” he recalled, “and Thanksgiving Day was exceptionally perfect.”
It started off around 9:30 a.m. with the same routine he and his friend, Andy Earl, a co-worker at Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, always followed when snorkeling The Breakers reef.
Earl parked his gray Toyota Scion along the east end of Sunrise Avenue, a half-mile north of the hotel. He and Viss walked two blocks north on North Ocean Boulevard and turned right at a public entrance to the beach, across from the end of Root Trail.
After dropping their towels and backpacks near the shoreline, they walked south on the wet hard-packed sand to The Breakers, where they kicked in with their masks, snorkels, dive belts and dive flag.
They explored the reef for more than two hours, collecting in their trolling buckets small fish to be transferred to Loggerhead’s tanks.
“It was a perfect diving day,” Earl recalled. “There were turtles, octopus, lionfish, angelfish. There was everything.”
The current carried them north, back toward their towels. By noon, they realized they were offshore from the end of Root Trail. They decided to call it a day.
“I started swimming in first,” Viss said. “I could see my stuff on the beach. I was swimming straight towards it.”
About 15 minutes earlier, a 36-foot center console boat pulled away from a dock on the Intracoastal Waterway behind a $15.2 million mansion on the west side of Palm Beach’s North End.
On board was the mansion’s owner, retired Goldman Sachs executive Daniel W. Stanton, his son-in-law, two grandchildren and his 30-year-old son, Daniel W. Stanton Jr., who was piloting the boat.
Like Viss, the Stantons share a love of the ocean. Their playgrounds are Palm Beach and Martha’s Vineyard, where Stanton Sr. founded The Boathouse, a private club, and is president of the nonprofit Boathouse Foundation.
Stanton Jr., known as “Danny” to family and friends, got his introduction to boating as a teenager not long after he moved to Palm Beach in 2004 with his parents and two sisters.
While a student at The Benjamin School, he learned to drive his father’s 22-foot Boston Whaler and 40-foot Double Eagle yacht. He earned a Coast Guard-issued license, allowing him to captain commercial boats in New England every summer in between years at Georgetown University.
In early 2018, Danny Stanton, a director for Wealth Partners Capital Group, bought a 2008 Yellowfin. He named it Talley Girl.
He took it to Two Rivers Boatworks in Stuart where it was refurbished with a new paint job — white with seafoam green trim — and three 400-horsepower Mercury Verado outboard engines with high-performance lower units and five-blade propellers.
Talley Girl’s makeover was featured in a 2019 episode of “Florida Sportsman Project Dreamboat,” with scenes of Two Rivers Boatworks owner Dale Kallaway piloting the refurbished Yellowfin at sea.
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“I haven’t quite experienced a boat that responds to the throttle like this boat does. Full throttle, and the skin on your face flips,” Kallaway says as Talley Girl’s engines blast dramatic fountains of spray in the boat’s wake.
“When you really pin it, the bow comes up. Within a split second, it’s on the plane and it’s running away. It’s the most remarkable feeling … like an aircraft taking off.”
At 11:47 a.m. on Nov. 28, Talley Girl was crawling at 8 to 10 mph after it left the docks behind Stanton’s father’s house and made its way north through a manatee protection zone in the Intracoastal Waterway, according to the boat’s GPS readings cited in a state investigation.
About 1½ miles north at the Lake Worth Inlet, Stanton increased the throttle, steered the boat east into the ocean and looped south on a planned 30-minute pleasure cruise.
He was soon averaging 53 mph, his “cruising speed,” according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission records.
A few minutes after noon, Talley Girl was about 200 yards off shore from Everglade Avenue — two blocks north of Root Trail — its bow planing over water 15 to 20 feet deep.
Sitting on a paddleboard about 30 feet east of the fast-moving boat was Christine Raininger, one of eight swimmers in the area, where three diver-down flags bobbed within 100 feet of each other.
She and three friends started waving their hands and screaming, “Hey, slow down!”
Stanton Sr. would tell investigators he saw a boat with divers about 80 yards to the left and told his son, who “immediately powered down” and turned the boat toward shore, an FWC report said.
But Danny Stanton apparently didn’t see other divers in the boat’s path.
Sound travels far underwater, Viss said, so it’s usually easy to hear the whirring engines of distant boats. Snorkeling that morning, he remembered hearing a lot of engine sounds.
But as he kicked toward shore, Talley Girl seemed to appear without warning from “out of nowhere,” he recalled.
“I guess this boat was going really fast and I didn’t have time to really hear and process that engine sound coming toward me,” he said. “Next thing I know, I look to the north and I see this big boat headed straight at me.”
It was about 50 feet away and closing fast. Its pointed green-and-white hull looked like the tip of an oncoming spear.
”I had maybe three or four seconds to think about what’s going on,” he said. ”And I knew those next few seconds would mean life or death.”
He swam as fast as he could, but realized there was no escape.
“At that moment, I thought to myself, I can’t let this boat hit my torso or my head. So, I swam to the side and got as far away as I could from it and had my limbs facing the boat.”
Maybe, he thought in that final frantic moment before impact, he could somehow push off or spring away as the boat hit him.
“It was a very swift kind of crashing motion on me. It was very fast, very sudden,” said Viss, who believes he was struck by the engine on the far right.
“I don’t really remember seeing it hit me. I just remember the aftermath.”
The boat that struck Carter Viss on Nov. 28, 2019, the Talley Girl, had three engines, each with five-blade propellers. The boat is shown here after the accident in a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission lot.
As he bobbed in the boat’s wake, the ocean water clouding red with his blood, the horror of what had just happened came into focus.
“I looked down and saw my arm on the ocean floor,” he recalled in a calm and easy tone.
“This isn’t real. This didn’t just happen,” he remembers thinking.
I looked down and saw my arm on the ocean floor.
“And then I saw both of my legs were cut open, too. And I didn’t even notice this arm was injured because this wrist was broken,” he said, holding up his left wrist.
“After I saw my legs, I started trying to swim and I just couldn’t because I couldn’t use my limbs.
“There was blood everywhere. I was trying to keep my head up. I was inhaling water. At that moment, I was like, ‘This is it. I’m not making it through this. There’s no way.’”
He screamed for help and prepared to slip beneath the waves.
“That’s when I saw Andy swim up on me.”
Earl was about 25 feet east of Viss, his head down as he swam toward shore. When he heard the loud engines of a passing boat, he lifted his head out of the water with the intention of yelling to Viss, “Holy s—, that boat was close.”
But before he could say anything, he saw Viss bobbing in the water and screaming.
Earl was rocked by waves from Talley Girl ’s wake as he swam to his friend. Seeing the horrific injuries, he struggled to hide his own shock and he focused on keeping Viss’ head above water.
Raininger, who didn’t know either of the men, paddleboarded over to help. She and Earl both used their bare hands to squeeze the end of Viss’ severed arm, stemming the blood.
It’s over, it’s over! I’m done!
Raininger started to fashion a tourniquet from the cord of her paddleboard. By now, Talley Girl had returned, alerted by the screams of Raininger and others who watched the accident unfold.
Danny Stanton’s brother-in-law called 911 from the boat, dispatching a crew from Palm Beach Fire Rescue Station No. 98 five blocks away. Stanton grabbed a first aid kit and helped Earl pull Viss onto the dive platform on the back of the boat.
Viss could see his dive rope tangled in the propellers. Then he started to panic with the possibility he might not survive.
“It’s over!” he moaned. “It’s over, it’s over! I’m done!”
Earl later would admit that he wasn’t sure Viss would survive, either. But as they were ferried toward paramedics, who were wading waist-deep into the surf to collect Viss’ mangled body, Earl refused to let his friend give up hope.
He held Viss’ hand — he didn’t know it was cut and broken; it was covered by a dive glove — and looked into his eyes.
“I said, ‘Carter, God is with us, God is with us,’” he recalled, choking back tears.
Those words of comfort turned out to be a pivotal moment, an injection of light into the darkness that was trying to swallow Viss.
“I was in sheer panic,” he recalled, “and when Andy said that, there was a peace that came over me. It was like nothing I’d felt before.
That was God working through me. I remember looking up at the sky and, you know, I forgot about it for a few seconds. It was just pure peace. It changed from ‘this is the end’ to ‘this is a survival story.
“That was God working through me. I remember looking up at the sky and, you know, I forgot about it for a few seconds. It was just pure peace. It changed from ‘this is the end’ to ‘this is a survival story.’
“And then it was like, ‘All right, let’s get to the ambulance, let’s get to the hospital.’”
More than 50 people, off work and enjoying a sunny holiday, were on the beach as the tragic scene unfolded.
“I heard this life-altering scream,” Kristin Lopopolo told investigators. “It wasn’t a child’s play scream; it was a cry for help.”
Others gasped as paramedics carried Viss on a gurney out of the surf, up the beach and into an ambulance.
“As horrible as it was,’’ Viss recalled, “I was in the ambulance about eight minutes after the impact. It was an amazing amount of time. Everyone was in the right spot to help.”
He remembers yelling his dad’s cellphone number to the police before an excruciating 5-mile ride to St. Mary’s Medical Center.
“Every little bump was just a ton of pain,” he said. “I was screaming. I remember (the paramedics) telling the driver to slow down.”
Hit by a boat in the ocean. Now Carter Viss tells his tale of survival
After he watched his arm sink in the ocean, Carter Viss had a moment with God: “It changed from ‘this is the end’ to ‘this is a survival story.’”
Joe Forzano, Palm Beach Post
After the ambulance sped away, Stanton Jr., his white polo shirt stained with blood, collapsed in tears by the entrance to the beach.
Stanton’s mother arrived and consoled him.
“As she embraced her son, he began to weep and spontaneously stated he was driving the boat and looking left and right, but he did not see the dive flags or any divers in the area of the crash,” a police report said.
A police officer who boarded the Talley Girl after the accident saw “multiple open cans,” including the alcoholic beverage Truly Hard Seltzer, and “a light blue mug with a clear lid containing the words ‘Danny Boy’ in the cup holder near the steering wheel. The mug contained an unknown clear liquid,” a report said.
An FWC investigation concluded that alcohol did not contribute to the crash. But the agency faulted Stanton for going too fast within 300 feet of a dive flag, reckless operation of a vessel and not paying close enough attention to his surroundings.
In the trauma bay at St. Mary’s Medical Center, Dr. Robert Borrego, the hospital’s chief of trauma, worked quickly with surgeon Mario Rueda and surgical resident James El Haddi to control the bleeding and assess Viss’ injuries.
The right arm was severed just above the elbow. The left hand and wrist was broken and had a 4-inch long laceration that barely missed the median nerve. The right knee was dislocated and had deep lacerations. The lower left leg had multiple fractures and deep gashes, the left foot bluish in color.
“Can you tell me your name?” Borrego asked his patient.
“Carter Viss,” he replied. But that’s about all he could say before he was sedated and put on a ventilator.
“Dr. B,” as Borrego is known to some colleagues, has treated more patients with catastrophic injuries than he’d like to remember in his 30 years at St. Mary’s. He served as a combat surgeon in the Iraq War in 2003.
Knowing that “massive blood loss and shock” can lead to organ failure, Borrego said he and his team weren’t sure how much longer their patient would survive.
“It’s a matter of how much reserve you have whether you can continue to battle and survive it,” he said.
“He was very critical for the first 48 to 72 hours. Just the fact that he was able to make it with that degree of injuries to the hospital in and of itself is amazing.”
When orthopedic surgeon Dilhan Abeyewardene joined the team in the operating room, a professional debate ensued over the fate of Viss’ legs. Although the right knee cap was nearly severed, the lower left leg was in even worse condition.
But Dr. A. — as the Viss family refers to Abeyewardene (pronounced Ah-bay-WARD-na) — persuaded the team to try to save both legs, even though “that probably wasn’t the most popular decision in the room,” he said.
“Initially, they had thought they were going to amputate one or both of the legs,” he said. “I kind of was able to pump the brakes on that and just say, ‘Hey, look, let’s try to fix this and see where it goes. He already lost one arm. He’s a young kid. Let’s try everything possible.’”
Viss’ severed right arm was found by a diver, but there was no hope of reattaching it.
In the hours after the accident, dining rooms and kitchens full of Thanksgiving dishes were abandoned as Viss’ friends scrambled to St. Mary’s.
Congregants from Truth Point Church prayed over his bed and played music. Loggerhead co-workers and PBAU friends kept a bedside vigil as Viss’ parents flew in from Colorado on a red-eye.
Leila and Chuck Viss had been driving home from a church service in Denver when they checked their phone messages. A Palm Beach police officer told them about the accident and urged them to call St. Mary’s.
“They suggested we fly out because they didn’t know if he was going to live,” Chuck Viss said, sobbing as he recalled the phone call. “We had to pull over and weep in a parking lot.”
When Leila and Chuck arrived the next morning, they were “told to remain calm” as they entered their son’s ICU room.
“As we walked towards his bed I remember my knees buckling,” Leila wrote in a journal entry.
“He was massive … because his body was so swollen from the trauma.
“Long ‘door handles’ called external fixators were screwed into his left leg to align and hold the bones together. A tube was stuffed down his throat deep into his chest and was secured with tape across his lips and face. A black brace fastened with Velcro around his right knee and thigh locked them both in place. Plastic that looked like packing tape clung to his right shin and was connected to what we would learn later on to be a wound vac. His entire left hand, his dominant hand, was wrapped in ice and bandages in the shape of a boxing glove. The right arm was missing its forearm…
“The body of our Carter was changed forever.”
For the next five days, Viss ran a fever and drifted in and out of sedation. Doctors and nurses washed his wounds to ward off infections that can be brought on by warm sea water.
Slowly, he improved. On Dec. 3, the breathing tube was removed, allowing him to talk. He thought it was Friday, the day after the accident, Leila wrote in the journal.
“He also said, unprompted … ‘I swam as fast as I could.’”
On Dec. 5, Dr. Borrego told Viss’ family that he was “ecstatic about his condition” and said “90% of the battle has been won.”
But they knew the remaining 10 percent wouldn’t be easy. He would spend two more months in the hospital recovering from follow-up surgeries to repair his limbs.
That would be followed by more months of occupational therapy and coming to terms with radical “ABA” lifestyle changes — “ABA” an acronym his mother coined in the blog for “After the Boating Accident.”
Dr. Abeyewardene said he was amazed by Viss’ ability to recover without infections or significant setbacks that could have “railroaded” the decision to save his legs.
“Like I told Carter, he could have been easily wheelchair-bound barring a number of different things,” Dr. A said.
“I can’t reinforce more how much his mentality helped him during his recovery. That kid is incredibly mentally strong.”
Leila Viss quit her job as a University of Denver piano professor and Chuck Viss took a leave of absence from his job with Oracle to help their middle son recover. They moved temporarily to West Palm Beach.
“It has rocked our world. It was a complete 180 from where we were the day before Thanksgiving,” said Chuck, who said he has been seeing a therapist.
I felt like I was going to implode if I didn’t write things down.
The day after the accident, Leila Viss started writing the online journal. It offered updates and photographs of his recovery, but also poignant anecdotes about how the ordeal affected the family, including Viss’ brothers.
“I felt like I was going to implode if I didn’t write things down,” she said. “I do believe it has been my therapy.”
Leila has spoken about the ordeal in her music podcast and is adapting the online journal into a memoir.
”I am 10 chapters in,” she said. ”I don’t know what the end looks like but I have a working title: No Wake Zone.”
The day after Christmas, she compiled a list of “unexpected gifts” from her son’s accident. The top five were:
“An additional member of our family — Andy — who saved Carter’s life.
“A new family friend for life — Christine — who also saved Carter’s life.
“Dr. Borrego’s availability to operate on Carter when he arrived at the ER.
“Dr. A’s determination to save Carter’s legs.
“The fact that like his grandpa Wil, Carter is left handed.”
On Dec. 31, Viss’ parents and brothers took a boat ride over the reef where he was struck.
“It was hard to believe that the accident happened in such a vast area just off the coast,” Leila wrote in the journal. “It was also a surprise to see that boats are allowed to motor at any speed through this sanctuary known for its sea turtles, exotic fish, coral and snorkeling.”
Some of the best medicine Viss received in the hospital, he said, was the outpouring of support from family, friends and strangers, including people on the beach the day he was injured who reached out to offer well wishes.
Among his many hospital visitors was Don Chester, a St. Mary’s administrator who was hit by a car and paralyzed from the waist down 15 years ago while running to train as a triathlete.
Viss also met a former Navy SEAL who lost a leg in a parachuting accident, and an Army sergeant who lost an arm when he was hit by a car.
“The Chesters were extremely helpful,” Leila Viss said, referring to Don, his wife, Sally, and their dog, Iggy, who came to Carter’s bedside in the first weeks.
While binging episodes of “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” on his laptop from his hospital bed, Viss never stopped thinking about his post-accident plan to lobby for safety changes to protect swimmers near reefs.
As an unofficial launch to his campaign, he decided to make his hospital release public.
“I’m ready to get home, start a new chapter and push forward,” he told a local TV crew as he was wheeled out of St. Mary’s on Feb. 3, more than two months after that fateful Thanksgiving Day.
On a muggy August afternoon, Viss gingerly made his way up a 6-foot stepladder at Loggerhead Marinelife Center, where he has worked since 2016 as a maintenance technician.
It was dinnertime for the hungry inhabitants of the center’s aquariums. Leaning over the tops of large tanks, he lowered his left hand to the water’s surface and sprinkled food that was eagerly gobbled up by swarming white grunt, lionfish, bluehead wrasse and queen angelfish.
He returned to work in June, an achievement he knows is rich in irony — a boat-strike survivor working at a facility known for rescuing sea turtles injured by boat strikes.
Among the other post-accident firsts he and his family have celebrated since he left the hospital: Casting a fishing rod and playing Bach on the piano with just his left hand, preparing his favorite meal of Mediterranean chicken shawarma with rice and hummus, and testing his surgically repaired legs with a mile-long walk from his apartment to the Juno Beach Pier.
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“His first day back at work, I’m thinking, ‘Is he going to be able to get up on a ladder to get to the aquarium?’ He’s got limited bend in his right leg,” recalled Earl, a Loggerhead technician. “But he went right up and I was like, ‘OK, do your thing!’”
His next big first will be getting back into the ocean. He said he wants to go snorkeling again. He may try in a few weeks.
“I just want to get back to what I was doing normally before this,” he said. “That has kept me motivated the whole time because I really love snorkeling and fishing and I can’t imagine life without that. So I’ve got to get back to what I love.”
Eventually, he hopes to work closely again with sea turtles, the center’s stars, like he did before the accident, when he often helped co-workers lug rehabilitated 150-pound turtles back to the ocean.
Since 2015, the center has encountered nearly 160 sea turtles injured from boat strikes.
“We see the worst of the worst when it comes to boat strikes,” Viss said.
“Now I’ve got this experience. I was hit by a boat. I can use this to educate people.”
In the 10 months since the accident, Viss has grown closer with Earl. They go fishing at least once a week, chronicling their adventures in their shared ”floridafishboyz” Instagram account, and in July they launched a loggerhead video series.
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Viss and Earl have stayed in touch with Raininger, a native of Ontario who works as a wildlife biologist for the FWC. All three still talk periodically about their shared emotional scars.
“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through in life,” said Earl, 36, who still remembers how Raininger hugged him after he fell to his knees in the sand and cried as the ambulance took Viss to the hospital.
“We could have taken a very negative kind of route mentally. We could have gone down a very dark path,” he said.
He said Viss’ positive attitude in the aftermath of the accident has been inspiring.
“It’s a gift, really, that he can see the light in the tragedy and the positives that can come out of this,” said Earl, a native of Illinois who said he had trouble sleeping for months after the accident.
But Earl and Raininger know their mental struggles are not at all comparable to what Viss has endured.
Fishing one day in August near Sandhill Crane Park in Palm Beach Gardens, Viss got distracted by the sight of a large motorboat being backed into a canal from a parking lot launch.
“It brings back memories, especially seeing the engines on the boat. When I see propellers, I get a little squeamish, I guess,” he said.
And he intends to return to The Breakers reef to snorkel, even though he knows that might produce “some uncomfortable feelings.”
But he has no difficulties sharing details of the accident.
“I have kind of come to terms with it,” he said. “I remember it for a reason and I feel pretty comfortable talking about it.”
One of the most loyal readers of the Viss family’s online journal is the man who drove the boat that caused Carter Viss’ life-changing injuries.
“I check it every single day,” Danny Stanton said. “It’s my routine in the morning.”
While Stanton said reading the journal has been ”incredibly difficult” because it reminds him of what happened to Viss, he said it’s also uplifting to see how courageous Viss has been through his recovery.
Stanton said he has been consumed with remorse for the past 10 months. He said he has flashbacks of the accident and trouble sleeping.
“Not a day has passed since Thanksgiving where I haven’t thought about the terrible events of that day and all that Carter has been through since,” he said, pausing several times during an interview to compose himself.
“It weighs on me every day, and I imagine it will weigh on me every day for the rest of my life.”
In September, Stanton was charged with one count of willful and reckless operation of a vessel, a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail. He has pleaded not guilty.
For months after the accident, Stanton said, he “didn’t step foot on” Talley Girl, “didn’t even go down to the dock,” he said.
In the spring, he was invited on a friend’s boat. It was a difficult first step, he said, that eventually led to his emotional ability to take Talley Girl out again. But when he’s on board, he said, Viss is never far from his mind.
“Personally I would very much look forward to the day where I hope to meet Carter and get to know him,” said Stanton, who reached a confidential out-of-court settlement with Viss in December.
Asked what he might say to Viss if such a meeting were to happen, Stanton was silent for a long moment.
“I think about that every day,” he finally said, “and my short answer is, I’m not sure. The weight of what I’ve felt throughout this entire experience, that range of emotions is so broad and so deep that I don’t think there is anything I can say to convey everything that I’ve felt since that day.”
In February, Dan Stanton Sr. reached out to Chuck Viss by phone. The two fathers had “a very nice, civil and heartfelt conversation” and discussed the possibility of meeting in person some day, Dan Stanton said.
Stanton Sr. is a former board chairman at The Benjamin School in Palm Beach Gardens, where in 2009 he founded the Dan Stanton Leadership Speaker Series to expose students to professionals who have excelled or overcome adversity.
Speakers have included a World Trade Center executive whose firm lost half its employees in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, golf great Jack Nicklaus, retired Army Sgt. Matt Eversmann of the ill-fated Blackhawk Down mission in Somalia, and professional surfer Bethany Hamilton, who lost her left arm in a 2003 shark attack.
This summer, the school’s headmaster asked Stanton Sr. for ideas for future lectures. At the time, the thought of having Viss as a possible speaker didn’t cross Stanton’s mind.
But at some point, he said, he might reach out to Viss with an invitation.
“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” said Stanton Sr., who chairs a town of Palm Beach advisory board. “Carter would be a very welcomed speaker there if he were ever willing to do that and talk about the impact of an accident and the lessons learned.”
There were 723 boating accidents reported in Florida in 2019, including 65 in Palm Beach County, the third-highest among Florida’s counties, according to FWC’s annual Boating Accident Statistical Report.
The majority of the accidents involved boats colliding with boats. Viss’ accident was one of three in which a boat struck a person and the only one in the Atlantic Ocean.
That shouldn’t diminish the need for a no-wake zone around The Breakers reef and reduced speed limits near reefs, Viss said, pointing out that snorkelers often worry about the proximity of boats.
“I did everything right to stay safe out there and it still happened,” said Viss, who graduated from PBAU in 2017.
When the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, he wants to talk to boat safety classes and eventually to the policymakers who can create no-wake zones.
If he succeeds, it would be the first no-wake zone in the open ocean. Friends already have a name — “Carter’s Law.”
But considering the challenges faced by Jupter residents who have been trying for years to establish a no-wake zone in a small section of the Intracoastal Waterway, Viss has a lot of work to do.
“I figure I’ve got to go full force into it,” he said. “That would be more accomplishments than I thought I could ever achieve in my life, if I could make an impact on ocean conservation like that.”
One person wants to help.
“I would very much look forward to a day and opportunity to work with Carter,” Danny Stanton said, “to do whatever possible to ensure that something like this never happens again.”
On Sept. 28, exactly 10 months after the accident, Viss stood on the beach behind Loggerhead Marinelife Center for a group portrait with the four people he credits with saving his life — Earl, Raininger, Dr. Borrego and Dr. Abeyewardene.
At their 10-month reunion, Dr. Robert Borrego, from left, Dr. Dilhan Abeyewardene, Carter Viss, Andy Earl and Christine Raininger meet on the beach. The doctors from St. Mary’s Medical Center saved Viss’ legs and repaired his broken hand after the Thanksgiving Day 2019 accident. To get him to the hospital alive, his friend, Earl, kept him afloat while Raininger, a stranger, tied a tourniquet on his severed arm.
Everyone wore masks, but no one was worried about social distancing, as evident in the handshakes and hugs that greeted Viss, who wore a “Life Is Good” T-shirt.
“You’re an amazing person. You’re a role model,” Borrego told Viss in a quiet moment after a photographer snapped the portrait.
As the group walked back to their cars, Earl remarked how the one-year anniversary of the accident was just two months away.
“It really gives new meaning to Thanksgiving,” he said.
As for Viss, he said he doesn’t have any special plans for Thanksgiving Day. Then he smiled and offered a wisecrack that made the group erupt in laughter:
“I’ll probably stay out of the water.”
Staff researcher Melanie Mena contributed to this story.
jcapozzi@pbpost.com
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