Capt. Jim Berry and his crew helped with the rescue and recovery effort 35 years ago after the Summit Venture crashed into the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
The day was May 9, 1980.
Writer Kent Chetlain put readers inside Berry’s boats.
They were two men on different life journeys. But Chetlain’s story about the aftermath, including an interview with Berry, remains powerful more than three decades later.
Berry owned the Cortez boat fleet, operated out of an office on the southeast side of the Cortez Bridge, where Tide Tables Restaurant and Marina, 12507 Cortez Road W., operates today.
Under poor weather conditions, Berry had canceled the morning fishing trip. They were poised at the docks to have a forgettable Friday. However, it was anything but forgettable.
Chetlain was a reporter for the former Anna Maria Islander newspaper who covered the disaster up close. His stories appeared in both the Anna Maria paper and the Lakeland Ledger. The partnership was possible because The New York Times, which owned the Ledger, had purchased the Anna Maria Islander about a week before the disaster.
Berry, whose business took tourists on fishing excursions, later told his story to tourists on boats he steered to where the Summit Venture met its fate. Captained by John Lerro, the 600-foot freighter veered off course in a heavy rain and struck the bridge. The roadway collapsed, plummeting a bus and several other vehicles into Tampa Bay, killing 35.
Chetlain, now 87, lives at Inspired Living at Hidden Lakes, an assisted living community in Bradenton. Greeting a visitor from his wheelchair April 25, Chetlain’s memory of the disaster was still good. He was on the scene early.
“There was a lot of stuff floating around, a lot of curious people,” he said. “But there was no story to really speak of, other than describing the debris.”
Chetlain found his writing voice. His prose, still posted online, was urgent — and elegant.
“The identification tag dangling from the light blue garment bag read: Brenda Green, Miami, Fla. It was among the drenched purses, handbags, caps, odd shoes and other flotsam picked up by the Coast Guard and rescue workers aboard deep sea fishing boat, the Miss Cortez II, while combing through the melancholy waters of Tampa Bay.”
Chetlain reported in The Ledger that Berry, “looking all of the classic sea captain with his Lincolnesque beard framing a solid face under a beaked cap, stood by the front railing as the Miss Cortez II hove into its slip.”
Berry, now 82 and a resident of Westminster Towers & Shores in Bradenton, still has the beard. He and daughter Jamie, who was 24 when she responded to the disaster with her father, spoke April 29 about the disaster.
Hearing the mayday call, they scrambled. They knew they had to respond.
“The search was on and we were hunting for people alive,” Berry said. “It finally got to the point where we realized people were not going to be alive. We spotted some bodies in the water.
“The thing that will probably burn the longest is we pulled two of the victims out of the water; one lady and one man. The lady drowned, but the man’s face was severed.” It was hanging by skin on one side.”
Chetlain wrote about a third body the crew of the Miss Cortez II saw, but they were unable to reach it before it sank. Someone else recovered that body later.
In his story, Chetlain described a “macabre scene.” Berry was worried that the sight of mangled bodies might affect his young crew members psychologically.
“They weren’t used to that,” Berry said. He was, having seen violent death while serving in Korea and Vietnam during his 21 years in the Army.
After the full scope of the disaster was evident, the Coast Guard radioed out seeking assistance from as many boaters as possible. Berry’s three party boats responded to the accident.
Chetlain detailed the efforts of a number of men and women from Manatee County who joined the rescue and recovery effort. Many worked for Berry.
Capt. Art Zalampas and mate Eddie Ranft were aboard the Miss Cortez. Capt. Kevin McGeary and mate Phil Hepler were aboard the Miss Cortez II.
Capt. Bob Locke and deckhand John Chapman were with Berry on the Miss Cortez III for the recovery of bodies.
Locke, Chetlain wrote, said they knew the dead man had a wallet, but they didn’t want to disturb the bodies.
“It looked like he had his work clothes on,” Locke said April 30. “He was all by himself.”
Bradenton Beach commercial fisherman Dan Eppie, Capt. Andy Rasmussen, then a Bradenton Beach councilman, and Cortez retiree Ken Henry were among those who hopped in boats and went out, as Chetlain observed, “to view the wounded span and the seemingly fruitless efforts to retrieve bodies of the victims.”
Jamie Berry responded in the Little Miss, a 22-foot outboard boat, arriving with Rick Ellis. Chetlain evinced her tone as “pathetically hopeless” as she described seeing baby shoes floating in the water. Berry said April 29 she had those baby shoes in her pocket when she reached the dock.
Thirty-five years later, Jamie Berry, a resident of Cortez, remembers “that it was a horrible day.” She recalls the rain and how she could not believe the bridge was down.
The rain “silhouetted the back span so well,” she said. “When you got up there it was just a total shock.”
Bud Johnson, 65, now a semi-retired Manatee County Sheriff’s deputy from Bradenton, was on the department’s dive team in 1980. He joined the Skyway recovery effort May 10-11.
By the end of May 9, the day of the disaster, all of the bodies had been recovered, he said. Still, there was work to do.
Johnson’s crew was assigned to dive the area underneath the bridge, where the boat made contact. Visibility was poor. There was a lot of trash in the water.
Back on the span, Johnson said, “the sight of all of the twisted steel was overwhelming. I don’t think any of us had ever seen anything quite like that,” he said.
More than three decades after the disaster, many of these men and women — from Cortez and other parts of the county — who responded to the mayday call have either died, moved away or live in the area but are difficult to locate. Some who were contacted chose not to speak on the record about what they saw that day and how it affected their lives.
Locke, 65, of Holmes Beach, worked as a boat captain and construction foreman before retiring. He and his son still occasionally take tourists out on their fishing boat.
The Berrys were in the fishing and sightseeing business for nearly 30 years. Jamie Berry said her father has forever been a leader.
“He’s always been able to tell somebody without too much exertion how to go about doing stuff,” she said. “The guys followed his lead that day.”
“It was a tragic thing,” Chetlain said of the disaster. He left journalism not long after writing his Skyway disaster story, to pursue a political career.
Chetlain served three terms — 1982-94 — as a Manatee County commissioner.
More photos and stories from the Skyway disaster and the original mayday call are archived on The Islander website. Readers are welcome to add their memories in comments.