Charleston SC -- It was an ugly, gray morning on the Gulf Stream, and an angry sea of 12-foot waves stood between Johnny Wayne Brown and home.
For eight days, he'd fished the Stream with Tony Bessent, his brother-in-law, and Gary McCombs aboard the 48-foot Hatteras Tracie Lynn. It had been a good trip: The hold was filled with iced-down grouper and snapper. A nice payday awaited them on shore.
On this morning, April 2, 2005, it was too rough for fishing, so the three men sat in the Tracie Lynn's wheelhouse drinking coffee. They already had caught what they needed and were ready to call it quits. Now all they could do was wait for a break in the weather to make for Murrells Inlet.
Bessent and McCombs listened to music over the satellite radio, but Johnny could hear nothing. Deaf since he was a baby, he navigated the world in silence. He had long ago refused to succumb to his disability, instead turning it into an asset. His deafness gave him what seemed to be an extraordinary concentration for fishing, for hunting, for any number of other hobbies and vocations. He'd been commercial fishing for 20 years and was one of the best in his home town of Murrells Inlet.
With nothing to do but wait, Johnny was bored. While Bessent and McCombs talked, Johnny leaned against the rocking bulkhead and drifted off to sleep.
The Tracie Lynn was 50 miles off Cape Fear, and the weather showed no signs of abating. The wind blew at 40 to 60 knots, tropical storm force, and the boat disappeared in troughs of blue-gray water, only to pop up atop a swell moments later. It was an unnerving roller coaster ride, but nothing that a bunch of veteran fishermen hadn't seen before.
Bessent stood up to stretch about 9 a.m. and walked to the wheelhouse door. It had been tied open with a bungee cord so the three men could get a fresh breeze without the door slamming against the bulkhead.
As he looked outside, Bessent saw the wave out of the corner of his eye. It was a rogue Bessent guessed to be 30 or 40 feet high. He yelled to McCombs to look out, to hold on.
Just before the wave hit, Bessent caught a glimpse of Johnny, peacefully sleeping with his head against the hull.
'The hearing world'
Johnny was born on Feb. 21, 1967, the sixth of Brenda and Jack Brown's seven children. They lived in Socastee, a rural community a few miles inland from Myrtle Beach.
Just after his first birthday, as Johnny was beginning to walk and talk, he came down with spinal meningitis. Before he recovered, the accompanying fevers burned out his hearing.
Barely more than a year old, Johnny was deaf.
He refused to let an inability to hear stop him. When his brothers and sisters ran off to play in the woods, he followed along. He acted as if he weren't deaf.
'He did everything the others did and some things he shouldn't have,' his mother remembered.
'He learned to live within the hearing world.'
Johnny took to sign language quickly and taught his family as well. They developed their own symbols, a language only they spoke.
He spent his first year of school in special education classes in Myrtle Beach public schools, but his parents thought he needed more. They wanted to enroll him in the South Carolina School For the Deaf and the Blind in Spartanburg but refused to send him away. So the entire family moved.
'We did not want him to feel like he wasn't good enough and we were shipping him off,' Brown said.
Johnny became one of the most gifted and popular students at the school. He helped other students learn sign language. His sisters, Laura Abernathy and Lisa Bessent, joke that he was so nice to one particular female student most likely because 'he wanted to kiss her.'
After nine years, Johnny told his parents he wanted to return to the coast. They suspected he was thinking of them, but by then he was a teenager and the lure of the beach, of the water, had to appeal to him. The family moved to Murrells Inlet and Johnny commuted to the School for the Deaf and Blind, spending his weeks in Spartanburg and his weekends on the coast.
By the time he graduated in 1986, he had been homecoming king and quarterback of the football team.
At home on the water
Johnny spent a lot of time hanging out on the docks and eventually started working on fishing boats with sister Lisa's husband, Tony Bessent.
Bessent got Johnny a job on the Beth-Anne, and Johnny quickly proved adept at the job.
'He was one of the best, if not the best,' Lisa Bessent said. 'Most guys on the boat would be talking or listening to music, but Johnny couldn't hear any of that. He just concentrated on the fish.'
He fished, got married, had two sons and eventually divorced. When his ex-wife moved with his children to Tennessee, he stayed behind. He often hung out at his mother's house, watching the Weather Channel, a habit for fishermen. When kids ran through the house, leaving the adults screaming for them to be quiet, Johnny just laughed. He said he couldn't hear a thing.
'One day he was watching 'Storm Stories,' and he told me he wanted to be buried at sea,' Brown said. 'I told him I wouldn't allow it.'
He grew restless if he spent too much time on land. He only wanted to fish, and only with his brother-in-law. His brothers tried to get him into the floor covering business, but Johnny wouldn't stick with it for long. Even after he met Samantha Feazell and made plans to marry in June 2005, he wouldn't stop fishing.
One day, he and his fiancee walked along the Murrells Inlet waterfront. He stopped at a bench engraved with the names of some people lost at sea, and he told her that one day his name would be there, too.
Despite this, he didn't hesitate when Bessent told him they'd been hired to run the Tracie Lynn. Johnny was excited. He was going back to sea.
Rescue
The wave hit the Tracie Lynn like a bomb. One minute the boat was there, the next it was just gone.
Bessent found himself in an air pocket beneath the boat and somehow spotted McCombs beneath him. Using his feet, Bessent pulled McCombs up next to him. He said, 'If you want to get out of here, follow me.'
Somehow the two men navigated the sinking wreckage of the Hatteras, eventually popping up on the confused seas. Before they had time to consider the hopelessness of the situation, three of the Tracie Lynn's four survival suits broke the surface nearby.
Bessent dove beneath the water, looking for Johnny, but he couldn't find him. There was nothing but debris in sight, and the largest piece of the boat he found was the wheelhouse door, still tied to its frame with the bungee cord.
When he realized McCombs had drifted away from him and that he couldn't catch up, Bessent tied himself to the door with the bungee cord. At least, he thought, this way they'll find my body.
For two hours, Bessent struggled in the unforgiving sea, trying to get his survival suit on. In the distance, he saw that McCombs had found the Tracie Lynn's survival raft. He couldn't climb in, but eventually the waves pitched him into it.
After five hours in the water, Bessent saw a freighter, the Greek-flagged Sophia Britannia. He yelled and waved but was certain the ship's crew members hadn't seen him. Then they appeared to shoot at him.
Bessent thought they were just trying to put him out of his misery. Then he remembered his Navy training. They were shooting a line to him.
It took the freighter a while to stop, but the crew eventually got a ladder down to the surface and pulled Bessent up.
They nearly lost him because the survival suit had filled with water. Finally, one of the sailors produced a knife and Bessent could only say, 'Be careful.' He didn't want to be pulled from the sea only to have someone cut off his foot.
In the distance, a Coast Guard helicopter picked up McCombs. The wave had destroyed the Tracie Lynn five hours earlier, and Bessent and McCombs told the Coast Guard patrol another man was still out there.
For the next day, three Coast Guard helicopters, a C-130 plane and a 110-foot patrol boat scoured the heavy seas off Cape Fear.
The searchers never found more than debris. There was no sign of Johnny. Despite his family's pleas, the Coast Guard called off the search.
Two weeks later, another rogue wave, this one 70 feet high, hit the Norwegian Dawn in the same waters, forcing the cruise ship to divert to Charleston for repairs.
A memorial for all
The idea for a monument came just weeks after Johnny was lost. A cousin from New England had Johnny's name added to a list of lost sailors read during ceremonies at the Seaman's Bethel in New Bedford, Mass., a building immortalized in 'Moby Dick.'
The family wanted to do something special for Johnny closer to home, something like the monument to lost fishermen in Gloucester, Mass. They contacted Murrells Inlet 2007, a group finishing a 10-year community redevelopment plan. An idea was born.
The family has designed an 8-foot rectangular granite monument with Johnny's image engraved on it and raised the $23,000 for the memorial through fundraising efforts, benefit concerts and donations from the bikers who vacation on the Grand Strand every year.
Their efforts paid off quickly, and the family plans to dedicate the monument April 2, the anniversary of Johnny's death.
The family wants the monument to pay homage to every South Carolinian lost at sea and is taking applications from anyone who wants their lost family members' or friends' names added to the monument. The plan is to add names every year, and the family has set up a committee to verify any claims that come in to the office. So far, there have been about 14.
Still grieving, the family has declined to read the applications that come in every week. Tony Bessent can't even speak of the tragedy; and Johnny's sister, Laura Abernathy, said she can't bring herself to read the applications.
'I couldn't do it,' she said. 'It touches too close to home.'
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sorry to hear Reba. Hate to say this but I was definitely expecting that. There's no way bikes like yours and mine can be comfortable for long trip as 2-UP. I definitely do want to get bigger windshield. Mine is small and it does get pretty dang exhausting when wind is constantly blowing at you full-blast. 
what happened? it looks like you had an accident!
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for sharing. what a true seaman he is. this is a very touching story especially the part where the entire family moved with him when they wanted to send him to this deaf school.
