Man's Sky-Diving Vacation Went Badly Wrong
By Booyeon Lee, Union Tribune

Will Slattery was swimming alone in the Pacific Ocean, prepared to die.

Then he saw a log, barely recognizable in the moonlight. He'd been trying to stay above the ocean swells for what seemed like hours, after parachuting out of a plane that crashed off Costa Rica.

He couldn't imagine what a log, about 7 feet long and 2 feet wide, was doing in the middle of the ocean. But then again, he couldn't believe that he was alone at night on the open sea.

Exhausted and his legs bloody from jellyfish stings, Slattery pulled himself up on the log and fell asleep. As the sun came up, and as he was preparing to abandon the water-saturated log that was beginning to sink, Slattery saw several boats in the distance. He swam toward what appeared to be a channel, then stood on top of the log waving at the boats. A fishing boat motored toward him.

"I was on my last legs," said Slattery at his home in Rancho Bernardo.

Each time he had resigned himself to death, he faced a miracle, he said. He escaped the plane seconds before it crashed, found a log in the middle of the ocean, then was spotted by a group of fishermen.

"This was something I absolutely could not fight or get out of," he said. "It was not a matter of when I would go, but how."

Slattery, 34, arrived back in San Diego on Sunday, after spending about two weeks in Costa Rica, recovering from dehydration and sunburn.

He is the sole surviver of a plane crash May 31 that set off a four-day search by the Red Cross and the Costa Rican coast guard. The small plane carried a pilot and five sky-divers staying at a beach Resort in Estrillos Este, a coastal town about 80 miles south of San José.

Slattery had been vacationing with two friends he had met through Skydive Elsinore, a drop zone in Lake Elsinore. Jimmy Simplicio and Manny Sanchez of Lake Elsinore jumped out of the plane with Slattery seconds before it crashed, but did not survive.

"It was supposed to be a short, fun vacation," Slattery said. "We found $200 plane tickets. How could we pass that up?"

The morning of the crash, as the three men ate breakfast together at the resort, Slattery said they talked excitedly about the sky-diving experience ahead and didn't worry about the clouds gathering in the sky.

The Cessna 206 also carried the Canadian owner of the resort, Milt Burton, and Costa Ricans Jean Roman and pilot Jorge Meléndez Mora. They were on their fifth jump at about 5 p.m. when the plane started jolting uncontrollably. Slattery believes it had hit a microburst, a sudden violent downdraft.

He remembers Sanchez yelling, "Open the door!" Slattery pulled the door open, jumped, and felt his parachute snap open. He saw his two friends floating nearby. Seconds later, he heard a splash and saw the tail of the plane sinking into the water.

After plunging into the ocean, Slattery unhooked the parachute, took off his shirt and sandals and tried swimming toward his friends.

"But the parachutes were acting like sails, pulling them away. I couldn't get to them," Slattery said, covering his face. "It seemed like seconds. . . . I was alone in the middle of the ocean."

The fishermen who discovered Slattery the following day were from Los Sueños, about 40 miles north of where Slattery and his friends were staying.

Despite Slattery's objections, he was flown to a hospital in San José. "I was twitching, saying 'I don't want to fly!' " he said.

A few days after the crash, Slattery returned to the Bacara Beach Resort to meet the grieving families of Burton and Sanchez. By then, the authorities had recovered their bodies. He spent about a week telling family members the story of his escape and his last moments with the men who died.

In the days after the crash, fellow divers gathered at Skydive Elsinore searching for information online.

"These were our best friends out there," said Brian Haemmerle of Borrego Springs. He sky-dived with Slattery, Sanchez and Simplicio almost every weekend.

"We're sort of cried out," Haemmerle said. "We've mourned and now we want to give them a send-off."

On July 2, Skydive Elsinore is holding a memorial event and a fundraiser. Several friends of the three men had hired a search crew, at a cost of about $10,000. Anyone who pays for tandem sky-diving that day can request a portion of the money go to a fund to pay for the cost of the search.

At his home Tuesday, Slattery grimaced occasionally from chest pains and had bruises and scars on his legs. A full-time caretaker of his grandmother who has Alzheimer's disease, Slattery said he has hired people to reorganize his home to create a "clean space to deal with whatever's coming my way."

Doctors have told him that post-traumatic stress disorder often sets in weeks after a traumatic event.

"It was both a tragic and miraculous week for me, my friends and family," he said. "But for everyone else, it was pure tragedy that was completely out of their hands. I got to fight for my life. The others didn't.