Reunited With Her Rescuers

Thirty-five years after two fishermen plucked a young girl from the Pacific Ocean, a podcast leads to a remarkable reunion

- Faith E Pinho

She had been drifting in the cold Pacific water for a night and most of a day.

Kept afloat by her orange life jacket, nine-year-old Desireé Rodriguez had watched helplessly as one family member after another let go of life. Just as she, too, began to give up, the skipper of a fishing boat spotted her bobbing in the water. Within minutes, the boat’s first officer leaped in and grabbed Desireé, pulling her back toward the boat—and toward life.

That was 35 years ago, and the last time the rescuers and the girl saw one another. Until this year.

May 18, 1986, was the kind of beautiful, sunny day that regularly brought the Rodriguez family to California’s Catalina Island for some fishing on their 28-foot pleasure boat, the DC Too.

Desireé’s father, a 30-year-old construction worker named Thomas Rodriguez, loved the sport, especially catching bass. A strong, slender man, he had instilled in his oldest daughter a love of the outdoors, teaching her how to bait a hook and cast a line.

As was their custom at least once a month, the family boarded their boat that morning for a carefree day trip. For the first time, Thomas’s sister, Corinne Wheeler, 33, and her husband, Allen Wheeler, 34, had decided to join them, leaving their three children at home in the Riverside, California neighbourhood where both families lived. They spent the day fishing in the Pacific Ocean, then left the island in the early evening. Soon dense fog rolled in.

Desireé fell into a light sleep beside her five-year-old sister, Trisha, at a table on the boat’s lower deck. Their father’s sharp orders startled her awake: “Get out of the boat. The boat’s sinking!”