Help! My Seacraft sunk!!!

[bitsamonkey]

I'd like to thank everyone for their input.
I too have thought of using the gas tank to help float it by putting a valve on the vent tube and blocking the filler. Inner tubes are also on the list. It seems like keeping it from turning over is a real challenge. Another thing we're considering is salvaging the outboard first. We have a hookah and it's only in 20 feet. Then we could take our time with the hull, as well as making it a lot easier to get the transom out of the water. I just don't know how well I'll be able to work under water to unbolt the motor etc.
Now this is how this happened, though I still can't believe it:
Two things; I always kind of joked about the boat sinking, and that was because I really was afraid that one day it would. I just thought it would be at the dock while unattended.
The other is that no matter what the guy in the boat when it sank failed to do or not do, as the owner, it's my fault this happened.
Now the story: towards the end of a beautiful day of spearfishing the patch reefs off of Miami Beach, including the biggest red grouper any of us had ever shot, I went for the last dive with a buddy while a third friend stayed on the boat. Seas were less than 2 feet with a light NW wind. We were in 25' and on a hookah, which means we're attached to the boat by a hose. The bottom didn't look that great so I surfaced and asked my buddy on the boat to pull the anchor to drift over some new bottom. The current was going North at a trickle so we ended up North of the boat. At one point while pursuing a big gag we were at the end of the hose and listing felt some tugging, but nothing unusual as it felt like the boat pulling us south.
About two minutes later we felt some tugging, and now it was obvious the guy in the boat was tugging on the hose. I surfaced to see the boat listing beyond recovery and by the time I swam to the boat it was upside down.
We detached ourselves from the hookah, grabbed the life jackets and a hand held VHF and started swimming the ~2 miles towards shore. I tried to give a mayday on the vhf but it crapped out before getting anyone on channel 16... so much for water proof vhf (older icom). We all had wetsuits, life preservers and fins so we were not really afraid for our lives but not looking forward to a long swim in the dark after a full day of diving.
Several boats passed close enough to see the people on them without seeing or hearing us as well as a Coast Guard chopper and a really slow moving sailboat. My dive partner had poked our 6' pole spear through a life jacket and was swinging it back and forth the whole time.
After about half an hour and minutes before dark a crew out fishing on a 28 Whitewater spotted us, picked us up, and dropped us off at the beach a half a block from our buddy's house. They were nice enough to go back to the sunken boat and get some gps coordinates for us (I'd tied a life jacket to the anchor line as a float).
I guess a malfunctioning bilge pump float allowed water to flood the bilge. The guy in the boat was not paying attention to much until he said he noticed his flip flops floating around at which point he decided to bail the cockpit with a bucket. He told me a yacht came by and three waves washed over the outboard well and he kept bailing. He also says a little water had steadily been coming in but he didn't think much of it. At this point he said he could bail anymore because standing at the back of the boat was making more water come in. He says he hit turned on all 3 switches (the boat had a 2500 manual on and 1500 automatic bilge pump). He says he didn't hear any wirring so, I don't know turned them off? He says everything happened real fast and that's when he thought it might be a good idea to get my attention!
I'm sure everybody reading this is thinking of all the key things that would have made this a non-event:
- drop anchor and point bow into waves
- turn bilge pump on and leave it on
- pull up the hookah hose until my regulator is in his hands
- as a last resort, disconnect hookah start the motor and run the boat
Why none of those things happened:
- I did not specifically tell him where the bilge pump switches are (there are 3 switches on the whole boat lights, bilge and bilge)
- I didn't tell him what could happen if water started breaking over the 20" transom
- total pothead
Lessons learned:
countless, I need to write them all down to not forget any of the little details that occur to me as I replay the scenario in my mind.
I've had a boat my whole life starting at 9 years old with a 10' john boat and 4.5 merc. Plenty of sailing, offshore fishing and way to much info on boats, boat designs, safety, boat handling and on and on. My boats have not all been pretty, but always in very good working order, and until the 30th have always taken me home. My buddy has been fishing at least once a week for the last 15 - 20 years so when I was laying on top of my upside down seacraft I could not understand how this happened.
As an aside, I don't know why there hasn't been a class action law suit against all manufacturers of automatic bilge pump switches.
And finally, I'm really glad we all made it back and those guys from the Whitewater are definitely having some drinks on us once this salvage stuff is taken care of.