The Coast Guard rescue swimmer gripped the starboard side of the sinking sailboat in the dark as the waves beat against him. He called out to the man standing on the boat as a helicopter hovered overhead.
“You’re going to jump,” Miles LeComer shouted over the sound of the wind and rotor wash and waves. “And I’m going to grab you.”
David Haight had a briefcase and a knapsack ready with some of the few valuable possessions he took with him on what was supposed to be a journey from Newport to Santa Barbara. LeComer, barely able to hold onto the sailboat as it rolled up and down on the waves more than 90 miles offshore, told Haight he could only take what was in his pockets. He gave him one minute to prepare.
Haight, his sailboat disappearing beneath him, didn’t need the minute. He jumped, crashing into the frigid Pacific Ocean, engulfed, immediately knocked about by 15-foot-tall waves. He went under.
A hand grabbed him and held on.
‘There wasn’t anything to feel’
Sitting in an Elmer’s Restaurant in Clackamas about a month after his rescue, Haight, 69, flashed a sly grin that hinted at the other wild stories in his past — and possibly in his future, too.
There was the arrest, when he was 24, when he and four others were caught by federal officials trying to smuggle 40,000 pounds of marijuana from Colombia to Florida by ship. And the time he and his girlfriend at the time found a dinghy abandoned in a Florida swamp,…
