Offers of boats and cash to recover their craft buoy Summit County couple
A crowdfunding campaign that blew away its fundraising goal in three days. Multiple offers from people seeking to give them free boats. The support of friends, family and a ton of strangers around the world.
Tanner Broadwell, 26, and Nikki Walsh, 24, who moved to Florida from Summit County, feel like they have a lot to be thankful for, even if the sailboat they poured their life savings into is now sitting at the bottom of a Florida channel.
The couple made international news over the weekend after their 28-foot vessel, the Lagniappe, struck a submerged object Wednesday night and sank in John’s Pass, a channel off of Madeira Beach, Fla., east of Tampa Bay. The outpouring of support that has accompanied that news coverage caught the couple by surprise.
“We have been getting blown up with all kinds of people offering us their boats,” Broadwell said in an interview with The Denver Post Monday. “It’s amazing. It’s great that people want to help us.
“But before I can get a new boat, we have to deal with the old boat, which is what we’re doing right now,” he said.
The accident came two days into the couple’s planned trip to Key West, Fla., their first big solo sailing jaunt after they sold most of their belongings last spring and moved from Summit County to Florida to pursue dreams of forgetting the workaday world and sailing the Caribbean. Walsh, Broadwell and their pug, Remy, got off safely, but aside from a cellphone and about $80, all of their belongings went down with the ship. They had no insurance and are on the hook for an estimated $10,000 operation to pull their vessel from the water and junk it, they say.
That bill prompted Walsh to launch a GoFundMe page last week. It’s raised more than $13,500 since Thursday, well beyond its goal. That generosity and the many positive comments on that page are one reason the couple say they feel blessed and are now more committed than ever to getting back on the water.
“I couldn’t have asked for more,” Walsh said Monday, speaking on her salvage cellphone at Broadwell’s mother’s house near Jacksonville. “I don’t even know what to say except thank you to every single person. I wish I could meet them and shake their hands.”
Broadwell is from Florida but first came to Colorado in 2010 to work a season as a lift operator in Aspen, later living in Breckenridge for a while. He met Walsh in her native Philadelphia and the two eventually moved to Dillon where they worked a variety of jobs over three years before making their way to Florida in 2017.
Media attention has also brought criticism. Broadwell said many people have suggested he didn’t have the sailing experience necessary to be on the water in the first place. He maintains that he was within the channel markers and hit something that was not charted, an accident, likely aided by shifts caused by Hurricane Irma, that could have happened to anyone.