November 12, 2014 — Trapped in the engine room of her father’s capsized shrimp boat for more than four hours while struggling to stay alive with her father’s lifeless body somewhere beneath the murky waters of Galveston Bay, 19-year-old Sabrina Galloway has good reason to hate her father’s boat, hate shrimping, hate Galveston Bay and hate a passion that has been a part of her life since a little girl. Instead, shrimping, the boat and the bay remain an important part of her life, as well as an important part of the healing process allowing her to move forward.
Galloway, her 13-year old brother Cody, their father Ronald “Ronnie” Galloway, Jr. and their deckhand had just finished a day of shrimping in the bay on the “Mr. Anthony”. Around 2 p.m., as they navigated Cedar Bayou in the Houston Ship Channel headed to their Baytown dock, a severe storm came from nowhere. Suddenly the vessel went sideways and overturned, killing her father and trapping Sabrina.
Her younger brother managed to shove his fist through a window on the starboard side of the boat. She boosted him through the window. The deck hand went next, but on his way out he accidentally kicked her in the face, knocking her back into the engine room.
“That’s when everything went black, except for a small beam of light. I kept screaming and banging and yelling for my dad,” Galloway remembered. “The water kept coming in and coming in.”
Topside her brother and the deck hand flagged down a fisherman who was able to enlarge a small hole, giving her more light and air.
“I was looking at my cellphone when the boat flipped, it was exactly 2:12 p.m.,” she recalled. “The 911 call was made at 3:03 p.m. and they finally got me out shortly after 6 p.m. The Coast Guard arrived around 4 p.m., but it was the Port of Houston Fire Department that cut me out of the boat with the Jaws of Life.”
Covered with slimy black diesel oil she yelled as she emerged from the boat, “I can’t see, I can’t see.” A rescuers voiced chimed reassurance, “Don’t worry I got you.”
Grew Up on Bay’s Water
The 19-year-old University of Houston student grew up on the waters of Galveston Bay. Ever since an early age she idolized her father and loved his shrimping profession. “I fell in love with shrimping because my dad loved it, if my dad loved it I wanted to know all about it,” she told Gulf Seafood News in an interview conducted on the deck of the “Mr. Anthony”.
“I was young, but I can remember going out on the weekends with my dad,” she reminisced. “I remember when my brother was four years old we used to tie a rope from mom to the back of his life jacket. It was only three feet long, but he enjoyed sitting on the deck and playing with the fish. We were all raised on the boat.
Read the full story at the Gulf Seafood Institute