A Raft of Memories: 51 Years Later, Recalling the Search for a Young Girl Lost at Sea
Editor’s Note: You are about to read an amazing story of courage and perseverance along with dose of luck. This story originally appeared in Sea Isle Times, our sister publication. We believe the story is moving enough that we’re sharing it here as well. Although this drama played out more than a half-century ago, we were fortunate enough to recreate the events of that day thanks to our interviews with those who were actually there that day. If nothing else, this story illustrates how quickly and unexpectedly our lives can change. And more than anything, it is a reminder of the importance of swimming in front of a lifeguard.
Shari Davis poses on her raft shortly after being rescued in July 1972. Note the U.S. Coast Guard jacket next to her. This photo was taken by Tom Kinnemand, the legendary Wildwood native who photographed Cape May County from 1950 until 1999 for the Wildwood Leader and The Press of Atlantic City. This photo was taken for The Press of Atlantic City and was digitally recreated from microfilm by Seven Mile Publishing.
The Davis family looked forward to their annual summer vacation as they piled into their Oldsmobile station wagon for their trek to the Jersey Shore in late July 1972. Car packed, Ronald and Shirley with their five children and two poodles departed Portage, a town of about 4,000 located in the coal region of Pennsylvania, for what would be a five- or six-hour drive to Pine Haven Campground in Ocean View. Since their destination was about a half-mile south of Sea Isle Boulevard, the town’s beaches would no doubt be a big part of what everyone hoped would be a memorable family getaway.
Memorable could be one way of describing their vacation. And not just for the Davis family.
“We still talk about it until this day,” says Mike McHale, seemingly still amazed. McHale is a former Sea Isle City mayor and was a lieutenant on the Sea Isle City Beach Patrol that summer. “Just amazing,” he adds, shaking his head while thinking back to the day.
What made their visit to Sea Isle City so memorable happened on Tuesday, Aug. 1. It was just before noon on a warm and sunny day with brisk west winds and temperatures in the high 80s. All in all, a pretty nice beach day. The family headed for the beach from their campsite offshore. They parked the station wagon along Landis Avenue at 2nd Street, just south of the Strathmere/Upper Township border, at about 11:45am. Their choice was an unguarded beach about a mile from the closest protected beach, which in 1972 was at 29th Street.
Seven-year-old Shari, the only girl among the Davis children, would rush to the water’s edge with two of her older brothers who were fascinated by a surf fisher working the water’s edge. This, while Shirley and Ronald prepared their 3-month-old son at the car for his first visit to the beach.
We’ve all heard it described … or worse, experienced it ourselves. It happens in the blink of an eye. A child disappears. You’re not sure where, or how. It just happens – and all too quickly. This was the case with Shari as her brothers ran back to the car. Did she wander off? If so, which direction? Or could someone have taken her from the sparsely populated beach? It was impossible to know for sure. Another possibility: Shari was last seen holding her inflated red and blue raft. Could she have gone into the ocean with the raft?
The family immediately began combing the beaches.
“Everyone pitched in,” recalls Shirley Davis, whose husband of 59 years died in 2020.
Over the course of the day, some of the boys in the Davis family would develop leg cramps from the long, unending walks looking and calling Shari’s name.
The family search would be simply the start of a seven-hour odyssey that Shirley remembers only as “torturous” in a recent interview with Sea Isle Times.
The Davis family didn’t wait long to enlist the help of the Sea Isle City Beach Patrol, SIC Police Department, New Jersey Marine Police, and finally calling in the U.S. Coast Guard, which maintained a seasonal station in the Townsend’s Inlet section of Sea Isle along with its air station at the southern tip of the county in Cape May. After all, Shari had carried her raft to the shoreline. Perhaps she had floated off on her raft.
“We had guards looking out for her immediately,” remembers Bill Gallagher, captain of the beach patrol back in 1972. “We had guards along the beach and several boats in the ocean as well. Lost children were a common occurrence on the beach. The intense duration of a seven-hour search was not common.”
It was about 3:15pm when the Coast Guard launched two Sikorsky HH-52 Seaguard helicopters from its Cape May air station. The HH-52 is designed with a boat-like hull bottom that allows it to land on the water. Traditionally, that aircraft was flown with two pilots and a crew member who served as a rescue swimmer. No one is sure who made the call, but the helicopters took off with only one pilot on this day, which although unusual was permissible at the time, given the calm and clear weather conditions. With one less person aboard, the helicopters gained an extra half-hour of fuel/flight time, thus extending their ability to search the vast area of ocean off Cape May County. Meanwhile, rescue boats from the Coast Guard and the New Jersey Marine Police continued to comb the local waterways.
Simultaneously back on the beach, Gallagher made the unprecedented decision to keep the SIC Beach Patrol on duty beyond its normal quitting time. He notes that it wasn’t uncommon for a lost child to grow tired of walking aimlessly and look to find themselves a comfortable spot on someone’s porch or backyard to nap. Especially on a warm day.
“I can remember, to this day, walking up and down the streets calling her name,” says Joe LaRosa, a retired educator, author, and a member of the 1972 Sea Isle City Beach Patrol. “We even checked the street ends near the marshes – walking through the mud and muck, calling her name while looking. I still know her name to this day from our search.”
The actions might have been unprecedented, but were undertaken for good reason: “We all had children around that age at the time,” Gallagher says. “I think we could imagine what the Davis family was going through.”
Possibly, but then again, maybe not.
News reports from that time said Shirley Davis never lost faith during the grueling search. “No, I never lost faith,” she confirms in our recent conversation. “But you can’t help it, sometimes it crosses your mind that she may not ever come back. It was just awful, on all of us.”
Sea Isle City’s police chief at the time, Robert Campbell, was quoted by multiple media sources including The Press of Atlantic City saying what most people probably thought themselves that day: “When I heard that she was possibly on a raft, I got a sick feeling in my stomach. We [the police] all have kids, too. I never expected to see her alive again.”
Regardless of how or where Shari disappeared, the day was quickly slipping away and the sun was beginning to set. Nightfall would bring an entirely new set of challenges for searchers. Still the search on the beaches, through the streets, and in and above the ocean, pressed on. Most searchers must have wondered at least once: How could this small child have just vanished? And so quickly?
One of the two helicopters involved in the search located an abandoned raft offshore. Upon closer examination, the object appeared to be a yellow raft, different than the faded red and blue raft that Shari was reported to have had. Thankfully, the decision was made to push on with the search and word of the raft that was found didn’t filter back to Sea Isle City until much later.
“I’m glad that I didn’t know about the raft,” Shirley Davis says. “I’m not sure how I would have handled it at that point.”
Recent movies and television specials have highlighted the heroics while teaching us about the role of Coast Guard rescue swimmers, but that particular job title hadn’t been created yet in 1972. On this day, in the helicopter piloted by Lt. Gerald Murphy, his crewman – or rescue swimmer – was Petty Officer Fred Ellinwood, now a retired and decorated Coast Guardsman.
The search for Shari Davis still stands out in Ellinwood’s memory more than 50 years later, despite having taken part in hundreds of rescues.
“Goodness, yes, I still remember the day,” he says in a phone interview from his home in North Carolina. “The pilots were great about going back when we spotted something. I could concentrate 100% of my attention on the search. But the pilots need to concentrate on the flight while they too were searching. If I’d spot something, it might be a cooler for example, but we’d still go back and take a closer look. It was common to find other objects.”
While the setting sun presented a new challenge for most of the searchers, ironically it might have assisted those searching from the air. As the sun began to settle lower, the glare on the water was reduced ever so slightly.
Ellinwood explains that the Coast Guard had personnel at the base whose job it is to review things like weather and wind conditions to determine search grids. However they did it, amazingly, it worked!
At 6:45pm, about five miles off the coast of Ocean City and perhaps four more miles north of where Shari jumped on her raft, Ellinwood spotted the faded blue raft with a little girl laying on top. His pilot, Murphy, thought she might be sleeping. Who could blame her after nearly seven hours at sea?
What an ordeal!
“We set down about 75 feet from her,” Ellinwood remembers. “We needed to be careful that the blade wash didn’t push her off her raft or create a wake that might scare her.”
He quickly swam over to check on the 7-year-old.
“The first thing that I asked her was if she was OK,” Ellinwood remembers. “She looked at me and said, ‘Yes, I’m OK.’” He explained to Shari that the helicopter would return her to her family. Obviously relieved, “She first asked if she could bring her raft back with her on the helicopter,” he adds with a chuckle nearly a half century later. “I assured her that we could take it along.”
Shari’s brother Ronald, then 6, can still see the helicopter approach in his mind. “We were back on the ball field,” he recalls. “I remember the helicopter circling in from back over the bay and coming in to land.”
Amazingly, Shari not only survived but was in relatively good condition all things considered – except for some greenhead bites on her legs and a badly sunburned ear. Shari explained that she tried to paddle toward shore several times, only to be rebuffed by the strong currents, probably like the current that initially pulled her from shore. She also utilized the swimming lessons that she had taken at a park at home when she was knocked off the raft two times by waves. After falling off the first time, she wrapped the rope that surrounded the raft around her wrist for the remainder of her adventure.
Shari told rescuers that early on in her adventure, she tried in vain to get the attention of some surfers for help, but they apparently couldn’t hear her. Throughout her ordeal, she never panicked. Although she was far enough offshore that she could no longer see the beach, her greatest fear was how she’d be able to sleep without falling off once the impending darkness arrived.
The Press of Atlantic City quoted Shari as saying that she tried several times to swim back to shore with her raft in tow. “I thought that I was close enough to make it,” she’s quoted as saying. “But it was too far, so I just got back on and hoped that someone would come to get me.” Later, Shari also confided in her brother Ronald that she observed fish “with fins” swimming around her. Still no panic.
“She was a tough kid,” Ellinwood notes. “I don’t remember much conversation on the helicopter on the way back. What she went through would have been difficult for an adult, but she was only a young child. She was a tough, tough kid.”
Ellinwood wrapped her in a Mylar rescue blanket because she was cold and gave her his uniform jacket. Like many of the others involved in the search, Ellinwood had reason to take this search personally: “I had a daughter of my own just about the same age at home.”
Relieved, the family headed back to their camp site.
“We had been on edge all day,” Shari’s brother Ronald says. “We were obviously relieved that Shari had been found.”
Understandably, Shirley Davis told her children: “I’ve had it. That’s it, we’re going home.”
Her children, including Shari, responded as you might imagine any child faced with losing their summer vacation might respond. “They all argued that they didn’t want to go home,” she says. Mom and dad gave in.
So, the next day, less than 24 hours after this ordeal, the Davis family was back on the beach in Sea Isle City. “Of course, that was minus any flotation devices,” Ronald Davis stresses.
“Shari put it all behind her,” her mother says.
Shari’s brother remembers their family being a little more cautious in their lives following the experience. “You think, ‘That could never happen to us,’” he says. “But it did, and it influenced the whole family.”
Thanks to the efforts of her family and everyone involved that day back in August 1972, Shari Davis got the chance to grow into an adult. She played on her high school and college basketball teams and lived a full life until she lost a valiant battle with cancer. Sadly, Shari passed away in September 2018 at the age of 53.
Her mother says that throughout her life, Shari never cared to discuss her experience.
“People would ask her about it,” Shirley says, “but except for a paper that she wrote for school in eighth grade, she just wouldn’t discuss it. None of us ever have.”
Most kids in the 1970s went home from a seashore vacation with treasured souvenirs from the boardwalk or Fun City. Maybe a special treasure from Creighton’s or Sands Department Store. Suffice it to say that few children ever went home with a Mylar rescue blanket, and an official government-issued petty officer jacket as souvenirs from what was a ride of a lifetime for Shari Davis.
“I enjoyed the helicopter ride much more than the ride on my raft,” she told The Press of Atlantic City.
To this day, it must rank as one of the most memorable vacations ever in Sea Isle City.
Editor’s note: Although they expressed their thanks back in 1972, the Davis family asked Sea Isle Times to once again pass along their sincere gratitude for the efforts of the Sea Isle City Beach Patrol, Sea Isle City Police Department, New Jersey Marine Police, and the U.S. Coast Guard. Ronald Davis told Sea Isle Times: “After all these years, we are still so appreciative of everyone who assisted our family in a very difficult time. Please be sure to convey our appreciation.”