Free Man on the Ice by Rex Saunders

my hand down to try to get it
     free, but this made me slide back down into the water again. I tried again, but
     I was only tearing the skin off my fingers.
    The ice was too hard and slippery to hold onto, so I looked at my boat. She was
     still bottom-up and going down by the stern. The weight of the motor was pulling
     her down. I swam back to the stern, the lowest part and easiest to climb up on.
     I got hold of the keel and the gunnel and slowly pulled myself along the bottom,
     until finally I could reach the ring in the middle of the stem. I got my two
     fingers in the ring and pulled myself up on the bottom of the boat. I put my two
     knees together and held onto the ring with both hands. As I watched the boat
     slowly driftingtoward a bigger ice pan, I thought, If only
     she stays afloat long enough to reach that ice pan, I’ll get off and I’ll be
     okay . I could feel the boat slowly sinking below me as I held on.
     Finally, she hit the ice and I just fell over on my side onto the ice pan.
    The boat disappeared about ten minutes later. She sank to the bottom. There was
     no sign of anything from the boat; neither the gaff nor paddle floated up. I had
     emptied my five-gallon can of gas into the gas tank about an hour or so before
     and placed the empty can on top of the seals. I saw only one dead seal floating
     around. He must have come out of the boat.
    I didn’t expect to see my survival bucket. That’s the five-gallon bucket I have,
     with all my survival things in it, like tarpaulin, flares, matches, flare gun,
     candles, and a small propane stove with two green propane tanks, a wool cap,
     socks, and gloves. If I got stuck in the ice or my motor broke down, all I had
     to do was pull the tarpaulin over the front part of the boat and I’d have a real
     nice place to lie down. I called it a five-gallon bucket, but it was probably
     seven or eight gallons. I don’t know where I got it. Anyway, it was a big bucket
     with a tight cover on it. It was waterproof, and I kept it in one of the lockers
     so I could get at it if I needed it. I thought for sure I would soon see the
     empty five-gallon gas can afloat, but I didn’t. Andas for the
     five-gallon can full of gas, I thought that one had sunk with the boat.
    My boat was a very nice boat. It was a 19-foot Seabreeze with a walk-through
     windshield, and my motor was a Mercury 50-HP four-stroke BigFoot. I only had the
     boat three years, and the motor five years. I had a brand new .223 sealing rifle
     and about twenty boxes of bullets, and a twelve-gauge goose gun with about seven
     or eight boxes of slugs, just in case something went wrong with the rifle, or if
     I could get a better shot at seals in the water with slugs. It’s hard to get a
     seal in the scope of a rifle when it’s blowing a bit. I lost about $15,000 in
     all. That was a very big loss to me, but I was on the ice pan walking around,
     when I could have gotten stuck underneath my boat and gone to the bottom of the
     Atlantic Ocean with her.
    The first thing I did when I got on the pan of ice was get my cellphone out and
     try to call my wife, but of course the phone was dead. Then I started walking
     around the ice pan. I was very cold. The pan of ice was about twenty feet wide
     and about forty feet long. It had one small clump of ice on it about the size of
     a five-gallon bucket. It was hard and shiny. I put my hand on it and the water
     was running off of it. I said to myself, “Oh my goodness, I can’t sit on that.
     I’ll freeze to death,” but I had to sit down somewhere and get my boots and
     socks off, or I really would freezeto death much quicker. After
     walking around the pan a few more times, I sat on the clump of ice. Boy, oh boy,
     it was cold. My floater suit was already soaking wet where I had opened up my
     collar and the water had flowed in. I managed to get my two boots off and wring
     the water out of my socks. Then I turned my boots