BODEGA BAY — For the first time since the 13-year-old San Jose boy woke up shivering and alone on a deserted stretch of beach two weeks ago, covered in salt and sand after clinging for hours to a floating ice chest, he returned Saturday to pray.
Jude Khammoungkhoune’s father had clutched the cooler beside him as long as he could after their family fishing boat sank in rough ocean waters, scattering its six passengers, including three cousins and a family friend, the evening of Nov. 2.
Jude is the sole survivor. He’s had nightmares — about falling into the frigid water, about gripping the cooler, about how he and his dad talked about surviving the night.
“We would have gotten out of this together,” Jude said.
As a full moon rose over Bodega Bay on Saturday, Jude’s mother, Yathida, two younger siblings and about 60 extended family members and friends lit candles and prayed that all the bodies would be found. In Buddhist tradition, they carried a fresh set of his father’s clothes to prepare him for his journey to the next life. As monks chanted, Jude knelt down next to his mother, folded his hands and joined in prayer.
Saturday evening was calm compared to the day when the boat went down, with barely a hint of a breeze. Jude stood by the boat dock where they had cast off that morning, when they dreamed of a big catch and the special crab stir fry with ginger and scallions his mother would make when they got home.
Gathering with relatives at the vigil helped him focus on the happy times with his dad, he said, like when he was 5 and caught his first fish — a striper — and how his dad was so proud and took his picture. As the sun went down, Jude felt a chill, but shook it off.
“I’ve been through it,” he said. “I’m used to the cold already.”
The sinking of the 21-foot Bayliner that Jude’s father, Prasong, kept parked in the driveway of their downtown San Jose apartment also claimed Jude’s close relatives from Rancho Tehama, northwest of Chico, including his dad’s cousin, Johnny Phommathep and two of his six sons, Johnny Jr., 17, and Jake, 14. In a tragic twist, both boys — and their mother Tiffany — had been wounded in 2017 when a school shooter fired into their car in Rancho Tehama.
“My sons escaped death once,” Tiffany said, “and death came for them again.”
Prasong Khammoungkhoune, 45, was one of the missing boaters lost to the ocean off the coast of Sonoma near Bodega Bay. Prasong loved fishing and the ocean was his second home according to family members on the GoFundMe post. He was a husband and father of three young children. (Photo courtesy of the family)
She has been walking the beaches nearly every day since, hoping, yet fearing, to find signs of her lost loved ones. The bodies of her 17-year-old and what appears to be her husband have been recovered by others. Her 14-year-old is still missing.
How Jude, the oldest son of Laotian refugees, survived overnight in waters that plunged to 52 degrees, with swells that reached 8 feet is phenomenal, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputy Rob Dillion said. “The fact that this young man was able to keep himself afloat, not lose his grip on the ice chest and stay calm enough to know that he should stay put while it’s dark — it’s unbelievable.”
Jude — short for Juladi — is an 8th-grader who loves to play basketball after school and spend weekends fishing with his dad, who ran his own business as a courier. Half Moon Bay for striped bass. Bodega Bay for the start of crab season.
He told his harrowing story this past week sitting next to his mother in the family home, where his father’s fishing poles still lean against the wall.
Towing the Bayliner behind them, father and son left San Jose before midnight, and by 4 a.m. that Saturday, they had met up with their cousins and longtime friend Matthew Ong, 42, and were launching their boat into the bay. A small craft advisory had been issued, but all was calm before dawn.
As they motored into open waters, Jude’s job was to keep track of the hoop nets that captured the crabs. They were hoping for better luck on the first day of recreational crab season, but the 13 crabs they caught by dusk were better than none. The sun was setting, the wind was picking up to a brisk 15 mph and the waters were rough as they hauled in the last net of the day from the back corner of the boat.
Suddenly, as they pulled in the line, a wave washed over the rear, swamping the back compartments that held the batteries and gas tank. They tried to motor forward hoping the water would pour out. Instead, Jude remembers hearing the hoop net line snap and the motor sputter as some of the adults scrambled to put on life jackets as the boat sank.
And just like that, he said, “We just went overboard in the water.”
With darkness descending and their cell phones sinking to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the three teenage boys and three men in their 40s found themselves at the mercy of the perilous Pacific four miles from shore.
Jude and his father grabbed the large white ice chest that was mostly empty except for some leftover chicken and heaved themselves over the top. They quickly lost sight of everyone else.
“We were getting a little bit farther and the waves were pretty high,” he said, “so we couldn’t really see the boat anymore.”
They held on as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.
“Everything’s going to be OK,” his dad told him.
They held on as the wind howled and the shoreline disappeared in the dark.
“We’re going to make it,” his dad said.
Was it two hours? It could have been four. Father and son side by side, surging up and down with the swells, clinging to an ice chest, hoping to survive.
“I love you,” his dad said.
“I love you, too,” Jude said.
As time wore on and the water roughened, Jude sensed his dad getting colder and weaker.
In one particularly violent crash of waves against the cooler, Jude said, “he slipped off.”
His father said something to him then, but Jude couldn’t make it out. The cacophony of the waves hitting the ice chest and crashing against each other and a seagull squawking overhead were all too loud.
He watched his dad, like his cousins, disappear.
“I was thinking that I was going to die,” Jude said. “I didn’t really know what I was going to do without him, because he was a little bit more smarter than me and knew more survival than I did.”
So with the moon a sliver, the night got darker. By about 2 a.m. the seas calmed and somehow, at some point, with Jude still holding on, the ocean must have rocked him to sleep.
Returning for the first time since he survived a fishing boat tragedy that swept away his father and four others, 13-year-old Jude Khammoungkhoune returns to Bodega Bay, Calif., Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
The next thing he remembers is waking up tumbling in the surf. It was pitch black. He had lost his grip on the ice chest. Only his life vest kept him afloat.
“It felt like a tsunami,” he said. “I just kind of floated myself and let the waves just push me a little bit closer to the point I could stand up. I felt dizzy everywhere I looked.”
He made his way just above the water line, then collapsed onto the beach and fell asleep. But the waves rolled in and startled him awake, so he moved a few more feet, plopped down and fell asleep again. He did this several times that night.
“I just kept going, and then I just slept again — until it was morning,” he said.
He had landed on a vast, desolate stretch of beach on a cold windy morning. His socks and boots, Nike pants, black T-shirt and jacket were sodden and sandy.
As he looked out across the ocean where his father lost his grip, he caught sight of a U.S. Coast Guard boat — right there!
“And then I saw a helicopter, a Coast Guard helicopter, then a Coast Guard plane,” he said. “I was waving to them. I kept saying, ‘Help!’”
But they didn’t hear him. He decided to hike inland where he came upon the Bodega Dunes Campground. He hailed a woman driving by.
“I told her my boat sank and I slept on the beach,” he said. “Can you drive me home?”
She called 911 instead.
Jude was released from the hospital within hours without a scratch. But he spent the first few days at home in San Jose in tears, he said. His counselor at school told him not to feel guilty about surviving, that he always had someone to talk to. GoFundMe crowdfunding accounts have been started for Jude’s family and for the Phommathep family.
In a photo taken earlier this year, Johhny Phommathep, and two sons, Johnny Jr, 17, and Jake, 14, enjoy a day of fishing. The three disappeared into the open ocean off Bodega Bay Nov. 2 when a family fishing boat carrying six passengers sank in rough waters. A 13-year-old cousin survived. (photo courtesy of Tiffany Phommathep)
Jude still doesn’t know what his father was trying to tell him when he slipped off the cooler that night, but he wonders if letting go was a selfless act, if maybe he was giving Jude a better chance to survive.
“It gave me a little bit of an advantage to get to land faster,” Jude said.
Jude’s mother and grandmother are certain of it. On Saturday, with candles lit, they thanked him and prayed for his safe passage.