Tragedy at sea recounted
Penrose man loses his girlfriend, sister in boating accident

By Gabrielle Crist, Rocky Mountain News
January 9, 2003

For 13 years, Mexico's Baja coast has been a winter escape for Bryan Stuart - a paradise along the Sea of Cortez where the 52-year-old built his home and where he met his girlfriend.

On Dec. 29, the beautiful waters betrayed him.

The Penrose resident was vacationing in San Felipe with his family and girlfriend, 52-year-old Eileen Kelkowski. The group had ventured to nearby Punta Bufeo to visit one of Stuart's brothers. On Dec. 29, they decided with a group of several people to make a quick jaunt to a cluster of islands prime for sea-lion sightings.

Stuart, Kelkowski and Stuart's sister, 50-year-old Ohio resident Bonnie-Laurie Carter, were in a 12-foot boat. Carter's husband and three friends were in another, slightly larger boat, relatives said.

The group set out about 9:30 a.m. The wind picked up about noon, and they decided to head back. The larger boat made it, and everyone on board assumed Stuart's group was close behind.

Time passed, and Stuart's boat still hadn't returned.

Everyone started to worry.

"We started searching the beach," said Leslie Joseph, Stuart's 26-year-old daughter.

Nearby residents joined in the search, some jumping in their boats and others combing the beach, but no one could find any sign of Stuart.

It got dark. The searchers came in. Joseph said she and many others hoped the trio had made it to one of the islands and just couldn't make it back.

About 1:30 a.m., people from the next camp heard someone shouting.

It was Stuart.

Residents got him to shore, and although he was dehydrated and seriously sunburned, he was alive.

Residents once again hit the waters, searching with spotlights for the women, but to no avail, Joseph said.

As the search continued, Stuart told his family what happened that day on the water:

His boat, which normally fared well in the calm waters of the Sea of Cortez, was capsized by the wind.

Before long, one end of the boat was jutting out of the water and the other was submerged, weighed down by the motor. Kelkowski and Carter floated on a wood plank that had served as a seat on the boat. Stuart told them to start kicking for shore.

In the meantime, Stuart tried to pry the motor from the boat, thinking the boat could float without it. He grabbed a life vest, but the women didn't.

Five times Stuart dived under, and when he came back up the last time, the women were nowhere to be seen.

Stuart assumed the women had paddled out of sight.

For the next 12 hours, Stuart floated in the water, hoping to be rescued, hoping Kelkowski and Carter had made it to shore.

Hours passed, and eventually, he heard a dog barking. Knowing he must be close to shore, Stuart began yelling for help. At first, the current pulled Stuart far from the shore and then brought him back close enough to be heard.

"He said five more minutes and he would have been dead," Kelkowski's daughter, Suryea, said. "His face was completely sunburned, like to a crisp."

But Stuart wouldn't go to the hospital. He stayed to help find Kelkowski and Carter.

"He honestly felt that they were OK," Joseph said.

Two days later, searchers found Kelkowski's body near Enchanted Island.

Stuart, volunteers and Mexican officials continued to search for Carter.

On Wednesday morning, volunteers found Carter's body after the official search had been called off.

Joseph said her father blames himself for the deaths.

"He has a lot of guilt. He feels that he should have never left them," Joseph said.

Carter's daughter, 28-year-old Karen Aldo, spoke to Stuart from her Ohio home Wednesday morning and assured him that no one is angry with him.

"We are just glad he is alive and with us," Aldo said.

Stuart is still in Mexico and could not be reached.

He has told his family and friends that he will leave San Felipe and never return.

Paradise lost in Mexico storm
Coloradan's dream life ends as his girlfriend, sister drown
By Michael Riley
Denver Post Staff Writer

Friday, January 10, 2003 - SAN FELIPE, Mexico - Bryan Stuart spent the past 13 years carving paradise out of the sand and rugged rock of an isolated Mexican beach. He built a house, sneaking materials across the border in an old bus and carrying 90-pound sacks of cement on his back down a narrow path.

Post / John Epperson
"I made a whole lot of agreements with the man upstairs. He didn’t keep his end of the bargain." - Bryan Stuart, holding a photo of girlfriend Eileen Kelkowski, on his attempts to rescue her and his sister.


The five months a year he wasn't working construction in Canon City, Stuart, 52, of Penrose swam and fished here. He knew the water and islands off the coast of Baja California well.

But on the morning of Dec. 29, a sudden storm in those waters swallowed his 12-foot fiberglass boat like a toy, he says, dumping him into the chilly water and sweeping his sister, Bonnye Carter, 50, and his girlfriend, Eileen Kelkowski, 52, out to sea.

By the time he was pulled out of the water 13 hours later, the paradise he'd built was gone.

"While I was in the water, I talked a lot to myself and I talked to God," Stuart said Thursday in an interview after he identified his sister's body in this small port town about 80 miles down the Baja California coast.

"I made a whole lot of agreements with the man upstairs. He didn't keep his end of the bargain," Stuart said, his face sunburned, his hair sun- bleached, his eyes tearing.

Keeping that bargain would have meant saving the two women who had climbed onto the boat with him under clear skies and on a glass-smooth sea two hours before the boat sank, Stuart said.


The sea was so smooth that the trio and others attending a family reunion planned a picnic and boat ride to a nearby island.

It was so calm that Carter's husband, who is afraid of water and cannot swim, didn't think twice about climbing into the larger of the two boats for the 7-mile ride.

It was quiet enough that danger, especially in this place that he loved, was the farthest thing from Stuart's mind.

"I thought I knew this place," he said. "Obviously, I didn't know it well enough."

The wind swept off the mountains; the waves rose. The boat tipped.

As he treaded water through the day and into the night, clutching a small life preserver, thoughts of saving his loved ones kept him alive, Stuart said.

The last time he saw the two women, they were clutching a piece of plywood from the boat. Stuart told them to swim toward shore, while he dove to try to detach the sinking boat's outboard motor, hoping the vessel would float again.

When he came up from the third dive, they were gone.

"The wind took them. Both the wind and the tide were headed northwest, toward the islands," he said.

The region's strong tides sweep past those islands on the way out to sea.

Stuart had been out there "at least 30 times" and figured the two women might be able to make it to land.

"I knew the girls would be on the island. The board was floating well, and I knew if anybody was going to be able to make it out there to get them, it would have been me," Stuart said. "That kept me going."

But the same swift currents that swept the women's makeshift raft also caught Stuart, sweeping him nearly 7 miles out. When the tide changed, the currents carried him back in, close enough to see lights on a beach about 500 yards away.

Stuart was unable to move his arms, but his cries for help woke up a dog.

"The next thing I knew, a boat was coming, and they pulled me out of the water," he said.

His toes were blue from hypothermia and he could not move his legs. The rescuers had to carry him to a truck, he said, because he couldn't walk.

Carter, a legal secretary from New Liberty, Ohio, loved the water but was a poor swimmer, said her husband, Herb Carter. Of Stuart's 10 brothers and sisters, Bonnye "was the heart of the family," Carter said.

Kelkowski was not only Stuart's lover but a close friend, he said. He convinced her to leave her insurance job in Canon City for seven months a year and come to Mexico, where she raced dune buggies and volunteered at a local orphanage.

Public prosecutor Gerardo Andrade said that he believes the deaths were an accident.

Friends and relatives who helped search for the two women over the past week and a half say Stuart is wrestling with guilt.

"He's the only survivor. For him, that's the worst thing about this," said Rafael Navarro, a long-time friend of Stuart's who helped organize and supply the searchers.

But Navarro and other friends said if anyone could survive such an ordeal, it is Stuart, who, among other pursuits, likes to race dune buggies across the Baja desert.

"If his car breaks down, he'll build a spare part to fix it if he has to. He just never gives up," Navarro said.

Friends said that despite his injuries, Stuart helped organize a search within hours.

Rescuers, including the Mexican army, sent boats into the area, and local fishermen joined in. After a day of searching, another storm forced a halt for 48 hours.

By that time, Stuart said, he knew it was too late. Kelkowski's body was found two days later, and Carter's body was recovered Wednesday.

Stuart said the life he built here is now over.

Kelkowski's remains will be returned to her two daughters. After he takes his sister's ashes to Ohio, Stuart plans to return to Mexico to sell his house and dune buggy.

"Maybe I'll come back in five years," he said. "But for now, I have to move on."

From the Rocky Mountain News. http://makeashorterlink.com/?N2A032F03

and from the Denver Post. http://makeashorterlink.com/?D2C012F03