Shal­iza Has­sanali

Up to yes­ter­day, the fa­ther of two daugh­ters who were strand­ed for 45 min­utes in chop­py wa­ters off Fan­ta­sy Is­land says he is yet to re­ceive an ex­pla­na­tion from the T&T Coast Guard for fail­ing to res­cue his "girls" who were in dis­tress. Michael Alon­zo said more than 15 calls made to the Coast Guard on Thurs­day to help Ash­ley, 24, her 21-year-old sis­ter An­gelie Alon­zo and her boyfriend off the west­ern penin­su­la were not heed­ed.

Ash­ley and An­gelie are both for­mer na­tion­al swim­mers. The trio of North West­moor­ings were head­ing from Fan­ta­sy Is­land to Pow­er Boats around 11 am when their boat Eclipse, stalled off Gas­par Grande. Af­ter no­ti­fy­ing her dad, Ash­ley said she called the Coast Guard in­form­ing them of her emer­gency.

"With­in min­utes, the boat start­ed to drift so we had to hold on to a tree branch to keep the ves­sel from mov­ing. But the waves were so pow­er­ful, it was slam­ming us against the rocks." Think­ing by then the Coast Guard would have re­spond­ed, Ash­ley said she called them again, on­ly to be told that they were prepar­ing a ves­sel to come to her res­cue.

As the waves vig­or­ous­ly rocked the boat, Ash­ley said An­gelie jumped in­to the wa­ter to push the boat, but she had to give up. When that failed, they found a piece of bam­boo in the wa­ter and tried to pad­dle the boat away from the rocks. "But noth­ing was help­ing us."

Sens­ing pan­ic in his daugh­ters' voic­es, Michael called a boat­man named Spi­der to as­sist the trio. "All this time we were still wait­ing on the Coast Guard. This was close to 45 min­utes af­ter and 15 dis­tress calls made and no one came to our as­sis­tance. All they kept say­ing was that they un­der­stand the sit­u­a­tion."

At one point, the Coast Guard, Michael said, stopped tak­ing his calls. Even­tu­al­ly they were res­cued by Spi­der. Ash­ley said their lives were in dan­ger and could have been lost. "All it could have tak­en was a lit­tle bit of wind and a good wave to slam us in­to the rocks."

To this day, Michael said he has re­ceived no re­sponse from the Coast Guard as to why they failed to re­spond and called for an­swers. Ef­forts to reach Kirk Jean-Bap­tiste, pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer of the Coast Guard yes­ter­day proved fu­tile.