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Adopt
a Boat participant a Fisherman and a Gentleman
Cape Code Times
As fishing hauls go, his was even odder. From 600 feet in the cold dark sea, Vincent Russo retrieved the big red bag in a net full of flopping haddock. "It's kind of an unbelievable story," Sulkes-Spieler said. The Florida retiree was ultimately reunited with the purse's contents - including more than $500 in cash. The handbag's soggy sojourn started in August, when Sulkes-Spieler was vacationing with her husband Abraham off the coast of Cape Cod on a whale-watching tour. "Pretty boring," she said. "It was windy and cold." Then things turned interesting. "I heard a whooosh, and the wind blew my bag off my arm," she recalled. "I looked down and there was my bag in the middle of the ocean." The red tapestry purse paused a moment, then dipped beneath the waves. "People said I'm never going to see it again," she said. They were wrong. More than three months later, Russo, owner and captain of the fishing vessel Miss Trish II, was about 20 miles off the Cape, scouring the 600-foot bottom for flounder or haddock. A commotion erupted among his five-man crew when they emptied a net on the deck. "In the middle of the fish there was this purse," said Russo, 46, from his Gloucester, Mass., home. A couple of laughing crewmen tore at the bag with gaff hooks, ripping it open. "Cash started coming out," Russo recalled. At first there were jokes about each man's cut. Then sober agreement that the bag's contents should be returned. "It was Christmastime," Russo said.
Russo's wife, Jane, dried the credit cards, makeup, car keys, photos, paperwork
and cash, packaged them neatly in plastic, and mailed them off. They didn't keep the money. Russo's crew donated it to victims of the South Asia tsunami. "They need it more than us," the captain said.
(Published: January 27, 2005)
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