Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

After running aground, Colt was able to rock the Whaler free and then drove off a ways. Then he did something that set the course for his foreseeable future: he decided to turn around and come back.

Colt motored up and stopped the boat about twenty feet away from the pier, then shut off his engine. Mauris says Colt was laughing. “I asked him what he was doing.”

Colt looked up at Mauris and said, “Did you hear about the plane I crashed?”

“That was you do that?”

“Yeah,” admitted Colt.

“What’s your name?” asked Mauris.

“Colton Harris.”

Mauris says Colt was very friendly, and as they started talking, he sat back and put his bare feet up on the gunwale. Mauris asked why he’d come to the Bahamas. Colt told him that he couldn’t get any farther. “He said he didn’t have enough fuel to go to Cuba.”

Colt answered every question Mauris and his friend asked. He told them he was from Camano Island and still planned on getting to Cuba. “I asked him how he’s getting there and he said, ‘Plane.’ My buddy was playing with him and said he wanted to go. But Bandit said, ‘No, I fly alone.’”

Mauris told Colt that there were plenty of planes at the airport for him to choose from, but apparently the Bandit had already checked out the flying stock. He shook his head, saying, “I don’t drive old planes.”

While they were chatting, the current carried the little boat toward the dock. Mauris and his friend knew about the $10,000 FBI reward and watched as the boat came closer and closer. When he was just about within jumping range, though, Colt calmly reached over and started the engine. “He moved out to about twenty feet away and shut it back down… and he was laughing.”

Mauris asked Colt if he was hungry. “He said, ‘No, I’m fine.’ And we asked him if he wanted some liquor, and he said, ‘I don’t drink and drive.’”

The Bahamian then mimed a toke and asked if Colt was interested in a little weed, but Colt just laughed and said no. As the Whaler again drifted in close to the dock, Mauris asked, “Why don’t you come up here and talk?” Colt nodded to the large group of men standing off a little ways. “You see all those guys? You think I’m crazy?” Then he slowly motored the boat back out of reach and stopped again.

“He was just chillin’,” says Mauris, who nonetheless remembered the “armed and dangerous” part of the police warning.

“Do you have a weapon?” he asked.

Colt smiled. “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

“I was like, yeah, he’s packin’. So there’s this big steel pole I was standing next to and I moved a little behind it.”

Mauris says the conversation had gone on for more than half an hour when Colt started to get agitated. “I ask him if he miss his mom, and he’s like, ‘Yeah,’ so I said, ‘Then why don’t you go back home?’”

“Too many cops,” said Colt, who then asked, “So where are your cops?”

“We don’t have that much cops,” answered Mauris.

“Well, call them,” said Colt. “I’m bored… I want to get chased.”

Naturally, Mauris first thought Colt must be joking. “But then he started to get mad, saying, ‘Call the cops, call the cops! I want to get chased! For real, call them! Call them!’”

Mauris tried to calm Colt down. “I’m like, ‘There ain’t no cops, man.’”

AND THERE WEREN’T. NO one had called them despite everyone on the dock figuring out that it was the famous Barefoot Bandit bobbing in front of them. Some of the other men tried to engage Colt in conversation, but he would talk only to Mauris and his pal.

After Colt got mad, Mauris slid a bit farther behind the steel pole and signaled to his buddy, who pulled out a cell phone. He didn’t dial the RBPF, though, he called friends who had a boat, whispering to them to hurry up and get there, that they had the Bandit “right here at the dock.”

Colt spotted the guy making the call. “Why is that guy on the phone?”

Mauris told him not to worry about it. Colt gave him a big smile and said, “I’m gone!”

He started up the outboard and began to pull away, turning back to yell to Mauris, “Read about me on the Internet!”

MAURIS SAYS THE WHALER blasted away in the direction of Harbour Island, aiming for the lights of a resort a third of a mile north of Romora Bay. “He went toward Valentines, so I told our friends in the boat to head that way and listen for the motor because he was running really hard and was the only boat moving out there.”

A taxi boat with a 115 Yamaha got within sight of Colt, but his little forty-horse Whaler could run over 30 mph and turn on a dime. A second boat joined the pursuit, but neither could corner the nimble Whaler out in open water as Colt ran circles around them in the darkness.

On the other side of the bay, Kenny Strachan was manning the shadows of Romora Bay Resort, lurking for looters. About twenty boats resided in the marina that night—big live-aboard yachts along with smaller speed-boats in the twenty-five- to thirty-two-foot range that the yacht owners used for fishing and diving excursions. A few people were on board, asleep, but most guests were down in Dunmore Town celebrating the holiday at Gusty’s, Vic-Hum, and Daddy D’s, leaving Romora and its docks deserted.

Shortly after 11:30, Kenny heard a commotion out on the black bay. “Engines were roaring and I could hear guys yelling, ‘See him? See him?’”

At 11:43, Kenny was heading toward the marina just as Colt came flying in. “He drive that boat under the dock, right under the marina office and jumped off,” says Kenny.

The docks at Romora stand high off the water, designed for big boats. Only one spot, a floating dinghy dock just below the office, sits low enough to disembark from a small tender. Colt drove directly there, climbed out, and tied the Whaler to a cleat, leaving the engine idling. He strapped on his backpack, grabbed his Walther PPK, and ran up the ramp to the main dock.

At the top of the ramp, Colt bolted through the office breezeway and turned left, running full speed down one hundred yards of dock before coming to dead wet end with nothing ahead of him but bay. He realized his mistake, spun around, and raced back, finally hurrying off the dock and onto the hotel grounds, where Kenny Strachan had positioned himself at the bottom of a stairway.

As Colt, who was obviously in some kind of distress, ran toward him, Kenny shouted, “What happened?”

“They’re trying to kill me!” Colt yelled.

That’s when Kenny saw a flash of silver in Colt’s hand, the pistol, and realized that God had kept His word and brought the Barefoot Bandit to him.

“‘Oh, that’s Bandit!’ I said to myself.” Kenny had purposely left his guns at home, but the $150-a-week security guard hadn’t received a divine strategy for how to handle the situation in case the Bandit brought his. “I was excited, but I didn’t want to get shot,” he says.

Colt kept running and Kenny kept pace alongside. “I didn’t want to show him my fear and give myself away. I wanted him to think I was on his side.” So Kenny played along, telling Colt, “I ain’t gonna let nobody kill you.”

Colt wasn’t buying it. “He looking at me tensified and kept exactly the same distance between us, eight feet, and wouldn’t let me get closer,” says Kenny. “I kept running beside him, asking, ‘Who tryin’ kill you?’ and saying, ‘Let me help you!’ When I moved a little closer, though, he put his finger on the trigger… He didn’t want to shoot me, he wasn’t evil, but I know he was thinking it was going to get physical and I was bigger than him.”

Kenny quickly weighed his options and his chances and made the wise decision. “Can’t run down a man with a gun, gotta let him go,” he says.