On March 1, the Coast Guard command center in St. Petersburg, Fla., received an early morning distress call. Four well-known athletes"”two of them players in the NFL"”had gone out on a 21-foot fishing vessel early the previous morning and hadn't returned home. The caller, a family friend of one of the players, was worried that their boat might have capsized in the heavy seas.

Over the next two and a half days, the Coast Guard conducted an intense search that quickly expanded to a 4,000-square-mile area of the Gulf of Mexico, some 35 miles west of Clearwater Pass. Involved in the effort were a 47-foot motor lifeboat, an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, a four-engine C-130J Hercules search plane, and three ocean-going rescue cutters and their crews.

By noon the following day, the search teams had located the vessel"”an open, center-console recreational boat that had foundered in rough seas"”and had rescued Nick Schuyler, a former University of South Florida football player who'd been found clinging to the overturned hull. The other three boaters, including Oakland Raiders linebacker Marquis Cooper, NFL defensive lineman Corey Smith, and former USF player William Bleakley, were never found. At the end of the third day, the Coast Guard suspended the search.

While the boaters' fame as football players garnered most of the public's interest during the search-and-rescue drama, there was another aspect of the effort that drew attention. The 65-hour operation cost about $1.7 million, according to Coast Guard estimates.

U.S. COAST GUARD FIREMAN ADAM CAMPBELLNick Schuyler is lifted into a rescue helicopter after being rescued from an overturned vessel. Victor "Marquis" Cooper, Corey Smith and William Bleakley did not return from their fishing trip.Coast Guard officials say the cost of the Florida incident isn't unusual, and they insist that the fact that two of the four boaters were professional football players did not influence the rescue effort.

"It's easy for a SAR case to run up to that amount, especially in cases where the weather is bad and the areas we have to search are large," says Lt. Commander Christopher O'Neil, the Coast Guard's chief spokesman. "Take a case where a passenger on a cruise ship has fallen overboard and is missing. You may well have to search hundreds of square miles of ocean for several days, calling out all kinds of aircraft and patrol boats. That kind of thing adds up very quickly."

The average search and rescue cost $27,712.50 last year, according to numbers calculated by Mad Mariner using data provided by the Coast Guard. However, that number is only an average, and does not convey the widely divergent nature of these operations. Some take only an hour or two and require one small rescue boat, while others may require days of searching using planes and helicopters. Indeed, Coast Guard officials say they do not calculate or consider costs when rescue decisions are being made, noting that it's their mission to carry out the work.

"It is not part of our business process or case completion process to calculate costs," O'Neil said, adding that, "It's simply not how we do business."

'HIT IT HARD AND HIT IT FAST'

Shore-based commanders decide what assets"”helicopters, search planes and patrol boats"”to send out based on a variety of factors, ranging from the area they have to search and what equipment they have available to sea state and weather conditions and the likelihood that anyone might have survived.

"It all depends on the circumstances and the information you have available," says Commander Erin MacDonald, chief of the Office of Search and Rescue at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C. "The general rule is to hit it hard and hit it fast, with as much as you have, because every minute that the search goes on, it becomes more difficult. The SAR controller isn't looking at costs."

One factor in the equation is which assets are nearest to the scene, MacDonald says. "If you have a C-130J that's already in the area on a training mission, you're likely to use it. Whatever is closest is going to go"”whether it's a helicopter or a 378-foot cutter or a 23-foot response boat. The sooner we can resolve a case, the better."

DOLLARS AND CENTS

The service spent a total of $665.1 million on SAR operations in 2008, almost 11 percent of its overall $6.1 billion budget. That's up from $467 million for SAR operations in 2003, and $427.2 million in 2000. Part of the reason the costs have gone up is that the number of recreational boats and other vessels has increased sharply over that same period.

While the service doesn't compile figures on the "average" cost of a SAR mission, it does have a menu of hourly costs that offers insight into how operations can get expensive quickly. The figures include estimates for the cost of fuel, maintenance, logistical support, electronic equipment, administrative costs, and pay and employee benefits, as well as asset depreciation.

The list shows that the cost of operating a 41-foot patrol boat is $2,739 an hour; a 47-foot motor lifeboat is $4,189 an hour; a 330-foot special-purpose law-enforcement ship is $2,189 an hour; a C-130J search plane is $15,202 an hour; and an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter (with rescue-swimmer aboard) is $13,880 an hour. If a ship or plane is on a routine training mission and is diverted to search for a missing vessel, the cost is allocated to the SAR mission.

And those are just the Coast Guard's expenses. If other law-enforcement agencies"”state or local marine police departments, for example"”join in the operation, the overall cost goes even higher.

In the Florida case involving the football players, the Coast Guard asked local law-enforcement officers for help gathering information from the players' marina. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sent out its own patrol boats. And the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center deployed search aircraft for part of the mission. Those costs are not included in the $1.7 million estimate.

Coast Guard officials say such cases underscore how expensive hoax calls and false alarms can be. The service has received some 772 known and probable hoax calls since early 2003"”115 of them confirmed hoaxes, 646 suspected and 11 others listed as a probable diversionary tactic by drug-runners and other criminals.

Knowingly making a false distress call is a felony, with penalties of five to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 criminal fine and $5,000 in civil fines. The court also may require the perpetrator to reimburse the Coast Guard for the cost of its response.

Coast Guard officials say they are currently seeking to recover $50,000 that the service spent on a several-hour SAR mission off the coast of Astoria, Ore., after a 31-year-old man set off two emergency distress flares while he and others were shooting off fireworks in a seaside parking lot in late April. The search involved several hours' time using patrol boats and helicopters. The flares were sighted over Young's Bay.

PAYING THE BILLS

The Coast Guard charges other government agencies for the use of aircraft and vessels in law-enforcement cases, with separate price lists for federal agencies and for state and local authorities. But it doesn't dun ordinary boaters or commercial vessel owners for any SAR operation that it performs in genuine distress cases.

If you're sitting there with a pencil and a calculator, trying to reconcile the per-hour charges with the $1.7 million price-tag for the early-March incident, don't bother spending much time on it. You can't just add up the hourly rates and multiply them by the time that the Coast Guard spent searching for the missing boaters.

You'd also need to know how long each asset was actually in use during the two-and-a-half-day period, and that could vary widely. A C-130J might have been out of operation for several hours for maintenance or repairs. Patrol boats must change crews after several hours to avoid their becoming so fatigued that it degrades their judgment and reaction-time. And some assets may not have been called out until later in the SAR period, after it seemed likely that the players had drifted further out into the Gulf of Mexico.

The SAR effort in early March was relentless"”and frustrating to the rescuers and the families, officials say. A two-inch-thick case file obtained by Mad Mariner under a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the Coast Guard sent a motor lifeboat, two cutters and several aircraft out shortly after it received the initial call, but the searchers weren't able to find any sign of the missing fishing boat.

Another search at first light also proved inconclusive. Finally, in late morning on Monday, a Coast Guard cutter located the capsized vessel far out in the Gulf, with Schuyler atop the bottom-up hull. He was rescued and flown by helicopter to Tampa General Hospital.

Coast Guard patrol boats and aircraft continued to search the area into the third day without finding the three other football players. The searches were finally suspended at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the patrols boats and aircraft returned to their bases.

U.S. COAST GUARD FIREMAN ADAM CAMPBELLCrew members from Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater, Fla., and the Coast Guard Cutter Tornado rescue Nick Schuyler from an overturned vessel 35 miles west of Tampa Bay, Fla., on March 2, 2009.PAYING A HIGH PRICE

What makes the SAR cost figures so striking, officials say, is the fact that much of the expense could be reduced if boaters were better trained in seamanship"”and if they paid more attention.

In the accident involving the football players, for example, an investigation by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission concluded that inexperience and mistakes by the boaters were major contributing factors to the accident.

The four men didn't keep close enough tabs on the weather, and they apparently were unaware that a storm front was moving in, a blow that resulted in stiff winds and heavy seas. When they had trouble weighing anchor, they tied their anchor-line to an eye on the boat's transom"”a serious mistake because it makes the vessel less stable than when it is anchored from the bow. And they compounded the problem by trying to throttle forward to pry the anchor loose from the bottom"”a move that flooded the boat and led to its capsizing. The four didn't don life-jackets until after the boat had capsized, and Schuyler said later that after several hours, when hypothermia set in, two of the men removed their life-jackets, likely out of delirium, fell unconscious and simply drifted away. Only Schuyler was able to hang on.

Cooper, the boat's owner, had some boating experience, but no formal training in seamanship, according to the Conservation Commission's report. The crew didn't think about cutting the anchor line to free the vessel. And they'd gotten much too far from shore, considering the bad weather that had blown in.

Coast Guard officials say SAR costs may be reduced somewhat after the service finishes installing its new Rescue 21 communications system, a $550.2 million, state-of-the-art, radio-direction-finding network. With it, the Coast Guard can pinpoint a distressed vessel's location from even a split-second transmission from the boat's VHF-FM radio.

The system, which has been suffering from the kind of glitches that often occur with startup programs, is being billed as a way to "take the search out of search-and-rescue" and cut the response time for rescuers to reach a vessel in distress. Cutting the response time will cut the cost as well, the service's spokesmen say.

The full cost of the Rescue 21 system, when it's finally completed, will total more than $1 billion, the Coast Guard says. The service's planners say they can't estimate how much money it will save for the same reasons that they can't predict the cost of SAR operations: each SAR case is so different that there's no way to calculate an average.

Even so, there's a bottom line: conducting search-and-rescue operations isn't cheap, and the service doesn't go out of its way to publicize the cost. "We never want people to think about how much it will cost if their vessels are in distress, MacDonald says.