... that started from a tropic port, aboard this tiny ship.
The mate was a mighty angry woman
the skipper dumb as stones.
He parted in an angry huff
and left her all alone;
he left her all alone...
========From the St. Petersburg Times=======
Woman, dogs stranded on sandbar after spat
The skipper leaves, then drives to Orlando. The Sheriff's Office snags a ride the next day to pick up the rest of the family.
By STEVE THOMPSON
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 27, 2003
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The official report is sketchy, but it seems that on several occasions, James and Leisha Kelley have taken a boat to a sandbar near Anclote Key, where they have argued, which has resulted in James motoring off leaving Leisha behind.
Until Tuesday night, James always came back.
After this most recent argument, James did not come back. Instead, he went ashore and drove to Orlando.
Meanwhile, back on the sandbar, Leisha, clad only in a bikini, was left with a cooler (contents unknown), a towel, a lounge chair, and two small dogs (names unknown).
At some point in the evening, Leisha borrowed a cell phone to call a friend, who apparently did not get any of her three messages until Wednesday morning. The friend called James, who declined to return to get Leisha, because he was already in Orlando.
The friend, Denise Anderson, called the Pasco Sheriff's Office.
Joseph Jata had been on the dock at Anclote River Park about 7 a.m. Wednesday preparing to take his 25-foot cruiser out when a sheriff's deputy asked him for a lift out to the sandbar to pick up Leisha Kelley.
She was angry, said Jata, 46, of Spring Hill.
He said they found her unharmed - "She was just by herself with the two dogs." But there isn't much boat traffic near the island on weekdays, Jata said, so it could have been quite awhile before someone happened to find them.
"It's probably a little chilly out there at night."
The sandbar, which is just north of Anclote Key, is a narrow strip that ranges from 28 to 40 acres, depending on tides.
And it was a spot that the Kelleys apparently visited often. James, 50, and Leisha, 39, were recently married, Anderson said.
One of the couple's previous arguments ended up more serious than Tuesday's incident. According to a Pasco Sheriff's Office report, James was arrested last year on charges of misdemeanor domestic battery, after an argument near a sandbar just west of New Port Richey's Floramar Terrace. The case still is pending. What is with this guy? Does boating make him intensely furious? Or does it just make her intensely unconsolable? Or both?
After that argument, as James motored toward the dock, Leisha jumped off the boat and swam to her friend Anderson's house. Anderson lives along a canal in New Port Richey.
Records indicate the couple recently moved from New Port Richey to the Orlando area. They keep their boat drydocked in a marina near Anclote River Park, Jata heard Leisha say.
Since Leisha's rescue from the island, the Pasco Sheriff's Office has taken no action on Tuesday's incident.
"It is not a criminal violation based on those particular circumstances," sheriff's spokesman Jon Powers said Thursday. "There was no complaint that a crime had been committed." I guess Leisha doesn't consider spending the night on a sandbar to be abandonment, which just goes to show the level of stupidity involved.
