On March 13, 1993 @ 4:25am, a 911 emergency call came into Palm Beach County. Charles & Betty Muer and longtime friends George & Lynn Drummey were on a 40-foot sailboat bound for Florida from the Bahamas. They were experiencing 70 mph winds and thirty-foot waves. Two different calls came in prior to 4:30am. Both were nothing but static on the other end.
It was determined the calls came from a cell phone in the Atlantic Ocean, about twenty-five miles east of Lantana.
Chuck Muer was president of C.A. Muer Corp, based in Detroit. It was a $65 million company that owned twenty-two seafood restaurants in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania & Washington D.C. George Drummey had his own company, Drummey & Associates, a manufacturers agent for an automotive supplier. He and his wife also had an Oldsmobile dealership.
Despite being warned by friends, Chuck had tried to outrun a massive storm. He’d outrun a hurricane once before. His sailboat, ‘Charley’s Crab,’ was spotted Friday afternoon, March 12 near Great Bahama Bank heading out on its 180-mile trip to Florida. It was expected to arrive some time Saturday.
‘Charley’s Crab’ likely got caught up in the Gulf Stream which is a river that runs north within an ocean a few miles east of Florida’s coast. While in the Gulf Stream, the Muer’s likely encountered the powerful storm that had crossed the state packing 80 mph winds coming from the west.
Chuck Muer was an experienced sailor, having started on Lake St. Clair northeast of Detroit and then sailing for nearly thirty years in Florida and the Bahamas. According to their daughter Susan, “we used to sail in the Bahamas every year, sometimes for weeks at a time, the whole family.”
In 1973, Muer bought Engine House #5 at 121 Thurman Ave on Columbus’ south end. The building was an old firehouse built in 1892. Muer had accumulated quite a few historical buildings in multiple states that he restored and reopened as his restaurant empire grew. After spending $1 million on renovations and keeping the old fire pole, the restaurant opened in 1974.
The décor and ambiance maintained the firehouse theme, complete with hoses and jump nets hung from the ceiling. The restaurant specialized in seafood and had live music every evening. Unique to the menu was Charley’s Bucket, a boil filled with lobster, crab, mussels, clams, dressed potatoes, corn & butter.
The wait staff would slide down the fire pole while holding a birthday cake with candles to deliver to a happy patron. The basement of Engine House #5 was a big bar area called ‘The Spot.’ In 1980, the restaurant was named a German Village historical site. It was quite the popular spot in Columbus.
Then, that fateful sailboat trip in 1993.
Muer had three restaurants in Florida named ‘Charley’s Crab’ (Ft Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Jupiter). He opened his first restaurant in 1965. C.A. Muer Corp was privately held. The Muer family – with seven children – held the majority interest.
Chuck and Betty were on vacation in March 1993. They were expected back Sunday. Susan, their daughter, knew of the storm on Friday evening while out with friends, but also knew that her father was a sensible, careful sailor who knew when not to take a risk. The Drummeys, however, had expressed an interest in attending a party in Palm Beach on Saturday night, so on Friday the two couples began their trek from the Bahamas northwest to Jupiter.
“Then at 4:20am it (the storm) hit like a wall.” The storm created steep water canyons 20 to 30 feet deep. “When wind opposes sea, the waves build fast,” said Coast Guard Lt Commander Jim Howe. “It’s the worst thing that can happen.” If the engine loses power, capsizing is almost certain.
Sailing friends remember there being no internal flotation onboard ‘Charley’s Crab’ and the fact that it had a round hull, small scuppers and inadequate bilge pumps made it very unseaworthy in a storm. The boat’s distress signal that would transmit an emergency by satellite to the Coast Guard was never activated.
One friend was not surprised nothing was found and says it likely sunk in one piece – given the magnitude of the storm – in thirty seconds or less.
Three Coast Guard and U.S. Air Force planes searched 17,000 square miles from Florida to Charleston, SC for almost a week. They found nothing. The Muer children hired private planes. Again nothing.
The powerful Gulf Stream can take things a long way away, even as far as the North Atlantic. “It’s unusual not to find anything,” said Howe. “Usually there’s something, if not a body, then something that fell from the boat.”
Four other vessels were reported missing during that storm at the same time. A 147-foot commercial freighter – Miss Beholding – carrying 5000 gallons of diesel fuel and twenty tons of M&Ms, Snickers and Three Musketeers bars had run aground on a coral reef in the Florida Keys.
Chuck Muer always wore his signature bow tie and was described as generous, honest, nice, level-headed, charismatic and cordial. He did a lot of charity work. Every year he hosted a big Christmas party at his restaurants in Florida, working with an organization in Broward County that helped troubled youth. He would take everyone out on a fishing charter.
Chuck and Betty Muer were both 55. They started dating in the eighth grade. Their children had to petition the courts to declare them legally dead.
The Muer children eventually divested themselves from the restaurant empire their father had built, selling much of their holdings to the Landry Seafood chain in Houston in 2002. Landry closed Engine House #5 in Columbus two months later.
The building eventually became the corporate headquarters for Big Red Rooster, a creative retail branding & marketing firm headquartered in Columbus.
Sources: Lost at sea by David Ballingrud, March 13, 1994, Tampa Bay Times, www.tampabay.com; Murder At Sea: what killed Detroit restauranteur Chuck Muer? Retro Kimmer’s Blog, www.retrokimmer.com; Restaurateur, companions missing in Atlantic, www.upi.com; John Sessa, Mar 8, 2025, www.facebook.com; Detroit restaurateur Chuck Muer reported missing, Associate Press, Ann Arbor News, March 17, 1993. www.aadl.org; Tequesta teens’ plight hits home to woman who lost parents as sea by Joe Capozzi, Aug 1, 2015, The Palm Beach Post, www.palmbeachpost.com; German Village – behind the bricks by John M. Clark, 2015; Engine House No 5, https://columbusrestauranthistory.com; Remember when old Columbus Fire Engine House No. 5 became a unique seafood restaurant? by Angela O’Neal, June 16, 2024, www.aol.com; Remembering German Village by Jody H. Graichen, 2010; Engine House No. 5, Columbus Ohio, www.grokipedia.com; The Bermuda Mystery has been solved, The Brain Maze, Dec 27, 2025, www.facebook.com; Featured picture of Chuck Muer is courtesy of TheOtherPlaceLounge, www.instagram.com.