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(CNN) -- The three friends pointed the nose of their 31-foot boat in the direction of the best fishing, near the oil rigs off the Louisiana coast. It was April 20, a beautiful, calm morning. They caught a netfull. Hours passed into darkness. At around 9:45 p.m., they looked out and saw what appeared, at first, like a flare. Bradley Shivers grabbed his binoculars. "Man, this doesn't look right," he said to his buddies Scott Russell and Mark Mead. Shivers then reached for the boat's radio to phone another rig. But then, over the airwaves: "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! This is the Deepwater Horizon! We are on fire! We are abandoning the rig!" Then a boom, an explosion. The fishermen were 18 miles away. "It hit your chest," Mead recalled. "It was like a plane flying real low, really fast," said Russell. "It shook the boat. I mean, we knew it was bad." Shivers radioed the Coast Guard. "'Please, how many people can you hold on [your] boat?'" he was asked. "'We don't know, you know, maybe 20-25, we've never, basically ... this is a fishing boat. I mean, we've never put that many people on it...They're like 'Please, please help!' Shivers threw the throttle down. As the Rambling Wreck sped toward the flames, they stowed their fishing gear and pulled out life jackets, floating pillows and rope. They put on life jackets. "We knew people were in the water," Russell recalled. "We had to be ready to jump." Mayday calls crackled on the radio. The 20 minutes it took the fishermen get to the rig felt like forever. What are we going to see when we get there? Shivers thought. The men kept communicating with the Coast Guard, describing their coordinates and what they were hearing over their radio as they closed in on Deepwater Horizon. For a second, just a second, disbelief gripped them. Flames blazed across the water's surface, jumping 500 feet. And the heat.... People were flailing in the current, hurt, screaming. Others clung to life boats. "We've got friends that are missing," someone shouted. "Please go search!" The Deepwater...
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Three friends were fishing 18 miles from the Deepwater Horizon on April 20 .
They arrived at the inferno before the Coast Guard .
Someone shouted to them: "We've got friends that are missing. Please go search!"
The men say they tried to tell BP, Transocean and received no response .