I would like to know if there was a Hurricane off the coast of Florida
in 1982 where 17 people were lost at sea.  There were some survivors,
one of which was a Donald Schollian.  He reports that the New York
Times carried a story on this tradegy, but I have not been able to
find copy on it.  Can you help?

i dont believe there was. because first of all, look at this page, it
is a page showing all of the major hurricanes off the atlantic coast
in 1982
http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/1982/index.html

and if you look, <b>Hurricane Alberto</b> is the only one remotely
near the coast of florida.

and then look on this page, showing the archives of past hurricanes.
then look at the archive under the Alberto section and then find the
year 1982, it shows no damage or no deaths were recorded.
http://www.hurricanesite.com/hurricanes2000.cfm?displaynames=yes

According to TheHurricaneSite.com, Tropical Storm Beryl (which never
made it to "hurricane" status) killed 115 people in 1982. Beryl was
the only tropical storm with fatalities in that year, according to the
site.

http://www.hurricanesite.com/hurricanes2000.cfm?displayear=yes

However, a map from Weather.Unisys.com indicates that Beryl didn't go
near Florida, although Hurricane Alberto (which had no fatalities)
did, as mikedirntrulez-ga has pointed out.

http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/1982/

If 17 Americans were lost at sea during a single storm, that would be
the sort of major disaster that would be certain to generate many news
articles, and many references on the Web. The story sounds somewhat
"fishy" to me.

You may soon be able to browse the full text of all New York Times
back articles. Then you could check and see if there was indeed an
article like the one this person described.

An article on the New York Times/ProQuest project is here:

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54030,00.html

Your best bet may be to find a college library where computers with
ProQuest are available for public use.