Bermuda Police have been asked to help in a two-year-old unsolved mystery of three Americans missing at sea.

American Mrs. Cora NeeSmith -- mother and grandmother of two of the missing men -- contacted Police to find out if local authorities had any knowledge of the trio who have been missing since April, 1990.

Police spokeswoman Sgt. Andrea Browne said neither Police nor Harbour Radio were familiar with the case, but Police would keep her request in mind.

Bermuda is just one of many places the desperate family have contacted in the past two years, Mrs. NeeSmith told The Royal Gazette from her Savannah, Georgia home.

"We've been doing this now for a while, we just got around to Bermuda,'' she said.

The NeeSmiths believe the three men were picked up by a cargo ship and are being held against their will in a foreign country.

Mrs. NeeSmith's two sons Billy Joe NeeSmith, then 23, Nathan NeeSmith, then 31, grandson Howard Keith Wilkes, then 18, and friend Franklin Brantley, then 23, left Richmond Hill off the coast of Savannah for a regular fishing trip on April 11, 1990.

The men, who were commercial fishermen, were en route to a fishing area off Edisto Beach, South Carolina on board the 34-foot fibreglass boat the Casey Nicole when they ran into difficulty.

The boat began taking on water around 4 a.m. the following day.

Nearly an hour after flooding was discovered, the four men, fearful that the boat might sink stuffed about 75 pounds of food into a duffel bag, loaded it into a two-man, inflatable life raft and then abandoned the fishing boat about 67 miles east of Hilton Head Island.

They also rounded up two 21 feet by six feet hatch covers made of plywood and covered on one side with styrofoam, plastic polyball markers, a plastic foam cooler and anything else that would float.

Then, using nylon rope they had taken along, the crew strung together a raft, figuring they could survive for a few days. But the raft could not accommodate all four men.

"The other three could sit on it with their legs hanging into the water and they were OK,'' Nathan NeeSmith later told The Macon Telegraph. "But I weigh about 250 pounds, and if I had tried to get on, it would have gone under.'' Their plight was complicated by two other factors -- Wilkes developed an acute case of leg cramps so he needed to stay on the raft and Brantley could not swim.

Nathan managed to swim back to the sinking fishing boat and held onto a portion which stuck out of the water for two days and two nights.

He later told The Macon Telegraph he saw a cargo ship in the distance -- about the same place he figured his shipmates might be. He said he believed the ship picked them up because it stopped.

Nathan managed to stay afloat in a bait box from the Casey Nicole for three more days.

He was found floating in the box on April 20, 1990, by crew on a boat passing 20 miles east of Hilton Head Island.

A massive search, from Florida to Virginia, was launched for the other three men.

And other fishing crews who knew the NeeSmiths joined the Coast Guard search.

But there was no sign of the men.

The NeeSmith family, however, have not given up their belief that the men are still alive.

They hired boats and continued a private search in the surrounding area, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean islands.

And Mrs. NeeSmith said just as they were exhausting their search -- about six months after the three went missing -- the family received a phone call from a man with a heavy Spanish accent who could only pronounce a family member's name and give a telephone number.

After a similar call was made another six times, Mrs. NeeSmith said the family began to take the caller seriously.

She noted that their number was unlisted.

The NeeSmith family received more hope after the story appeared on the American television show "Unsolved Mysteries''.

Mrs. NeeSmith said shortly after the show aired an immigration officer in Miami called to tell them there was a Mexican man at the immigration camp who had been in a Cuban prison with three Americans fitting the missing trio's descriptions.

The Mexican man gave the name of the Cuban prison and its location.

One of the NeeSmiths' daughters and a private investigator went to Cuba undercover to check out the new information. But prison officials in Cuba denied the men were there.

"But it was so clear they had been there,'' Mrs. NeeSmith said. "The Mexican guy described the same people. We went back and asked four different times.'' The NeeSmiths, who extended their search to Haiti and Mexico, now have investigators working for them in the northern part of South America.

They are offering a $50,000 reward to anybody who can lead them to the missing men.

Mrs. NeeSmith said since offering the cash, the family had received lots of calls. One was from a lady in New York whose son was rescued by a ship taken to Caracas, around the same time that the trio were believed to be rescued.

The woman also told Mrs. NeeSmith that she received a phone call from a Mexican man around the same time that the NeeSmith family received their first call.

The man told the woman he was from Mexico, but had been in a Cuban prison.

"Everything he said panned out,'' Mrs. NeeSmith noted.

"We know they are out there,'' she said. "And we're not going to give up.

"My family will continue searching until we get results. If we had the raft in our hand, we would say OK God and accept it. But until then we will continue to search.''