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Shipwrecked: A Shocking Tale of Love, Loss, and Survival in the Deep Blue Sea

yachts lost at sea

Illustration by Comrade

A drift in the middle of the ocean, no one can hear you scream.

It was a lesson Brad Cavanagh was learning by the second. He had been above deck on the Trashman , a sleek, 58-foot Alden sailing yacht with a pine-green hull and elegant teak trim, battling 100-mile-per-hour winds as sheets of rain fell from the turbulent black sky. The latest news report had mentioned nothing about bad weather, but two days into his voyage a tropical storm formed off of Cape Fear in the Carolinas, whipping up massive, violent waves out of nowhere. Soaked to the skin and too tired to stand, the North Shore native from Byfield sought refuge down below, where he braced himself by pressing his feet and back between the walls of a narrow hallway to keep from being knocked down as 30-foot-tall walls of water tossed the boat around the open seas.

Below deck with Cavanagh were four crewmates: Debbie Scaling, with blond hair and blue eyes, was an experienced sailor. As the first American woman to complete the Whitbread Round the World Race—during which she’d navigated some of the most difficult conditions on the planet—she was already well known in professional sailing circles. Mark Adams, a mid-twenties Englishman who had been Cavanagh’s occasional racing partner; the boat’s captain, John Lippoth; and Lippoth’s girlfriend, Meg Mooney, rounded out the crew, who were moving a Texas tycoon’s yacht from Maine to Florida for the winter season.

As the storm continued, Cavanagh grew increasingly angry. At 21 years old and less experienced than most of the others, he felt as though no one had a plan for how they were going to get out of this mess alive. He knew their situation was dire. The motor was dead for the third time on the trip, and they had already cut off the wind-damaged mainsail. That meant nature was in control. They could only ride it out and hope to survive long enough for the Coast Guard to rescue them. Crewmates had been in contact with authorities nearly every hour since the early morning, and a rescue boat was supposedly on its way. It’s just a matter of time , Cavanagh told himself again and again, just a matter of time.

After a while, the storm settled into a predictable pattern: The boat would ride up a wave, tilt slightly to port-side and then ride down the wave, and right itself for a moment of stillness and quiet, sheltered from the wind in the valley between mountains of water. Cavanagh began to relax, but then the boat rose over another wave, tilted hard, and never righted itself. Watching the dark waters of the Atlantic approach with terrifying speed through the window in front of him, Cavanagh braced for impact. An instant later, water shattered the window and began rushing into the boat. He jumped up from the floor with a single thought: He had to rouse Scaling from her bunkroom. He had to get everyone off the ship. The Trashman was going down.

Three days earlier, the weather had been perfect: The sun sparkled on the water and warmed everything its rays touched, despite bursts of cool breezes. Cavanagh was walking the docks of Annapolis Harbor alongside Adams, both of them hunting for work. A job Adams had previously secured for them aboard a boat had fallen through, and all they had to show for it was a measly $50 each. As they made their way along the water, Cavanagh spotted an attractive woman standing by a bank of pay phones. He looked at her and she stared back at him, a sandy-haired, 6-foot-3-inch former prep school hockey player draped in a letterman jacket. It wasn’t until she called out his name that he realized who she was: Debbie Scaling.

Cavanagh came of age in a boating family. He’d survived his first hurricane at sea in utero, and grew up on 4,300 feet of riverfront property in Byfield, where his father, a trained reconnaissance photographer named Paul, taught him and his siblings how to sail from an early age. From the outside, the elite schools, the sailboat, the new car every five years, the grand house, and the self-made patriarch gave the impression that the Cavanaghs were living the suburban American dream. Inside the home, though, it was a horror show. Always drinking, Cavanagh’s father emotionally abused, insulted, and belittled his wife and children, Cavanagh recalls. Whenever Cavanagh heard the clinking of ice cubes in his father’s glass, his stress meter spiked.

Despite that—or perhaps because of it—all Cavanagh ever wanted was his father’s approval. Sailing, he thought, would earn his respect. Cavanagh’s sister, Sarah, after all, had been a star sailor, and at family dinners his hard-drinking—and hard-to-please—father talked about her with pride and adulation. In fact, it was Cavanagh’s sister who had first met Scaling when they raced across the Atlantic together a year earlier. She had recently introduced Scaling to Cavanagh and her family, and now, standing at that pay phone in Annapolis, Scaling could hardly believe her eyes. At that very moment, she had just called Cavanagh’s household in hopes of convincing Sarah to join the crew of the Trashman , and here was Sarah’s younger brother standing right in front of her.

Scaling was desperately looking for help on the yacht. Already things had been going poorly: The boat’s captain, Lippoth, who was a heavy drinker, was passed out below deck when she first showed up at the Southwest Harbor dock in Maine to report for work. Soon after they set sail, they picked up the captain’s girlfriend, Mooney, because she wanted to come along for the trip. From Maine to Maryland, Lippoth rarely eased the sails and relied on the inboard motor, which consistently sputtered and needed repair. They’d struggled to pick up additional hands as they traveled south, and Scaling knew they needed more-qualified help for the difficult sail along the coast of the Carolinas, exposed at sea to high winds and waves. Scaling didn’t share any of this with Cavanagh or Adams when Lippoth offered them a job, though. Happy to have work, the pair accepted and climbed aboard.

Perhaps Cavanagh should have known something was wrong with the yacht when the captain mentioned that the engine kept burning out.

“Mayday! Mayday!” A crew member was shouting into the radio, trying to summon the Coast Guard as the yacht began taking on water. Cavanagh had just burst into Scaling’s cabin, while Adams roused Lippoth and Mooney. And now they huddled together at the bottom of a flight of stairs watching the salty seawater rise toward the ceiling. Lippoth tried to activate the radio beacon that would have given someone, anyone, their latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, but the water rushing in carried it away before he could reach it.

The crew started making their way up toward the deck to abandon ship. Cavanagh spotted the 11-and-a-half-foot, red-and-black Zodiac Mark II tied to a cleat near the cockpit. The outboard motor sat next to it on the mount, but the yacht was sinking too fast to grab it. As he fumbled with the lines of the Zodiac, one broke, recoiled, and ripped his shirt open. Then he lost his grip on the dinghy, and it floated off. Fortunately, it didn’t go far. Adams wasn’t so lucky. A strong gust of wind ripped the life raft out of his hands, and the sinking yacht started to take the raft and its emergency food, water rations, and first-aid kit down with it. By the time Cavanagh swam off the Trashman , it was nearly submerged.

As Cavanagh made his way toward the dinghy, he kicked off his boots, which belonged to his father. For a moment, all he could think was how angry his dad would be at him for losing them. When he got to the Zodiac, he yelled to the others to grab ahold of the raft before the yacht sucked them down with it. The crew made it onto the dinghy with nothing but the clothing on their backs. As they turned around, the last visible piece of the Trashman disappeared beneath the ocean.

Terrified, the five crew members spent the next four hours in the water, being thrashed about by the waves while holding on to the lines along the sides of the Zodiac, which they had flipped upside down to prevent it from blowing away. During the calmer moments, they ducked underneath for protection from the strong winds, with only their heads occupying a pocket of air underneath the raft. There wasn’t much space to maneuver, but still Cavanagh felt the need to move toward one end of the boat to get some distance from his crewmates while he processed his white-hot anger at Lippoth and Adams. Over the past two days, Adams had often been too drunk to do his job, and Lippoth never did anything about it, leaving him and Scaling to pick up the slack. Cavanagh had spent his childhood on a boat with a drunken father, and now, once again, he’d somehow managed to team up with an alcoholic sailing partner and a captain willing to look the other way.

Perhaps he should have known something was wrong with the yacht when the captain mentioned that the engine kept burning out. Maybe he should have been concerned that Lippoth didn’t even have enough money for supplies. But there was nothing he could do about it now, adrift in the Atlantic and crammed under an inflated dinghy trying to stay alive.

As nighttime approached and the temperature dropped, Cavanagh devised a plan for the crew to seek shelter on the underside of the Zodiac yet remain out of the water. First, he grabbed a wire on the raft and ran it from side to side. He lay his head on the bow of the boat and rested his lower body on the wire. Then the others climbed on top of him, any way they could, to stay under the dinghy’s floor but just out of the water. When the oxygen underneath the Zodiac ran out, they’d exit, lift the boat just long enough to allow new air into the pocket, and go back under again.

Sleep-deprived and dehydrated, Cavanagh’s mind wandered home to Byfield and the endless summer afternoons of his childhood spent under his family’s slimy dock, playing hide-and-seek with friends. Cavanagh had spent a lot of his life hiding from his father and his alcohol-fueled rages. If there was a silver lining to the abuse and the fear he grew up with, it was that he learned how to survive under pressure and to avoid the one fatal strain of seasickness: panic.

The next morning, that skill was suddenly in high demand as Lippoth unexpectedly swam out from under the Zodiac to find fresh air. He said he felt like he was having a heart attack and refused to go back under. The storm had calmed, but a cool autumn breeze was sucking the heat from their wet bodies, and Cavanagh wanted the crew to stay under the boat to keep warm. Disagreeing with him, Cavanagh’s crewmates decided to flip the boat right-side up and climb onboard. It momentarily saved their lives: They soon noticed three tiger sharks circling them.

Mooney had accidentally gotten caught on a coil of lines and wires while abandoning the yacht, leaving a bloody gash behind her knee. Everyone else had their cuts and scrapes, too, and the sharks had followed the scent. The largest shark in the group began banging against the boat, then swam under the craft and picked it up out of the water with its body before letting it drop back down. The crew grabbed onto the sides of the Zodiac while Cavanagh and Scaling tried to fashion a makeshift anchor out of a piece of plywood attached to the raft with the metal wire, hoping that it would help steady the boat. No sooner had they dropped the wood into the water than a shark bit it and began dragging the boat at full speed like some twisted version of a joy ride. When the shark finally spit the makeshift anchor out, Cavanagh reeled it in and Adams, in a rage, grabbed it and tried to smash the shark’s head with it. Cavanagh begged his partner to calm down. “The shark’s reaction to that might be bad,” he said, “so just cool it.”

Cavanagh believed that if they could all just stay calm enough to keep the boat upright, they could make it out alive. “The Coast Guard knows we’re here,” Cavanagh told the others, who had heard a plane roaring overhead before the Trashman sank. It was presumably sent to locate any survivors so a rescue ship could bring them back to shore. Unknown at the time was that a boat had been on the way to rescue the group, when for some reason—a miscommunication of sorts—the search was either forgotten or called off. No one was coming for them.

yachts lost at sea

Brad Cavanagh is still haunted by his fight for survival. / Portrait by Matt Kalinowski

Fighting to survive, Cavanagh knew he needed to keep his mind and body busy. With blistered lips and cracked hands, he pulled seaweed onboard to use as a blanket, and he flipped the boat to clean out the urine and fetid water that had accumulated in it. First, he scanned the water to make sure the sharks had left. Then, with Adams’s help, he leaned back and tugged on the wire to flip the boat, rinsed it out, and flipped it back over again so everyone could climb back in. He had a job and a purpose, and it kept him sane.

The others struggled. Adams and Lippoth were severely dehydrated. (Adams from all the scotch he drank and Lippoth from the cigarettes he chain-smoked before the Trashman went down.) Meanwhile, Mooney’s cut was infected and filled with pus; she was getting sicker and weaker. As they lay together in a small pool of water in the bottom of the boat, they all developed body sores, likely from staph infections. Cavanagh’s skin became so tender that even brushing up against another person sent a current of pain through his body. After three days without food and water and using their energy to hold on to the Zodiac during the storm, they were all completely spent.

Realizing that the Coast Guard may not be coming after all, some crew members began to believe their only hope for survival was to eventually wash up on shore. What they weren’t aware of was that a current was pulling them even farther out to sea.

That night, Cavanagh dreamt of home. He was on a boat, sailing, and talking to the men on a fishing vessel riding along next to him as he made his way from Newburyport to Buzzards Bay. It was the route his family took when moving their boat every summer.

The day after he had that dream, the situation descended into a nightmare: Lippoth and Adams began drinking seawater. It slaked their thirst momentarily, but Cavanagh knew it would only be a matter of time before it sent them deeper into madness. Soon enough, the delusions began. First, Lippoth started reaching around the bottom of the boat looking for supplies that didn’t exist. “We bought cigarettes. Where are they?” Lippoth asked. Then Lippoth began trying to convince Mooney that they were going to take a plane to Maine, where his mother worked at a hospital. “We’re going to Portland,” he told her. “I’m going to get the car. I want you guys to pick up the boat and I’ll come back out and get you,” Lippoth said before sliding over the edge of the Zodiac and into the water.

“Brad, you’ve got to get John,” Scaling said to Cavanagh in a panic. But Cavanagh was so weak, he could barely muster the energy to coax Lippoth back onboard. “If you go away and die, then I might die, too. I don’t want to die,” Cavanagh pleaded.

It was too late. The wind pulled the Zodiac away from him. The captain soon drifted out of sight. Across the empty expanse of the ocean, Cavanagh could hear Lippoth’s last howls as the sharks attacked.

yachts lost at sea

An old newspaper clipping of Cavanagh and Scaling, not long before their rescue. / Courtesy photo

Now there were four. Cavanagh, though, noticed Adams was quickly careening into madness, hitting on Mooney, and proposing that sex would cheer her up. Rebuffed, he decided to take his party elsewhere. “Great,” Cavanagh recalls him saying, “if we’re not going to have sex, I’m going back to 7-Eleven to get some beers and cigarettes.”

“You’re not going,” Cavanagh said. “We’re out in the middle of the ocean.”

“I know, I know,” he told Cavanagh. “I’m just going to hang over the side and stretch out a little bit. I’ll get back in the boat.”

Holding onto the side of the raft, Adams slipped into the water. Cavanagh looked away for a moment to say something to Scaling, and when he turned back, Adams was gone. Soon after, the boat began to spin and the water around them started to churn wildly. Cavanagh knew the sharks had gotten Adams, but he was so focused on surviving that it hardly registered that his racing buddy was gone forever.

The three remaining castaways spent the rest of the evening being knocked around as the sharks bumped and prodded the boat. They found something they like , Cavanagh said to himself. And now they want more.

Mooney lay there shivering violently from the cold. In the black of night, she lurched at Cavanagh, scratching at him and screaming. Then she began speaking in tongues. In the morning, Cavanagh woke first and found her lying on her back, her arms outstretched, staring into the sky. “She’s dead,” Cavanagh said when Scaling woke up. “She’s been dead for hours.”

Then a terrifying thought came to his mind: Maybe we could eat her . He was so hungry, so desperately famished, but her body was covered in sores and oozing pus.

Cavanagh and Scaling removed Mooney’s shirt so they would have another layer to keep warm, and her jewelry so they could return it to her family. They still hoped they would have that chance. Then they pushed her naked body off the raft. She floated like a jellyfish, with her arms and legs straight down, away and over the waves. Neither of them were watching when the sharks came for her, too.

After Mooney died, Scaling was troubled that she was lying in pus-infected water and begged Cavanagh to flip the boat over and clean it out. Weak and unsteady, he agreed to try. Standing on the edge of the Zodiac, he tugged the wire and tried to flip it, but he didn’t have the strength to do it alone. Then he gave another tug, lost his balance, and tumbled backward into the water. He tried to get back in the boat but couldn’t. Panic seized him. Every person who had come off that boat had been eaten by sharks. He needed to get back in fast, and he needed Scaling’s help.

Cavanagh begged her to help him up, but she only sat there sobbing inconsolably on the other side of the raft. With his last bit of strength, Cavanagh willed himself over the side on his own. He sat in the boat, winded and seething with anger. The entire time, from when they were on the Trashman with a drunken crewmate, during the storm, and throughout their harrowing journey on the Zodiac, Scaling and Cavanagh had upheld a pact to look out for each other, to protect each other from the sharks, the madness, the others. How could she have left me there in the water? he thought. How could she have let me down? They were supposed to be a team. Now on their fifth day without food or water, he couldn’t even look at her. There were two of them left, but he felt alone.

They sat in a cold, uncomfortable silence until he had something important to say. “Deb, look,” Cavanagh shouted. A large vessel was approaching them. They’d spotted a couple of ships before in the distance, but none were close enough for them to be seen. As it moved toward them, he could see a man on the deck waving. Shortly after, crew members threw lines with large glass buoys on the end of them. But they all landed short, splashing in the water too far away. Undeterred, the men on deck pulled the rescue buoys back and tried again.

Cavanagh, for his part, couldn’t move. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told Scaling. It felt as if every muscle had gone limp. He had nothing left after spending days balancing the boat, flipping it, pulling it, and watching his crewmates die. The ship made another turn. Closer. The men aboard threw the lines again. Scaling jumped into the water and started swimming.

Seeing his crewmate in the water was all the motivation Cavanagh needed. Fuck it , he told himself. Here I go . He rolled overboard and managed to grab a line, letting the crew reel his weakened body in and hoist him up onto the deck along with Scaling. Aboard the ship, Cavanagh saw women wearing calico dresses with aprons and steel-toed work boots waiting for them. They were speaking Russian. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Coast Guard never came to save them, but ice traders on a Soviet vessel did.

The crew gave Cavanagh and Scaling dry clothes and medical attention, along with warm tea kettles filled with coffee, sugar, and vodka. That night, as the Coast Guard finally arrived and spirited the two survivors to a hospital, the temperature dropped down into the 30s. Cavanagh and Scaling wouldn’t have made it through another night at sea.

As Cavanagh was recuperating in the hospital, his mother flew down to be by his side. Seeing her appear at his bedside felt like the happiest moment of his life. His father, however, never came; he was on a sailing trip.

Cavanagh soon returned home to Massachusetts and once again felt the need to keep busy: He immediately began taking odd jobs in hopes of earning enough cash to begin traveling to sailboat races again. Processing what he’d endured—five days without food or water and man-eating sharks—was next to impossible. The Southern Ocean Racing Conference season in Florida started in January, and he was determined to be there, but not necessarily to race. He needed to talk to the only other person who had made it off that Zodiac alive. He had something important he needed to tell Scaling.

A few months later, Cavanagh boarded a flight to Fort Lauderdale for the event. With no place to stay, he slept in an empty boat parked in a field. Walking around the next day, he caught a glimpse of the latest issue of Sail magazine and stopped dead in his tracks: Staring back at him was a photo of him and Adams, plastered across the cover. A photographer had snapped a shot of the two racing buddies just before they’d joined the Trashman . It was like seeing a ghost.

Cavanagh paced the docks searching for Scaling—then there she stood, looking as beautiful as ever. His whole body was pumping with adrenaline at the sight of his former crewmate. He needed to tell her he was in love with her. They had shared something that no one else could ever understand. The bond he felt was far deeper than any he’d ever known.

He moved toward her to speak, but the mere sight of Cavanagh made Scaling recoil, reminding her of the horrors that she’d suffered at sea while in the Zodiac. “I’m sorry, but I cannot be around you,” he recalls her saying. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with me. Please leave me alone.” Dejected and hurt, Cavanagh retreated. Then he did what he’d always done: He walked the docks, banging on boats until he found someone willing to hire him.

As the years rolled by like waves, Scaling became a socialite and motivational speaker, talking publicly and often about her fight to survive. She appeared on Larry King Live and wrote a memoir. She and Cavanagh both continued to sail and ran in similar circles, seeing each other often, and both trying desperately to hide their pain when they did.

Scaling eventually settled down in Medfield, where she raised a family and spent summers on the Cape. In 2009, her son, also an avid sailor, drowned in an accident. Nearly three years to the day later, she passed away in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, at 54. Cavanagh was walking out of a marina in Newport, Rhode Island, when someone broke the news to him. He was profoundly disappointed. Disappointed with life itself. He had loved her. There was no information in her obituary about her cause of death, but he recalls there were whispers among family members of suicide. Cavanagh believed no one could have saved her: She was still tortured by those days lost at sea. He was now the lone survivor of the Trashman tragedy.

Several years later, Scaling’s daughter gave Cavanagh a frame. Inside it was a neatly coiled metal wire—the same one Cavanagh had rigged up to suspend their shivering bodies under the Zodiac and flip the boat to keep it clean. It was what had kept them both alive. Unbeknownst to him, Scaling had retrieved it after the dinghy was found still floating in the ocean. She framed it and hung it on her wall, keeping it close all those years.

Cavanagh remains hell-bent on learning why the Coast Guard never showed up in the aftermath of that fateful storm.

On a cold winter day, I drove to Cavanagh’s home in Bourne, where he lives with his wife, a schoolteacher, and his two children. He still had wide shoulders and a strong face, now layered with deep wrinkles, and greeted me with a handshake. His enormous hands engulfed mine.

The wind howled outside and a fire burned in the living room’s gas stove as he sat down on his couch to talk—for the very first time at length—about his life since being rescued. Above his head was the rendering of a floating school he once wanted to build for the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. It had classrooms, living quarters for the students, and bathrooms, but it never was built. It became one of Cavanagh’s many grand ideas over the years, all of which had to do with sailing, that he never saw to fruition. He wants to write a book, too, like Scaling, but he hasn’t been able to get started.

Sailing is the one thing that has remained constant in Cavanagh’s life. He said the ocean continued to give him freedom, even as he remained chained to his past, to the shipwreck that almost killed him, and to the abusive father who failed him.

While we sat there, listening to the wind, Cavanagh pulled out his father’s sailing logbook. In it were the dates and locations of his around-the-world trip. The day his father set sail in 1982, Cavanagh thought he was finally safe. His mother had just filed for divorce and Cavanagh no longer felt he had to stick around to protect her, so he left home to start his life. His father had invited him to join him on his trip, but there was no way Cavanagh was doing that. He wound up on the Trashman instead.

Cavanagh paused to read his father’s entries from the days that Cavanagh was lost at sea. At the time, his father had been docked and drunk in Bermuda, which lies off the coast of the Carolinas, just beyond where the yacht went down. Then he set sail again into the weakened tail end of the same storm that had sunk the Trashman , not knowing that his son had been floating in that same ocean, fighting for his life and waiting for someone to save him.

Cavanagh remains hell-bent on learning why the Coast Guard never showed up in the aftermath of that fateful storm. He has documents and photos from the official case file after the sinking of the Trashman , but they give few, if any, clues. He has spent decades trying to figure out what happened, and now that he’s the only crew member alive, he’s even more determined to find the truth. He wants to know how rescuers forgot about him and his crewmates, and why. Haunted by his memories, he has driven up and down the East Coast, stopping at bases and looking for anyone to speak to him about the incident. He is still adrift, nearly 40 years later, still searching for answers.

Search for 3 missing American sailors off coast of Mexico has been suspended: US Coast Guard

They had not contacted friends, family or maritime authorities since April 4.

The search for three Americans missing off the coast of Mexico has been suspended, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

"An exhaustive search was conducted by our international search and rescue partner, Mexico, with the U.S. Coast Guard and Canada providing additional search assets," Coast Guard Cmdr. Gregory Higgins said in a statement . "SEMAR [The Mexican Navy] and U.S. Coast Guard assets worked hand-in-hand for all aspects of the case. Unfortunately, we found no evidence of the three Americans' whereabouts or what might have happened. Our deepest sympathies go out to the families and friends of William Gross, Kerry O'Brien and Frank O'Brien."

The Mexican Navy and Coast Guard spent "281 cumulative search hours covering approximately 200,057 square nautical miles, an area larger than the state of California, off Mexico's northern Pacific coast with no sign of the missing sailing vessel nor its passengers," the Coast Guard said.

Kerry O'Brien, Frank O'Brien and Gross had not contacted friends, family, or maritime authorities since April 4.

PHOTO: Ocean Bound sailboat, the boat three Americans were sailing from Mexico in before going missing.

The trio likely encountered "significant" weather and waves as they attempted to sail their 41-foot sailboat from Mazatlán to San Diego.

"When it started to reach into five, six, seven days and we started to get a little more concerned," Kerry's brother Mark Argall told ABC News.

Higgins had expressed concern that the weather in that region worsened around April 6, with swells and wind creating waves potentially over 20 feet high. The three were sailing a capable 41-foot fiberglass boat, with similar sailboats successfully circumnavigating the planet. However, the lack of clear information about the sailors' location, partially attributable to the lack of GPS tracking and poor cellular service near the Baja peninsula, has left the families of the missing Americans uncertain about their loved ones' whereabouts.

"We have all been spinning our wheels about the different scenarios that could have happened," Gross' daughter Melissa Spicuzza said.

Kerry and Frank O'Brien, a married couple, initially decided to travel to Mexico to sail a 41-foot LaFitte sailboat named "Ocean Bound" to San Diego after the boat underwent repairs near Mazatlán, Mexico, according to Argall.

MORE: 6 children rescued near water diversion tunnel in Auburn, Massachusetts

The couple decided to hire Gross, a mechanic by trade and sailor with more than 50 years of experience, to help navigate the boat from Mazatlán to San Diego. Spicuzza recounted that friends of Gross would compare him to the 1980s fictional television character and improvisational savant MacGyver based on his ability to repair boats.

"Whatever it takes, he'll get it rigged up. He'll get it working," Spicuzza described.

The Coast Guard believed the sailors left their slip (the equivalent of a parking spot for boats) on April 2. They eventually departed Mazatlán on April 4, based on Facebook posts and cellphone usage.

PHOTO: William "Bill" Gross is seen with his daughter, Heather, in this undated photo.

The sailors expected the trip across the Gulf of California to Cabo San Lucas, where they planned to pick up provisions, would take two days. However, the Coast Guard does not believe the sailors ever stopped in Cabo San Lucas. Since April 4, marinas throughout the Baja Peninsula have not contacted the vessel, nor have any search and rescue crews spotted it.

According to Higgins, the weather worsened around April 6, with winds of 30 knots, strong swells, and waves making navigation more challenging. Spicuzza added that the sail from Mexico to California is inherently tricky since sailors need to navigate against the wind and current.

"From the tip of Baja all the way back up to Alaska, you're going against wind and current, so it's a more difficult, exhausting sail, but of course, doable with the experience that's on board," Spicuzza.

MORE: 1,200 aboard 2 migrant boats rescued in Mediterranean

Spicuzza added that the group's initially planned 10-day journey was likely unrealistic. Sailing against the wind and current would require the sailors to tack frequently, essentially zig-zag to make progress despite sailing into the wind, which could extend the journey to two and half weeks.

Moreover, according to the Coast Guard, the boat lacks trackable GPS navigation, such as a satellite phone or a tracking beacon. The limited cellular service in that region of Mexico also makes triangulating the cell position difficult.

Robert H. Perry, the designer of the 41-foot sailboat, noted that their boat was likely manufactured in Taiwan 35 years ago. Despite its age, the fiberglass sailboat itself was a time-tested, ocean-navigating boat.

PHOTO: Frank and Kerry O'Brien are seen in this undated file photo.

The travel circumstances have left family members uncertain about the status of their loved ones. Based on the timing, it appears possible they are "just going to roll into San Diego like nothing happened in maybe about a week," Spicuzza suggested, with the radio silence attributable to some electronic issue. Alternatively, the Coast Guard has worked on plotting where their life raft might have drifted under current weather conditions.

"It's just been a roller coaster of emotions the last several days; I want my dad home, I want him safe, [and] I want the O'Brien's home safe," Spicuzza said. "I'm very much looking forward to sitting around a table with all of them and joking about the time they got lost at sea – that is the hope."

ABC News' Elisha Asif, Helena Skinner, Zohreen Shah, Amantha Chery and Marilyn Heck contributed to this report.

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Hundreds of ships go missing each year, but we have the technology to find them

yachts lost at sea

Senior Lecturer in Astronomy, University of Leicester

Disclosure statement

Nigel Bannister works for the University of Leicester. He received funding from US Office of Naval Research - Global to conduct this work.

University of Leicester provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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The seas are vast. And they claim vessels in significant numbers. The yachts Cheeki Rafiki , Niña , Munetra , Tenacious are just some of the more high-profile names on a list of lost or capsized vessels which grows by hundreds each year.

Yet it took the disappearance of flight MH370, now declared lost with no survivors , to demonstrate how difficult it can be to find something in the open ocean. As the search continued, incredulity grew: exactly how, in the 21st century, is it possible to lose a 64-metre aircraft?

There are great unknowns at sea: planes and boats go missing. Illegal fishing and piracy are easy to conduct – and small vessels can smuggle powerful weapons and dangerous individuals. The technology to improve this situation already exists, we just need to make better use of it.

The view from above

Satellites provide the vantage point necessary to monitor large areas of ocean. Spacecraft carrying synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide high-quality images with resolution down to a metre, regardless of the weather. But the relatively small number of spacecraft equipped with SAR, and the dawn-to-dusk orbits which most occupy, also limit the times of day when they can provide coverage.

To offer comprehensive monitoring at sea, we need to bring together different types of imaging, including radar and photographic images in the human-visible wavelength. This is often overlooked for maritime purposes due to the effects of cloud, rain, and darkness that limit its use. But there are enough satellites with the capability that could provide excellent coverage.

Detail and coverage

The two key requirements for effective monitoring are high spatial resolution (good detail) and a large field of view (wide area). One tends to come at the expense of the other, so that a device – whether it is a camera, satellite or radar – capable of detecting small vessels will usually only be able to scan an area a few tens of kilometres wide, making it both unlikely that the search area of interest has been recorded and rendering subsequent searches very slow.

But the situation is changing. The number of imagers is growing rapidly. In our recently published study , we identified 54 satellites carrying 85 sensors which offer useful resolution and could be accessed commercially (excluding military surveillance spacecraft). Companies such as PlanetLabs are in the process of launching many more.

While each satellite’s imaging device generates an image track only 10-100km across, the motion of the satellite as it orbits the Earth effectively “scans” that track so that the image is narrow in one dimension but circles the world in the other. With orbital periods of around 90 minutes, one satellite makes around 16 passes over the daylit hemisphere every day. The combined imaging work of all these satellites now make a significant contribution to our awareness of maritime traffic.

Image early, image often

Imagery used in search-and-rescue operations is usually taken after the target is lost. In the case of the Niña which disappeared off the coast of New Zealand, eight days elapsed between last radio contact and the alarm being raised. For MH370, the search area evolved over periods of weeks. In both cases, ocean currents carry evidence away from the accident site, while debris disperses and sinks, making it more difficult to identify by satellite.

It would be far better to have an archive of recent, regularly updated images so that the recent history of a location over a period of several days can be examined. This could offer evidence of the vessel’s course or state, or pick up on areas of fresh, concentrated debris.

yachts lost at sea

Making the best of what we have

Satellites with visible wavelength cameras are generally used for gathering images of land. What if satellite operators could generate revenue by taking images of the oceans? The limited resources on satellites mean that it isn’t generally possible to constantly take images, to store that data and transmit it all in the next available contact with the ground (which may be some time after an image is acquired). As it is, it’s not possible to create a global maritime monitoring system of this kind without purpose-built spacecraft with bigger data storage and more frequent contact with ground stations to download it.

But it is possible to monitor high-priority areas of heavy traffic, protected fisheries and security-critical regions, with co-operation between operators of existing spacecraft (for which there are precedents such as George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project , which uses satellites to gather evidence of atrocities and war crimes), and incentives, perhaps involving maritime insurance companies.

Retrieving hundreds of gigabytes of data a day from satellites requires a new approach to ground stations. One solution may be to “crowdsource”: to create a network of stations operated by small institutions, universities and individuals to spread the burden of downloading data and increasing the periods during which data can be recorded and transmitted.

There are groups working on automated vessel-detection algorithms – and crowdsourcing also has a role here, such as TomNod , for example, which asked members of the public to help inspect images online in the search for Niña. How much more effective could search and rescue be if the power of crowdsourcing was applied to each stage of data acquisition, storage and processing, combined with high-quality images taken around the time the vessel was lost?

  • satellite tracking
  • Missing aircraft
  • Search and Rescue
  • Maritime security

yachts lost at sea

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An updated photo of the vessel searchers are looking for in the case of the 4 missing boaters out of Venice. This is a 1995 23-foot white SportCraft, registration # FL9937HC. (City of Venice)

Coast Guard suspends search for 4 missing boaters "pending new information"

The U.S. Coast Guard has suspended a search for four missing boaters last seen Saturday morning in Venice.

In a post on X, officials said the search was called off "pending new information."

The boat is a 25-foot center console and was last reported about 30 miles off Venice.

What You Need To Know

The u.s. coast guard has suspended a search for four missing boaters "pending new information" boat is a 25-foot center console and was last reported about 30 miles off venice men on the boat range in age from 35 to 54, the coast guard said.

#Final @USCG suspended the search for the 4 missing people pending new information. #SAR — USCGSoutheast (@USCGSoutheast) February 20, 2024

The men on the boat range in age from 35 to 54, the Coast Guard said.

Authorities said the men left the Marina Park boat ramp at about 8 a.m., Saturday, and were supposed to return that night. Their vehicle and boat trailer were still at the park on Sunday.

Previous updates showed agencies involved in the search with the Venice Police Department include the U.S. Coast Guard, FWC, Manatee County Sheriff's Office, Sarasota County Sheriff's Office, Sarasota Police Department, Venice Fire Rescue, Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Lee County Sheriff's Office and Sea Tow Venice. In addition to vessels, the Coast Guard and SCSO have also provided searches by air.

Working together, these agencies have already searched over 4,600 square miles of surface in the Gulf, and are going out up to 80 nautical miles offshore. The search for the four men spans from Sarasota County south, pushing into Collier County. Boaters out on the water were asked to report any information that may be relevant to this case to VPD Detective Courtney Zak at 941-486-2444 or [email protected] ; or use radio Channel 16 VHF.

Boat Watch, International search aid for missing & overdue boats.

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Four Fishermen Missing off Venice Florida

  • Four Fishermen Missing off Venice Florida

Feb 19, 2024

UPDATE: The USCG has suspended its search for the 4 missing fishermen as of Monday Feb. 19, 2024 at 8 PM pending new information.Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Networks  A BOLO has been issued for 4 missing fishermen that left Venice, Florida at 8 AM Saturday...

BOLO SV ANDIAMO Tonga to Fiji

BOLO SV ANDIAMO Tonga to Fiji

Dec 22, 2023

UPDATE posted on Boat Watch Facebook Group December 22, 2023 It is with great regret that I am passing on the news that RCC New Zealand has called off their search for SV Andiamo. That’s all but an official proclamation that they’re lost at sea. For those of you in Tongawho knew them and would...

Search for FV Carol Ann

Search for FV Carol Ann

Nov 29, 2023

Search by Volunteers Suspended Note: This post on Boat Watch Facebook group is  from the family of the missing boys on November 29, 2023. It is with great sadness that we are informing everyone that the helicopter that landed at 4:38 P.M. today will be our last flight unless we receive new...

Flotsam and Jetsam MV Trophy Bermuda to Virgin Islands

Flotsam and Jetsam MV Trophy Bermuda to Virgin Islands

Oct 30, 2023

MV TROPHY Adrift Between Bermuda and the Virgin Islands Report from Boat Watch facebook group - CAUTION: Floating remains of a small vessel with TROPHY printed on the side spotted at 26.50.508’N 63.49.700’W between Bermuda and Virgin Islands.

Missing Boater Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina

Sep 1, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Networks  USCG requests assistance in looking for a missing boater, Scott Johnson, 47 years old and his dog, Baxter.  He was last seen by a neighbor on 8/22/23. Johnson reported that he was going out on his 23 foot sport fisher,...

BOLO SV DEFIANT Eastern North Pacific

BOLO SV DEFIANT Eastern North Pacific

Jul 22, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Networks  An AMVER alert has been issued by RCC Alameda for SV DEFIANT, a 60 foot Trimaran with one person on board. The last known posistion is: 12-13.48N 099-19.73W on July 13, 2023. UPDATE: July 28, 2023 - USCG Cutter Active is on...

Missing Person Delron Francis on Voyage USVI to Dominica

Missing Person Delron Francis on Voyage USVI to Dominica

Jul 11, 2023

USCG San Juan has received a Missing Persons Report concerning Mr. Delron Francis, 37 years old, DOB April 28, 1986. He was on a voyage from Red Hook, St. Thomas USVI to Dominica on a catamaran. Family members have not heard from Mr. Francis since June 07, 2023. Report any sightings or information...

BOLO for MV ROTHO Nuuk to Maniitsoq Greenland

BOLO for MV ROTHO Nuuk to Maniitsoq Greenland

Jul 9, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Networks  A Bolo has been issued for MV ROTHO that left Nuuk, Greenland on July 5, 2023 for Maniitsoq, Greenland.It is a SeaStar 6000 med 150 hk Honda. The Captain's name is Per V. Larsen, and he is a Danish citizen. Anyone with...

Missing Diver Bahamas

Missing Diver Bahamas

Jun 20, 2023

Ryan Proulx, 31, was last seen near the Bimini Barge Wreck on Friday, a diving location roughly 1.5 miles west of Bimini Inlet, according to the Coast Guard. After aircraft crews searched over 673 square miles for Proulx, the Coast Guard suspended the search on Sunday afternoon. Authorities call...

SV Ocean Bound Overdue Mexico to San Diego, CA

SV Ocean Bound Overdue Mexico to San Diego, CA

Apr 15, 2023

News Release U.S. Coast Guard 11th District PA Detachment LA/LBContact: Coast Guard PA Detachment LA/LBOffice: (310) [email protected] Detachment LA/LB online newsroom Search suspended for three missing Americans 04/19/2023 08:14 PM EDT   The U.S. Coast Guard has been informed that...

Fishermen Missing Off Puerto Rico North of Desecheo Island

Fishermen Missing Off Puerto Rico North of Desecheo Island

Feb 27, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Net Coast Guard air and surface units are searching now for one of the  overdue fishermen in Mona Passage waters off Rincón, Puerto Rico. Overdue were Luis Eliel Guerra, 29, and Wilson Negrón, who reportedly departed from Rincón at...

MV Nidval in Need of Assistance NW of Cartagena, Colombia

MV Nidval in Need of Assistance NW of Cartagena, Colombia

Feb 25, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Net MV NIDVAL in need of Assistance 159 NM NW of Cartagena, Colombia 252039Z FEB 23HYDROLANT 441/23(26).CARIBBEAN SEA.DNC 14.M/V NIDVAL LOW ON FUEL, RADAR DISABLED,LAST KNOWN POSITION IN 13-23.00N 076-56.08W.VESSELS IN VICINITY...

Tyler Doyle Still Missing South Carolina/North Carolina Border

Feb 22, 2023

Tyler Doyle, 23 years old is still missing - South Carolina/North Carolina state line by the jetties in Little River, North Carolina.  Keep a sharp lookout in this area for Tyler Doyle. Report any sightings to nearest authorities. Here is a plea from the family. "My son Tyler Doyle was Duck...

FV NO THAT ONE Overdue St. Lucia

FV NO THAT ONE Overdue St. Lucia

Feb 20, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Net MRCC Fort de France requests assistance in locating FV NO THAT ONE with two persons on board and overdue from St. Lucia Harbor. FV is white and blue with a red hull. Report any sightings, keep a sharp lookout and assist if...

BOLO for Two Men from Antigua – Dominica to St. Martin

BOLO for Two Men from Antigua – Dominica to St. Martin

Feb 14, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Net BOLO for two men missing from Antigua on a passage from Dominica to St. Martin. Tmoy Samuels and Maurice Mauriceson Valentine are from Antigua and 21 years old. They left on a sailboat from Dominica on February 3, 2023 and planned...

BOLO for SV with 11 POB Dominica to St. Martin or BVI’s

Feb 13, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Net MRCC Fort de France has reported a ten meter SV, white and yellow hull with 11 persons onboard is unreported on a passage from Dominica to the British Virgin Islands or St. Martin. The two crew are from Antiqua and the passengers...

BOLO for Two Fishermen Missing Grenada

BOLO for Two Fishermen Missing Grenada

Feb 5, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Net Family members in Grenada report that Kindon Alexander and Keithlon Lewis from St. Andrew, Grenada left Grenville February 5, 2023 and have not returned. They are in a new blue and white fishing skiff named Perfect Timing with a...

Urgent Message for SV Northern Lynx Cuba to Bahamas

Jan 20, 2023

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets URGENT Message for SV Northern Lynx on passage from Cuba to the Bahamas  SV is a 48 foot Fontaine Pajot Catamaran registered in Vancouver Canada, which left Cuba on January 19, 2023 on passage to the Bahamas, maybe Bimini....

Drifting Red SV Alegria of Cowes Martinique

Drifting Red SV Alegria of Cowes Martinique

Dec 31, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets MRCC Fort de France is searching for SV Alegria of Cowes, a red sailboat drifting from Martinique since Dec. 30, 2022 at 1 PM. It is a cutter rig with blue mainsail sheets and could be within a 50 mile circle west of Fort de...

Fisherman Overboard Cape Sable Island Nova Scotia

Fisherman Overboard Cape Sable Island Nova Scotia

Dec 26, 2022

UPDATE Dec. 28, 2022 UPDATE: SEARCH SUSPENDED FOR FISHERMAN LOST AT SEA. Yesterday December 26th 2022, the Lobster industry lost one of their own. Christian Lee Atwood aged 27 years was lost over-aft of the MV Little Weasel II at about 8:15 am, while lobstering off shore in the Outer Island and...

BOLO for Stolen SV KE ‘OLA KAI Colombia

BOLO for Stolen SV KE ‘OLA KAI Colombia

Nov 19, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Boat Watch has received a report that stolen SV KE 'OLA KAI was seen leaving Cartagena, Colombia November 19, 2022 and is possibly in the Rosario Islands. The boat is a 2000, 46 foot Moody, US documented, navy blue hull with a...

BOLO for Two Boaters Missing From Key West

BOLO for Two Boaters Missing From Key West

Oct 17, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Please be on the lookout for a 32 foot, light blue, Carver Power boat with two persons and a dog aboard that have been missing from Key West since Tuesday September 27 as Hurricane Ian passed. Missing are Omar Millet Torres and...

Sailor Missing On Passage From Massachusetts to Florida

Sailor Missing On Passage From Massachusetts to Florida

Oct 8, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Solo sailor Matthew Dennis, 22 years old, is missing on a 28 foot, 1976 Pearson, white hull, sailboat named "Sail Away". The sails have a navy blue trim. He left from Salem, Massachusetts on September 22, 2022 on a passage to...

Pilot Boat Overdue Dominica to St. Martin

Pilot Boat Overdue Dominica to St. Martin

Sep 10, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets UPDATED September 13, 2022 BOLO for an overdue former Pilot Boat M/V PILOTINE, Blue hull, two persons on board, overdue between Dominica and St. Martin. UPDATED INFO : MRCC Fort de France advised Boat Watch, M/V left Dominica on...

MV Three Amigos Missing West Coast of Florida

MV Three Amigos Missing West Coast of Florida

Aug 30, 2022

The Three Amigos a 39' Trojan Express is missing from the West Coast of Florida Specifically, it is missing from being at anchor in the area 1 mile West of Bonita Springs, between Barefoot Beach & Vanderbilt Beach just W of the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River.  GPS location when last...

SV Corsair Stolen Olympia Washington

SV Corsair Stolen Olympia Washington

Jun 3, 2022

Be On the Lookout for a stolen SV Corsair Boat Watch has received a report that SV Corsair was stolen near Boston Harbor Marina, Olympia, Washington. Report any sightings to the nearest Coast Guard or law enforcement agency.

MV Fair Chance Sinks Trinidad Crew Missing

MV Fair Chance Sinks Trinidad Crew Missing

Apr 3, 2022

Coast Guard Tows Vessel To Shallow Waters, So Divers Can Search For Survivors ByMikey Live April 5, 2022 (TRINIDAD EXPRESS) – The Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard (TTCG) intends to have the partially-submerged vessel Fair Chance towed to shallow waters in the Gulf of Paria so divers can begin...

Man Missing From Union Island, St. Vincent & Grenadines

Man Missing From Union Island, St. Vincent & Grenadines

Mar 30, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Dennis Leo Gellzeau  left Union Island, St. Vincent & the Grenadines in a small green boat with a 40 HP engine and is missing. No further information is available. Report any sightings to local authorities and assist if...

BOLO “SV EXODUS DEL CARIBE” Eastern Caribbean

BOLO “SV EXODUS DEL CARIBE” Eastern Caribbean

Mar 27, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets SV "Exodus Del Caribe", formerly known as "SV Venus", with David Welles, 69 years old, on board is overdue on a voyage from St. Vincent to St. Lucia in the Eastern Caribbean. SV Exodus is a 38 foot sloop, navy blue hull, and is...

BOLO for Red & White Center Console Boat Miami

Mar 18, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Bolo for a red and white, 29 foot,Wellcraft Scarab center console, white bimini, two outboards with one person on board. Florida Registration Fl 5345EP Last known position: 26-06.8N 080-01.0W (Offshore of Ft Lauderdale) AT...

BOLO For Missing SV Blue Rose, Cruz Bay, St. John, USVI

BOLO For Missing SV Blue Rose, Cruz Bay, St. John, USVI

Mar 9, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO for stolen sailing vessel "BLUE ROSE", a 45 foot Freedom. The vessel was last seen on March 4, 2022 on a mooring at the mouth of Cruz Bay, St. John, USVI.  The vessel has a seven foot Radar mast mounted near the aft rail, is...

BOLO for 39 People Missing from Overturned Boat Bimini, Bahamas to Ft. Pierce, Florida

BOLO for 39 People Missing from Overturned Boat Bimini, Bahamas to Ft. Pierce, Florida

Jan 26, 2022

MIAMI — The Coast Guard suspended the search for the 34 people missing at sea, Thursday, at approximately 6 p.m., from a capsized vessel, pending new information. A good Samaritan reported to Sector Miami watchstanders, Tuesday, at 8 a.m. that he had rescued a man from a capsized 25-foot vessel...

Two Men Missing from British Virgin Islands on Boat “Gorda Sound”

Two Men Missing from British Virgin Islands on Boat “Gorda Sound”

Jan 17, 2022

Two men are missing in the British Virgin Islands that were last seen December 31, 2021 on a 36 foot Avanti powerboat, in Tortola, named, “GORDA SOUND”, which is also missing.The 36 foot Avanti, “GORDA SOUND” is described as having a white hull, white hard top, very distinctive white seats with...

$25,000 Reward re Missing Man Sugarloaf Key, Florida

$25,000 Reward re Missing Man Sugarloaf Key, Florida

Jan 12, 2022

39 Foot SeaVee Stolen from Chubb Cay, Bahamas

39 Foot SeaVee Stolen from Chubb Cay, Bahamas

A 37 Foot SeaVee, made in Miami was stolen from Chubb Cay Bahamas January 11, 2022 at around noon. If you have information please call Corporal Smith @ 242-559-3969 or the nearest Coast Guard authorities.

BOLO for Man Overboard from FV Marza Guadeloupe, Eastern Caribbean

Jan 3, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets MRCC Fort de France has issued a lookout for a man overboard January 20, 2022 from the FV Marza in the vicinity of 17-42.4N 062-30.0W, near Gruadeloupe, Eastern Caribbean Sea. Vessels in the area are requested to keep a sharp...

BOLO For Boston Whaler Driggs Hill South Andros to Nassau, Bahamas

BOLO For Boston Whaler Driggs Hill South Andros to Nassau, Bahamas

Jan 1, 2022

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BASRA is looking for a 17' Boston Whaler, 1 pob, left Driggs Hill South Andros for Nassau on 27 December and has not arrived.  All vessels please keep lookout and render assistance or report any sightings to BASRA

BOLO for Two Men Missing After Vessel Sinks near Cedar Key Florida

Dec 30, 2021

UPDATE January 2, 2022 Coast Guard suspends search for missing boater near Cedar Key ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.— The Coast Guard suspended search efforts Sunday evening for a missing boater one mile offshore of Cedar Key. Deceased is David Savioe, 33, and missing is Michael Sedor, 39. A...

BOLO for FV Big Bro Overdue St. Lucia, Eastern Caribbean

BOLO for FV Big Bro Overdue St. Lucia, Eastern Caribbean

Dec 29, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets As of January 3, 2022 - MRCC Fort de France advises this is an active lookout for FV Big Bro. MRCC Fort de France has issued a lookout for FV Big Bro which is overdue Castries Harbor, Saint Lucia, Eastern Caribbean.  FV Big Brow...

MV Strong Trinity with 11 Crew Missing Since Cyclone Odette Cebu, Philippines

MV Strong Trinity with 11 Crew Missing Since Cyclone Odette Cebu, Philippines

Dec 27, 2021

UPDATE from the families March 21, 2022 "I have sent an email looking forward for helping us to find the missing tugboat. MV STRONG TRINITY. The incident happened during the Super Typhoon Odette hit the Philippines last December 16, 2021. Until now all of the 11 crews were still missing. Hope you...

Urgent Bolo for Man Overboard Yucatan Channel

Urgent Bolo for Man Overboard Yucatan Channel

Dec 21, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets URGENT BOLO FOR MAN OVERBOARD FROM TANKER IN YUCATAN CHANNEL. On 20 Dec 2021, sometime between morning and noon, a 31 year old worker on the tanker City Island went overboard near position 22-00N / 085-00 W in the Yucatan...

Epirb Activated 569 NM Off Barbados

Epirb Activated 569 NM Off Barbados

Dec 17, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets On December 17, 2021, a EPIRB was activated at 13-21-00N 049-47-50W AT 162315Z, which is 569  NM East of Barbados registered to a 17 Meter Vessel Oceans Carisma.  Boatwatch determined that the vessel and the owner of Oceans...

Boat Found Drifting off Carriacou with Dead Bodies

Dec 13, 2021

by The New Today December 12, 2021 A small boat with about three to four bodies believed to be Hispanics has been discovered in the waters off Grenada’s sister island of Carriacou. According to a well-placed source, the boat was found drifting by a fisherman from Petite Martinique in waters just...

BOLO for Stolen Boat, MV “Gina Page”, Pompano Beach Florida

BOLO for Stolen Boat, MV “Gina Page”, Pompano Beach Florida

Dec 7, 2021

This boat was stolen in Pompano Beach Florida in September 2021. Report any sightings or information to the Sheriff's office, Detective Hopkins or to the nearest police department. It is a 2005 Edge Water with the name "Gina Page" on both sides.

Distress Call Relayed Over HF SSCA Radio KPK, Papua, New Guinea, South Pacific

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets UPDATE: November 7, 2021 10:18 Eastern 050812Z DEC 21 HYDROPAC 3506/21(73). BISMARCK SEA. PAPUA NEW GUINEA. DNC 05. 23 FOOT VESSEL CAPSIZED IN VICINITY 03-02.22S 142-06.72E ON 04 DEC. NUMEROUS PERSONS REMAIN MISSING. VESSELS IN...

BOLO: SV  La Mouette Stolen From St. Vincent

BOLO: SV La Mouette Stolen From St. Vincent

Nov 29, 2021

SV "La Mouette" Stolen Boat Watch has received a report of a stolen Lagoon 38, white with a blue stack pack/lazy bag. The yachts name is "La Mouette". It left the mooring ball in Blue Lagoon, St Vincent at around 6pm yesterday Sunday November 27th. This has been reported to SVG Coast Guard. Report...

USCG Suspends BOLO For Missing Boater North of Frying Pan Shoals, North Carolina

USCG Suspends BOLO For Missing Boater North of Frying Pan Shoals, North Carolina

Nov 28, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets The Coast Guard is searching for a 44-year-old man in the vicinity of Frying Pan Shoals, North Carolina, Saturday. The man departed the Federal Point Yacht Club on Monday 22 Nov 2021, on his 19-foot SeaCraft vessel. Sector North...

BOLO from SV AZORA Adrift north of Clearwater, Florida

BOLO from SV AZORA Adrift north of Clearwater, Florida

Oct 30, 2021

Non Emergency Bolo for Adrift SV AZORA off Clearwater, Florida SV AZORA is a 42 foot Tartan sloop, dark blue hull with a beige Bimini with a Cortez, Fl hailing port. The last known position on 10/17/21 was 28 43.67N and 083 11.72W, just north of Clearwater, FL, and off the coast 26NM in the area...

BOLO for SV “ARIANE” Passage from Sicily, via Greece to Tortuga Marina, Varna, Bulgaria

BOLO for SV “ARIANE” Passage from Sicily, via Greece to Tortuga Marina, Varna, Bulgaria

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Urgent BOLO for SV "ARIANE" on passage from Sicily, via Greece to Bulgaria SV "ARIANE" has a solo captain, Barney Brogan, 45 years of age and a British citizen. SV "ARIANE" is a 1984, 35 foot Van De Stadt sloop, dark navy steel...

Catamaran “Kailani II” Stolen from Young Island, St. Vincent, Eastern Caribbean

Catamaran “Kailani II” Stolen from Young Island, St. Vincent, Eastern Caribbean

Oct 11, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Boatwatch has received a report from the owner of a 44 foot catamaran, named Kailani 2, stolen between October 8th to the 9th, 2021, from Young Island, St. Vincent in the eastern Caribbean. The catamaran is 2016 Fontaine pajot...

BOLO for MV Guadalupe Returning From Aid in Haiti to Mexico

BOLO for MV Guadalupe Returning From Aid in Haiti to Mexico

Oct 3, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets A BOLO has been issued for the MV Guadalupe, an 83 foot Yacht Club Playa Company boat, returning from giving aid in Haiti. The last known position on September 28, 2021 at 12:35 PM, recorded on a spot tracker was 130 miles...

Two Men Arrested after 552 kg of Suspected Cocaine Seized from a Burning Sailboat off Coast of N.S.Halifax, Canada – One Escapes from Hospital

Two Men Arrested after 552 kg of Suspected Cocaine Seized from a Burning Sailboat off Coast of N.S.Halifax, Canada – One Escapes from Hospital

Sep 13, 2021

Samantha LongCTVNewsAtlantic.ca writer @samjlong Contact Published Thursday, September 2, 2021 4:16PM ADTLast Updated Thursday, September 2, 2021 4:54PM ADT Mounties say they have arrested two men – one of whom was wanted by police – after seizing 552 kilograms of suspected cocaine from a burning...

BOLO: SV Secret Plans Stolen from Halifax Harbor, Canada Sets Off PLB in Eye of Hurricane Larry

BOLO: SV Secret Plans Stolen from Halifax Harbor, Canada Sets Off PLB in Eye of Hurricane Larry

Sep 11, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets URGENT BOLO: USCG Rescue Coordination Center Boston received a Personal Locator Beacon Alert on September 10, 2021 with Canadian registration located 550NM E of Cape Cod, MA and 340NM SE of Halifax, NS.  PLB is registered to a...

SV Queal Activates EPIRB, Assisted by LPG Tanker Arago & JRCC Australia

SV Queal Activates EPIRB, Assisted by LPG Tanker Arago & JRCC Australia

Aug 26, 2021

On August 26, 2021, JRCC Australia advised Boat Watch that they have been coordinating the response  to the EPIRB activation by SV Queal. Overnight LPG Tanker ARAGO accompanied the sailing vessel and intends to transfer the sailor at first light if weather conditions allow it. The EPIRB was...

BOLO for Two Persons in the Water from Downed Helicopter, Albemarle Sound, Alligator River, North Carolina

BOLO for Two Persons in the Water from Downed Helicopter, Albemarle Sound, Alligator River, North Carolina

Jul 21, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO for two persons possibly in the water or debris from a helicopter that went down July 19, 2021 in Albemarle Sound, North Carolina. Debris and personal items have been found near the Alligator River. Keep a sharp lookout for...

USCG Suspends Search for Diver Off Mayport/Jacksonville, Florida

USCG Suspends Search for Diver Off Mayport/Jacksonville, Florida

Jul 11, 2021

Coast Guard, partner agencies suspend search for missing diver off Mayport JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Coast Guard has suspended the search, Tuesday, for Timothy Obi, a 37-year-old male diver who went missing Saturday approximately 46 miles east of Mayport.  Diving equipment matching the description of...

BOLO for F/V Flipper Missing From Bonaire, ABC’s

BOLO for F/V Flipper Missing From Bonaire, ABC’s

Jul 7, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets  A BOLO has been issued for F/V Flipper missing from Bonaire as of July 6, 2021.It is approximately 16 feet with a 25 HP outboard. The interior of the vessel looks to be white, while the exterior hull is blue. Report all...

Search for Missing Boater near Culebra, Puerto Rico Suspended

Search for Missing Boater near Culebra, Puerto Rico Suspended

Coast Guard suspends search for missing person in the water near Culebra, Puerto Rico SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The Coast Guard suspended its search for a missing male boater Wednesday night near the island of Culebra, Puerto Rico. “Suspending a search is never easy, our thoughts and prayers are...

3 Jamaican Sailors Missing on 28 foot S/V “God Alone”

Jul 2, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Three Jamaican Sailors Missing on 28 Foot Sailboat BOLO for S/V “God Alone” with Captain Keron Powell, 43 years of age and two unknown mates. They left Port Antonio point June 6, 2021 to go fishing and have not been heard from...

Fishing Vessel Eden Missing From Antiqua, Last Seen off Barbuda

Fishing Vessel Eden Missing From Antiqua, Last Seen off Barbuda

Jun 28, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets A Bolo has been issued for F/V Eden which left Antigua, Eastern Caribbean on Thursday June 24, 2021 at around noon with two men on board. They last had signals to their phones north of Barbuda. The 25 foot pirogue is light blue...

BOLO for Debris or Persons in the Water 55NM WSW of the Dry Tortugas, Florida after EPIRB Activation

BOLO for Debris or Persons in the Water 55NM WSW of the Dry Tortugas, Florida after EPIRB Activation

Jun 15, 2021

UPDATE: June 17, 2021 The USCG has called off the search regarding this EPIRB activation. The EPIRB was unregistered but with good batteries.  Please register and update all safety devices. Notification and float plans should have people that know you and your boat very well.Broadcast Version For...

Search Continues on land and sea for Sailor Tomas Gimeno and Anna, age one after Olivia Gimeno’s body found at sea Tenerife Spain

Search Continues on land and sea for Sailor Tomas Gimeno and Anna, age one after Olivia Gimeno’s body found at sea Tenerife Spain

Jun 11, 2021

Body found in bag in sea off Tenerife confirmed as missing girl Olivia Gimeno taken by her father Olivia Gimeno, six, and her sister Anna, one, were taken by their father Tomas without permission on 27 April 2021.  By Sky News Friday 11 June 2021 15:11, UK   Image:Olivia Gimeno, six (right)...

Experience Sailor, Britt Taylor Lost Overboard At Sea

Experience Sailor, Britt Taylor Lost Overboard At Sea

Jun 5, 2021

Britt Taylor, 52, is believed to have fallen overboard 170 miles east of the Bahamas. Photo courtesy of Dick Enerson. Chesapeake Bay Magazine by Meg Walburn Viviano BAY BULLETIN  SEARCH CALLED OFF FOR WOMAN LOST AT SEA SAILING TO ANNAPOLIS June 7, 2021 The Coast Guard has suspended its search for...

USCG Searching for 10 people in the water, 2 deceased, 8 rescued off Key West

USCG Searching for 10 people in the water, 2 deceased, 8 rescued off Key West

May 28, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets The US Coast Guard is searching for 10 people missing at sea, after being reported Thursday, after the rescue of eight people and the recovery of two bodies, 16 miles south of Key West.  All boats should keep a sharp lookout and...

Eight Persons Missing on 23 foot Bayliner from Nassau, Bahamas to the US

Eight Persons Missing on 23 foot Bayliner from Nassau, Bahamas to the US

May 19, 2021

BOLO For 23 Foot Bayliner with Eight Persons On Board Bahamian Captain Tarran Maynard, 35 years old and seven Dominicans are missing on a passage from Nassau to the US on a 23 foot Bayliner motorboat, white in color, with a blue Bimini, two 350 Yamaha engines and no name on the boat. The boat had...

BOLO for Overdue Boat on passage Key West, Fl to Guanaja, Honduras

BOLO for Overdue Boat on passage Key West, Fl to Guanaja, Honduras

May 16, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets Emergency BOLO for Overdue Boat on passage Key West, Fl to Guanaja, Honduras BOLO for two persons on board M/V Cats Paw on passage from Key West Florida to Guanaja, Honduras. Cat's Paw is described as 30 foot Rampage Sport Fish,...

SV “Good Luck” Grounded On East Coast Of Montserrat

SV “Good Luck” Grounded On East Coast Of Montserrat

May 14, 2021

CROSS Antilles Guyane / MRCC Fort-de-France The S/V "GOOD LUCK" is grounded on the east coast of Montserrat. Nobody on board. We don't know what happened. Bermuda or UK flag boat, 60ft, we do not know the current owner and are looking for information about this vessel (owner's name, last calls,...

Search Suspended for 8 Crew Still Missing From Seacor Power lift boat

Search Suspended for 8 Crew Still Missing From Seacor Power lift boat

Apr 14, 2021

UPDATE: April 19, 2021 Re Louisiana Rescue Operation: Coast Guard is suspending search for remaining 8 Seacor Power crewmembers NEW ORLEANS — The Coast Guard is suspending its search Monday for the remaining missing Seacor Power lift boat crewmembers 8 miles south of Port Fourchon. Eight crew...

BOLO: Power Boat Stolen From Grand Cay Abaco, Bahamas

BOLO: Power Boat Stolen From Grand Cay Abaco, Bahamas

Apr 11, 2021

Non Emergency BOLO for Boat Stolen In Grand Cay Bahamas A 23 foot Parker power boat was stolen March 30, 2021 from Grand Cay, Abaco in the Bahamas. Report all sightings to the Royal Bahamas Police Force or your nearest Coast Guard. The owner Russell Mc Garrett can be contacted at (242-817-0209).

BOLO: Two Bahamians Missing in Skiff Off Long Island, Bahamas

BOLO: Two Bahamians Missing in Skiff Off Long Island, Bahamas

Apr 7, 2021

Update February 23, 2021 SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Coast Guard air and surface units assisted a distressed sailing vessel Monday that was taking on water with eight people onboard in the Caribbean Sea, approximately 80 nautical miles south of Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico.The Zoma, a 46-foot Danish...

Fishing Vessel Adrift Off Dominica

Fishing Vessel Adrift Off Dominica

Mar 24, 2021

British Sailor Sarm Heslop Missing from SV Siren Song, Frank Bay, St. John, USVI

British Sailor Sarm Heslop Missing from SV Siren Song, Frank Bay, St. John, USVI

Mar 15, 2021

Virgin Island Police and USCG authorities are seeking any information on the disappearance of British sailor, Sarm Joan Lillian Heslop on March 7, 2021, from the charter catamaran, Siren Song located in Frank Bay, St. John, USVI. Sarm Heslop is described as 41 years old and from Southhampton.Ryan...

SV Barnacle Adrift, 3 Rescued by Cargo Ship, Mexico, Cuba

SV Barnacle Adrift, 3 Rescued by Cargo Ship, Mexico, Cuba

Mar 10, 2021

One Person Onboard 4 Meter Boat Overdue Salisbury Dominica

One Person Onboard 4 Meter Boat Overdue Salisbury Dominica

Feb 26, 2021

BOLO: For Two Persons Aboard Small Boat Off Jeremie, Haiti

BOLO: For Two Persons Aboard Small Boat Off Jeremie, Haiti

SV Rebecca Souimanga Adrift And Desmasted

SV Rebecca Souimanga Adrift And Desmasted

Jan 21, 2021

UPDATE: January 22, 2021: The owner of this sailing vessel advises that the cargo ship that rescued him was the Harvest Frost. The sailor expresses his gratitude to the ship and all involved in the rescue. The SV is a Belgium flagged boat....

Man Overboard From MV Baltic Klipper 1,200 Miles NE of Bermuda

Man Overboard From MV Baltic Klipper 1,200 Miles NE of Bermuda

Jan 8, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO:January 8, 2021, at 9 PM, USCG RCC Norfolk confirmed that a man was overboard from the container ship, MV Baltic Klipper at 35-44N 041-30W. This is 1,200 miles NE of Bermuda. Lookout, assist if possible. The USCG is...

BOLO: Colombian Coast Guard Conducting Rescue Near Sapzurro

BOLO: Colombian Coast Guard Conducting Rescue Near Sapzurro

Jan 5, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO ISSUED AT 0134 HRS UTC, 5 JAN 2021 Search and rescue operations in progress by the Colombian Coast Guard. Five persons missing in vicinity of 08-35.76N 077-17.10W. This position is  6 NM SE OF SAPZURRO, COLOMBIA on the...

10 Meter SV Adrift and Disables Off Montserrat, Eastern Caribbean

10 Meter SV Adrift and Disables Off Montserrat, Eastern Caribbean

Jan 3, 2021

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO: UPDATE January 10, 2021-  The adrift 30 foot Sailing Vessel spotted previously, 12 NM WSW of Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean has been spotted again at: 16-11.12N and 065-24.25W. The vessel is 10 meters in length with a...

SV EXODE Stolen From Nassau, Bahamas In August 2020 Spotted In December 2020

SV EXODE Stolen From Nassau, Bahamas In August 2020 Spotted In December 2020

Dec 31, 2020

UPDATE: 31 DEC 2020: The S/V EXODE was spotted in Nassau Harbor today.   Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network & Other Nets There is an active lookout for a stolen sailboat from Nassau, Bahamas. The stolen vessel is a 1976 Irwin sloop named EXODE, 37 feet in length, which...

BOLO: Twenty Persons Aboard 29 Foot Mako Missing Bimini to Lake Worth, Florida

BOLO: Twenty Persons Aboard 29 Foot Mako Missing Bimini to Lake Worth, Florida

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets The USCG RCC Miami has an active search for a 29 foot Mako cuddy cabin, blue and white in color, and powered by two (2) 250 HP Yamaha two stroke outboard engines. The vessel was believed to have departed Bimini, Bahamas at 0700...

BOLO: Man Overboard West Indian Ocean, Madagascar

BOLO: Man Overboard West Indian Ocean, Madagascar

Dec 21, 2020

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO for man overboard from Vessel Egret Oasis in the vicinity of trackline joining 25-44S 048-26E, 25-50S 048-14E in the West Indian Ocean, Madagascar. Vessels in the vicinity are requested to keep a sharp lookout, assist if...

BOLO For Three Fishermen Missing In The Bua Waters of Fiji, South Pacific

BOLO For Three Fishermen Missing In The Bua Waters of Fiji, South Pacific

Dec 14, 2020

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO for three fishermen are missing from the Bua Waters of Fiji, South Pacific. Their boat is described as white and 29 feet. Fiji Navy Search and Rescue Centre, have been searching the Bua waters since the report was lodged by...

JRCC Australia Looking For Man Overboard From HWA Hung

JRCC Australia Looking For Man Overboard From HWA Hung

Dec 11, 2020

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets 0615 Hrs 11 DEC 2020: JRCC Australia is reporting a man overboard from the vessel HWA HUNG in position 10-04S / 081-35E. All vessels in the vicinity are requested to keep a sharp lookout, assist if possible, and report any...

BOLO: Man Overboard FV Sea Goddess Hawaii

BOLO: Man Overboard FV Sea Goddess Hawaii

Dec 10, 2020

UPDATE 11 DEC 2020: HONOLULU — The Coast Guard has suspended the active search for the missing mariner who fell overboard approximately 150-miles southeast of Big Island, Friday evening. The mariner, a Republic of Kiribati native, remains missing. “Our crews and partners worked diligently, but...

BOLO: Man Overboard From Tourist Boat Caloosahatchee River Near Ft. Myers

BOLO: Man Overboard From Tourist Boat Caloosahatchee River Near Ft. Myers

Dec 5, 2020

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO: USCG is searching on the Caloosahatchee River for a man who fell overboard from a tourist boat on Friday night at around 8:15 PM. USCG advised they are searching in the area of Marker 64 on the River near the Midpoint...

BOLO: Sailor Travis Gates Missing Guatamala, Honduras, Belize

BOLO: Sailor Travis Gates Missing Guatamala, Honduras, Belize

Dec 2, 2020

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets BOLO (Be On Lookout): Travis Gates, white male, age 45 is missing from his sailing vessel "Avenir" on a passage from El Golfete, also known as Texan Bay on the Rio Dulce River, Guatemala to Placencia, Belize on Monday November...

Coast Guard Suspends Search For Missing Fishermen Off Massachusetts

Coast Guard Suspends Search For Missing Fishermen Off Massachusetts

Nov 23, 2020

UPDATE:0618 HRS EST 24 NOV 2020: BOSTON — The Coast Guard suspended the active search for four missing fishermen off the coast of Massachusetts, 5:22 p.m., Tuesday. “The decision to suspend a search is never an easy one. Our crews conducted searches continuously for over 38 hours covering an area...

UPDATE: URGENT BOLO: Search For Missing Diver Off Trinidad – Reinaldo Novoa

UPDATE: URGENT BOLO: Search For Missing Diver Off Trinidad – Reinaldo Novoa

Nov 13, 2020

UPDATE: Nov. 17, 2020                      *URGENT HELP NEEDED* Reinaldo Novoa, Retired Nurse and pharmacy representative, father to two boys, married to Jasema Mungalsingh, grandfather to 7 grandchildren,*went missing off the coast of Mayaro while doing an open dive, at 3:45pm yesterday. He is a...

Search Suspended Two Persons Missing From Overturned Boat, Beaufort, N.C.

Search Suspended Two Persons Missing From Overturned Boat, Beaufort, N.C.

Nov 11, 2020

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network and Other Nets: BOLO Canceled: The US Coast Guard suspended its search for two persons in the water, after an overturned 35 foot recreational vessel was discovered near Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina on November 10, 2020. Anyone with...

BOLO For Missing Fisherman Off Montauk, New York

Nov 8, 2020

UPDATE 1532 HRS 08 NOV 2020: Coast Guard suspends search for missing fisherman off Montauk, N.Y. NEW YORK — The Coast Guard suspended the search Sunday afternoon for a missing fisherman who went overboard 16 nautical miles south of Montauk Point, New York, Saturday....

Hazzard To Navigation 172 miles Off Cape Hatteras After Sailors Rescued

Hazzard To Navigation 172 miles Off Cape Hatteras After Sailors Rescued

Nov 4, 2020

BROADCAST VERSION FOR MARITIME MOBILE SERVICE NETWORK AND OTHER RADIO NETS UPDATE 0745 HRS, 06 NOV 2020.  THE USCG RCC NORFOLK ADVISED THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE ABANDONED S/V BALI HAI At 0146 hrs UTC 06 NOV 2020 WAS LOCATED AT 36 01.1 N / 071 58 W. This vessel should be considered a hazard to...

BOLO For Scarab LOS ALBERTOS With 5 Persons Off Colon, Panama

BOLO For Scarab LOS ALBERTOS With 5 Persons Off Colon, Panama

Oct 12, 2020

BROADCAST VERSION FOR MARITIME MOBILE SERVICE NETWORK AND OTHER RADIO NETS BOLO for a 33 foot wellcraft Scarab with the name of "LOS ALBERTOS" with five (5) persons on board (POB) 25 miles W/NW of Colon, Panama. The vessel was last seen on 10 October 2020 near Volcan Reef in position 9 32.131 N /...

BOLO for SV Maserval Stolen From Cap d’Agde, France and Seen in the Balearic Islands, Spain

BOLO for SV Maserval Stolen From Cap d’Agde, France and Seen in the Balearic Islands, Spain

Sep 12, 2020

BROADCAST VERSION FOR MARITIME MOBILE SERVICE NETWORK AND OTHER RADIO NETS All vessels are requested to be on the lookout (BOLO) for the S/V MASERVAL, a Sun Odyssey 33i which was stolen from Cap d'Agde is located on France's Mediterranean coast at 43 17 N / 03 31 E. The S/V MASERVAL is a Jeanneau...

SV RANA II Stolen – Last Seen In Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands

SV RANA II Stolen – Last Seen In Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE MARITIME MOBILE SERVICE NET All vessels in the Mediterranean are requested to keep a sharp lookout for the S/V RANA II. This vessel is a 1974, 48 foot Olympic sailboat (Made in Greece) which was stolen in Marseille, France on 24 JANUARY 2020. A surveillance camera confirmed...

Two Missing Sailors From SV Dancing Brave Adrift Off St. Barthelemy Island, Eastern Caribbean in Dinghy

Two Missing Sailors From SV Dancing Brave Adrift Off St. Barthelemy Island, Eastern Caribbean in Dinghy

Sep 3, 2020

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network & Other Nets MRCC Fort De France, Martinique, has asked Boatwatch.org for assistance in locating two persons in an overdue inflatable dinghy, brand is HIGHFIELD, and length is 2.50 meters, white hull, with pale grey pontoons, powered by a...

New York, Bermuda, BVI’s  SV Tally Ho! Boat Watch

New York, Bermuda, BVI’s SV Tally Ho! Boat Watch

Jul 24, 2020

**********UPDATE 23 JULY 2020***************************** While speaking with USCG RCC Boston regarding a different matter, it was learned the EPIRB for the S/V TALLY HO was located. Boatwatch was not aware of that development. Here is what RCC Boston told us: On 20MAR2020 the EPIRB from the...

Search Called Off for SV OHANA-ULI Off Tanzania/Seychelles

Search Called Off for SV OHANA-ULI Off Tanzania/Seychelles

Jul 22, 2020

UPDATE July 24, 2020 From the family of Del and Craig Mc Ewan. To our dear friends and family, It is with a heavy heart that after every effort possible has been made we need to inform you that the search for Del and Craig McEwan has been called off with no recovery being made. We would like to...

BOLO Crew Member Missing Tanker Hellas Gladiator 400 Miles Off NC

BOLO Crew Member Missing Tanker Hellas Gladiator 400 Miles Off NC

Jun 24, 2020

UPDATE 26 June 2020: Cancel Bolo: Coast Guard suspends search for missing tanker ship crew member near Cape Hatteras, North  Carolina ************** Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network & Other Nets The Coast Guard is searching for a crew member of a tanker ship approximately...

Mega Yacht Captain Bob Peel lost at sea on his Sailboat KALAYAAN in the Caribbean

Mega Yacht Captain Bob Peel lost at sea on his Sailboat KALAYAAN in the Caribbean

Apr 3, 2020

Veteran Sailor Lost At Sea From the Royal Gazette of Bermuda Owain Johnston-Barnes Published Apr 8, 2020 at 8:00 am (Updated Apr 8, 2020 at 7:37 am) A veteran sailor with close ties to Bermuda is missing in the Caribbean. Bob Peel, the former captain of the Boadicea, the superyacht owned by Reg...

Search Supended For Survivors of Small Plane Crash Emerald Isle North Carolina

Search Supended For Survivors of Small Plane Crash Emerald Isle North Carolina

Mar 24, 2020

Coast Guard suspends search for two missing persons associated with plane crash near Emerald Isle, North Carolina U.S. Coast Guard sent this bulletin at 03/24/2020 09:14 PM EDT PORTSMOUTH, Va. — The Coast Guard suspended its search Tuesday evening for two missing persons involved in a Cessna...

BOLO For Missing Sailor 32 Miles NW Marco Island

BOLO For Missing Sailor 32 Miles NW Marco Island

Mar 10, 2020

UPDATE: March 13,2020, USCG has advised that the search for Mr. Jim Clauson has been suspended pending further developments. Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network & Other Nets The USCG St Petersburg, FL has asked the public's assistance in locating Mr. Jim Clauson, age 73, who...

U K Captain K.P. Pearson of SV “UMZUNGU” Contact Trinidad Coast Guard

U K Captain K.P. Pearson of SV “UMZUNGU” Contact Trinidad Coast Guard

Mar 7, 2020

UPDATE 15:30 Eastern Time 08 Mar 2020: Anne Lloyd provided the following resolution to this case: it is a British flagged yacht called UMZUNGU call sign MNYT2; MMSI 235 038 556 owned by Mr K. P. Pearson. Please see the attached photo with the UK SSR Number for the SV UMZUNGU.  It is SSR 123188. If...

MV ROME Overdue Panama City Florida to Ft. Myers

MV ROME Overdue Panama City Florida to Ft. Myers

Feb 26, 2020

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network & Other Nets UPDATE: 0645 hrs, 26 Feb 2020: USCG RCC Miami advised the search has been suspended for the M/V ROME. Update February 20, 2020 - U.S. Coast Guard Rescue Coordination Center (RCC) Miami, FL has asked for assistance in locating...

Urgent Watch For Unknown Vessel In Distress Willmington, N. Carolina

Urgent Watch For Unknown Vessel In Distress Willmington, N. Carolina

Feb 11, 2020

Update- February 13, 2020 - Coast Guard suspends search. WILMINGTON, N.C. — The Coast Guard suspended its search on Thursday after an unregistered emergency position indicating radio beacon alert lead responders to debris approximately 126 miles southeast off the coast of Wilmington, North...

Four Missing At Sea Bahamas to Jamaica

Four Missing At Sea Bahamas to Jamaica

Jan 31, 2020

The M/V Fatal Attraction and Crew of Four Missing For Three Years Between Bahamas and Jamaica The family of four missing men, three from Jamaica, and one from the Bahamas has asked Boatwatch.org to list them as missing since 06 Jan 2017. We know it's been a long time, but listing them...

Missing Crew Off Tanker “Star Aquila” Dauphin, Alabama

Missing Crew Off Tanker “Star Aquila” Dauphin, Alabama

Jan 23, 2020

BOLO Cancelled.  Coast Guard searching for missing person near Dauphin Island, AL NEW ORLEANS — The Coast Guard is searching for one person who went missing aboard the vessel Star Aquila, Thursday, approximately 12 nautical miles south of Dauphin Island, Alabama. Watchstanders at Coast Guard...

BOLO Canceled: Search Suspended For 2 Missing Mariners In Pamlico Sound, NC

BOLO Canceled: Search Suspended For 2 Missing Mariners In Pamlico Sound, NC

Jan 8, 2020

January 9, 2020 Coast Guard suspends search for 2 missing mariners in Pamlico Sound, North Carolina Watch the above video of the USCG rescue swimmers. PAMLICO COUNTY, N.C. — The Coast Guard suspended its search Thursday afternoon for two mariners who were reported missing after the commercial...

SV AVRIO Found Off Jamaica

SV AVRIO Found Off Jamaica

Dec 20, 2019

Broadcast Version For Maritime Mobile Service Network & Other Nets UPDATE: This BROADCAST VERSION IS VALID 29 JAN 2020 The SV Avrio was initially sighted by the US coast guard on 27 January at 01:27 local time (06:27 UK) 71 nautical miles from Ocho Rios which is in on the north coast Jamaica....

SV Simba Found on Reef in the Red Sea

SV Simba Found on Reef in the Red Sea

Dec 13, 2019

Update: January 7, 2020 Out of respect, and at the specific request of the family, Boatwatch.org has not been providing additional information on the website. If anyone has pertinent information, or may be able to help or assist the family in any way, please contact Boat Watch at...

Search For Missing Fishermen off Puerto Rico

Search For Missing Fishermen off Puerto Rico

Nov 26, 2019

Update: USCG discontinues search. Coast Guard continues search for missing fisherman off “Caza y Pesca” Beach in Arecibo, Puerto Rico SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Coast Guard rescue crews continue to search Tuesday for a missing fisherman in waters off “Caza y Pesca” Beach in Arecibo, Puerto Rico....

Bayliner H.M.S. Me II Missing N.Carolina to Norfolk

Nov 25, 2019

Update: Active USCG Search Cancelled USCG CANCELS SEARCH FOR M/V H.M.S. Me II Valid 25 NOV 2019 PORTSMOUTH, Va. — The Coast Guard has suspended its search for a 50-year-old man who was reported missing while transiting from New York to Florida aboard his 35-foot recreational vessel, Monday....

Sailboat Iona, Peter Rang, Missing Bermuda to Azores

Sailboat Iona, Peter Rang, Missing Bermuda to Azores

Nov 13, 2019

UPDATE: New information confirms that there is a  second person on board, Tom Cleeren, from Belgium. Also, RCC Bermuda confirms a departure date of September 6, 2019. RCC Azores has no record of the IONA arriving. SV IONA, a Hunter Legend 37.5, with experienced single-hander sailor Peter Rang and...

Two 30-Foot Boats Adrift Between Bahamas Vero Beach

Oct 21, 2019

The U.S. Coast Guard Rescue Coordination Center, Miami, Florida has asked Boatwatch.org assistance in locating the owner(s) of two overturned vessels located  on 20 OCT 2019 by the M/V ACE INDEPENDENCE and USCG  in position 27 54.5 N / 079 15.8 W, or approximately 60 NM East of Vero Beach, FL, and...

Estonian Sailor Mysteriously Disappears, Honduras

Estonian Sailor Mysteriously Disappears, Honduras

Oct 17, 2019

Update: Tribute to Andreas Sepsaka, SV Salacia Watch the beautiful tribute to Andreas made by another sailor at the location where Andreas and his boat disappeared. In the early hours of 11 June 2019, two separate EPIRB activations were received from the S / V SALACIA with only sailor ANDREAS...

SV Blue Highways, 44’ Beneteau Oceanis missing, presumed stolen

SV Blue Highways, 44’ Beneteau Oceanis missing, presumed stolen

Oct 3, 2019

The S/V BLUE HIGHWAYS is a 44’ Beneteau Oceanis which was missing and presumed stolen from a private mooring located in Leverick Bay, Virgin Gorda, BVI.  The vessel was last seen on the mooring buoy on April 6, 2019 and missing on April 7, 2019. This boat is not to be confused with the S/V BLUE...

Loss of Firefighters off Cape Canaveral, FL

Loss of Firefighters off Cape Canaveral, FL

Aug 18, 2019

Update: Family, Community Honor Life of Missing Jacksonville Firefighter Read the article at https://www.news4jax.com/news/celebration-of-life-this-morning-for-missing-firefighter Update: "That was a very devastating time": Wife of missing Jacksonville firefighter opens up about husband and search...

SV Trinavis Missing, Caribbean

SV Trinavis Missing, Caribbean

Jul 4, 2019

July 2019, Friends of Rocco Acocella advised SSCA KPK radio service that he was overdue on a passage between St. Maarten and Barranquilla, Colombia. He left St. Maarten on June 17th, on his 8-meter trimaran, a Telstar MK II and intended to arrive in Barranquilla on June 28 or 29. His intention was...

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What’s Wrong With All the Ships?

Do recent boat disasters actually point to a global shipping industry in distress?

Illustration of a ship encountering a banana peel

Are the boats okay?

They seem to be in a tough stretch. A ship called the Felicity Ace is currently afire and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Azores, with a reported 4,000 cars on board, including Porsches, Bentleys, and Audis. The crew abandoned the vessel, en route to the United States, last week, and firefighters are now trying to control the blaze.

In January, a different container ship, the Madrid Bridge, limped into the port of Charleston, South Carolina, after losing about 60 containers at sea. Pictures of the vessel showed one row of the metal boxes collapsed and teetering over the gunwale. Among the cargo lost : highly anticipated print runs of cookbooks from Mason Hereford and Melissa Clark.

A week later, an oil-storage vessel exploded off the coast of Nigeria. Within days, a Mauritian oil tanker had run aground off Reunión in the Indian Ocean. In Peru, workers are still cleaning up a spill that, according to some accounts, occurred when a tanker was rocked by tsunami waves. Experts are nervously watching another tanker off the coast of Yemen, which is slowly disintegrating in the midst of a war and an existing humanitarian crisis.

These cases come just months after the spectacle of the Ever Given, a massive container ship that wedged itself into the banks of the Suez Canal, halted shipping for days, and enthralled a world bored to tears with the pandemic. These incidents are transfixing—a little awesome, in the old-fashioned sense , and a little hilarious, in a very contemporary internet-ironic one —but is the global shipping industry in some sort of collapse?

Read: The big, stuck boat is glorious

The short answer is no. “It’s just that people have noticed,” John Konrad, the CEO of the shipping site gCaptain , told me. Over the past few years, about 50 major ships have been lost annually. (Comprehensive figures from 2021 are not available yet, but Konrad said he doesn’t see evidence of any big jump last year.) Most of the time, the public has no reason to pay attention to these sinkings and collisions. But supply-chain crunches caused by the pandemic have made the shipping system more visible than it has been for decades, spotlighting cases like the Felicity Ace and Madrid Bridge. Meanwhile, more volatile weather caused by climate change and ever-larger container ships mean the risk of losses may be rising.

Until recently, major nautical disasters could seem like a relic of the past, like train wrecks or dirigible crashes. Every year, the German insurance giant Allianz issues a report on shipping and safety, and it captures steady improvement. As recently as 2000, more than 200 big ships were lost. (Don’t call them “boats” unless you’re ready to be corrected by cranky old salts.) By the early 2010s, that number had dropped to about 100 a year. In 2021, just 49 were lost, and 2020 saw only 48 losses. Allianz attributes this to “the positive effect of an increased focus on safety measures over time, such as regulation, improved ship design and technology, and risk management advances.”

Even so, that’s a startling rate of one major ship lost almost every week. Most of them don’t make the news. Though classified as “major,” most of these ships are far smaller than the Ever Given or the Felicity Ace. Their crews also largely comprise seafarers from countries like the Philippines or India, the ships sink far away (the biggest portion of losses is around the South China Sea), and their cargo isn’t something that Americans consumers miss. But when ships laden with things Americans care about, such as cars and cookbooks, start hitting choppy seas, they tune in.

In 2015, the cargo ship El Faro sank in the Atlantic Ocean with American sailors on board—a rare loss from the shrinking U.S.-flagged fleet. The Ever Given snarled Suez Canal traffic headed to Europe, affecting Western consumers and becoming a somewhat blunt metaphor for supply-chain disruptions affecting all kinds of goods. The Felicity Ace was bound for Rhode Island when it caught fire, carrying luxury cars for the U.S. market. One Porsche on board was being shipped to the editor of a popular car-review site .

Even under these circumstances, a major disaster doesn’t always make much national news. In September 2019, a car carrier called the Golden Ray, roughly the same size as the Felicity Ace, capsized in St. Simons Sound off Georgia. No cargo ship so large had sunk in U.S. coastal waters since the Exxon Valdez, and the process of breaking up the ship—one of the most expensive salvage efforts in history—concluded only in October. Outside of the trade and regional press, however, the story barely made a splash.

The pandemic could be a factor in some of these recent accidents. Every link in the supply chain, from truckers to ports to shipboard crews, is subject to strain and fatigue. When the freighter Wakashio grounded off Mauritius in 2020, two crew members had been on board for more than a year, prevented from normal rotations onto shore and trips home because of quarantine rules.

Derek Thompson: America is running out of everything

But two problems do seem to be growing: shipboard fires and containers going overboard, like the ones that sent the cookbooks to a watery grave. The reasons have nothing to do with the pandemic. First, the size of vessels continues to grow, though the crews in charge of wrangling them stay the same size. The Ever Given was one of the largest ships in the world when it launched, at 20,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs), a benchmark for container ships. One factor in its grounding was that the huge wall of boxes on board effectively acted as a sail, allowing the wind to drive the ship into the canal’s bank. But ships as large as 24,000 TEUs will soon join the fleet.

“Vessel size has a direct correlation to the potential size of loss,” Allianz notes. “Car transporters/RoRo and large container vessels are at higher risk of fire with the potential for greater consequences should one break out.”

Second, ships are also at greater risk of losing containers, or even sinking, when they hit unexpected storms. Climate change means that rather than being confined to specific seasons, storms can hit at any time. “The weather is getting more unpredictable, and these ships are getting bigger, so they’re stacking higher,” Konrad said. “When the ships get hit in a wave, you get a bigger lever that’s pulling the containers over.” (In a bitter environmental irony, the Felicity Ace fire has kept burning because of lithium-ion batteries on electric cars .) In other words, the recent rash of high-profile shipping snafus may be only a factor of greater attention—but a warming planet means a mounting number of disasters might be just over the horizon.

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Coast Guard Suspends Search for Four Missing Fishermen Off Florida Gulf Coast

The men, who were described as experienced fishermen, set out for a boating trip on Saturday from Venice, Fla., and did not return home, the authorities said.

A small, white boat on a trailer parked in front of a house.

By Derrick Bryson Taylor

The United States Coast Guard has called off a search for four missing boaters who set out Saturday morning for a day of fishing off Florida’s Gulf Coast and never returned home.

The fishermen, Angel Hernandez Munoz, 38; Ruben Mora Sr., 54; Julio Cesar Cordero Briones, 37; and Alfonso Vargas Parra, 35, left for a boating trip from Venice, Fla., about 20 miles south of Sarasota, at 8 a.m. on Saturday, according to a news release from the Venice Police Department .

The water was “not too rough” that morning, Capt. Andy Leisenring of the Venice Police Department said at a news conference on Monday . By the afternoon, however, weather conditions had deteriorated, with heavy fog settling over the area, he said.

“Going into overnight and into Sunday, the winds picked up, the seas picked up, of course it’s been raining most of that time,” Captain Leisenring said, noting that weather conditions remained rough on Monday. “It’s not very safe to be out there for a small vessel,” he said.

The men set out aboard a 1995 23-foot white SportCraft boat, according to a news release from the Police Department. It was unclear what safety and emergency equipment, if any, were on board.

Captain Leisenring said the authorities had been told that the men were experienced fishermen, but they did not leave behind a float plan, a detailed overview of a boat excursion.

“They did not tell the family members exactly where they were going, and so that does hinder our search efforts a little bit,” he said. “We have to estimate a starting point and adjust from there for the search.”

By Sunday, the U.S. Coast Guard and multiple local law enforcement agencies had pooled their resources to search for the men by sea and air. As of Monday, the search had covered over 4,600 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico, the Police Department said.

The U.S. Coast Guard said on social media late Monday, less than 48 hours after the investigation began, that it was suspending its search for the men, pending new information.

The U.S. Coast Guard and a Venice Police Department detective on the case did not respond to requests for further information on the decision on Tuesday.

Ruben Mora Jr., Mr. Mora’s son, said in a news conference on Monday that he had planned to meet his father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, after fishing on Saturday but did not hear from him.

“My dad lives for the water; he lives for the ocean,” Ruben Mora Jr. said. “We’re just trying to bring him home as quick as possible. I can’t imagine what he’s going through or what his friends are going through. I just want him back here.”

Derrick Bryson Taylor is a general assignment reporter. He previously worked at The New York Post’s PageSix.com and Essence magazine. More about Derrick Bryson Taylor

Massive search suspended for 4 missing boaters from Venice. Here's what we know Tuesday

yachts lost at sea

The search has been suspended for four Florida men whose boat went missing in the rain Saturday night and never returned, according to the Venice Police Department.

By Monday morning multiple agencies had searched over 4,600 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico for the boaters, who left for a boating trip from Venice Inlet on Saturday, Feb. 17. The U.S. Coast Guard posted on X , formerly Twitter, just after 10 a.m. Monday that the search was ongoing.

"The U.S. Coast Guard officially suspended the search at 8 p.m. for the four missing boaters out of Venice, pending any new information," the VPD posted on Facebook Monday evening. "The men's relatives have been notified."

Here's what we know.

When did the four Florida boaters go missing?

The men left from the Marina Park Boat Ramp , near the Historic Venice Train Depot, around 8 a.m. Saturday morning, according to the VPD .

Family members contacted police Sunday morning and officers found the men's vehicle and boat trailer still at the park, VPD Capt. Andy Leisenring said in a press conference Monday.

"They did not leave what we call a float plan," Leisenring said. "So they did not tell the family members exactly where they were going and so, of course that does hinder our search efforts a little bit.

"We have to estimate our starting point and then adjust our search," Leisenring said. The family has provided some information about the boaters' usual habits, he said.

How did the Florida boaters go missing?

While there's no way to be certain at this point, the weather may have been an issue. While the rain was light yesterday, the fog in the afternoon and rougher weather in the evening may have been a factor, Leisenring said.

"Going into overnight and into Sunday, the winds picked up, the seas picked up, of course it's been raining most of that time," he said. "Even now the conditions are roughly 4- to 6-foot seas so it's not very safe to be out there for a small vessel."

Captain Steven Stasko with the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) said conditions out on the water were not favorable for searchers. "I think we're in the 5- to 6-foot sea condition range," he said, "and those waves add disturbance on the water line which makes it difficult to see anything, really. That's where our air assets are very helpful."

What are the names of the Florida boaters who went missing?

The men were identified as:

  • Angel Hernandez Munoz, 38, of North Port
  • Ruben Mora Sr., 54, of Port Charlotte
  • Julio Cesar Cordero Briones, 37, of North Port
  • Alfonso Vargas Parra, 35, of North Port.

What kind of boat were the missing boaters in?

The boat is a 1995 23-foot white SportCraft, registration # FL9937HC.

Where is the search for the missing Florida boaters?

People from the Venice Police Department's Marine Patrol, the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office, the Sarasota Police Department, the Manatee County Sheriff's Office, Venice Fire Rescue, the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, the Lee County Sheriff's Office, the FWC and SEATO of Venice searched the Gulf of Mexico from Sarasota County south into Collier.

The U.S. Coast Guard searched areas nine miles offshore and beyond, Leisenring said, using multiple boats, aircraft and helicopters and going out to 80 nautical miles (just over 92 miles).

Who to call if you see the missing Florida boaters

Anyone with information is urged to contact VPD Detective Courtney Zak at 941-486-2444, U.S. Coast Guard St. Petersburg at Sector St. Pete at 866-881-1392, email [email protected], or use radio Channel 16 VHF.

Unlucky Billionaire’s $38M Megayacht Falls Off Cargo Ship, Gets Lost at Sea

The 130-foot boat was being transported by boat so it could compete in a boat race elsewhere on the planet. Because first world problems.

Unlucky Billionaire’s $38M Megayacht Falls Off Cargo Ship, Gets Lost at Sea

We’ve all heard of the unfortunate story of someone losing their car or motorcycle in a freak accident, but what about losing a $38-million megayacht ? Various international news outlets report that a 130-foot sailing yacht named MY Song was recently lost in the Mediterranean Sea after falling off a cargo ship while in transport. 

You’d think that a boat that fell off another boat would just land in the water and float after suffering some minor damage, right? Unfortunately, this was not the case. According to reports, MY Song fell off its transport freighter and plunged into the Mediterranean after being hit by an unexpected severe storm. Thankfully, it didn’t sink all the way to the bottom, but it did sustain significant damage. Recent reports claim the yacht was last spotted drifting about 40 miles north of the island of Menorca with nearly half of its hull submerged under water.

The boat is owned by Italian billionaire Pier Luigi Loro Piana, and it was on its way to the Loro Piana Superyacht Regatta in Porto Cervo in Sardinia, Italy. It was supposedly being transported on a massive freighter after spending some time sailing around North America.

Pier Luigi is the grandson of Pietro Loro Piana, the founder of an ultra high-end clothing company. Forbes last reported Loro Piana’s net worth at around $1.6 billion.

MY Song’s construction completed in 2016 and in the following year, it won the 2017 World Superyacht Award for the “Best Sailing Yacht ” in its class and size. It also set a speed record while participating in the RORC Transatlantic Race, a 3,000 nautical mile journey from the Canary Islands to Grenada. The boat beat the previous record by nearly 1 hour and 20 minutes. Its mast is over 56 meters tall and the boat was capable of speeds of up to 30 knots.

"We were informed of the loss of a yacht from the deck of the MV Brattinsborg at approximately 0400hr LT on 26th May 2019. The yacht is sailing yacht My Song," said David Holley in an official statement, the chief executive of the logistics company responsible for transporting MY Song. "Upon receipt of the news Peters & May instructed the captain of the MV Brattinsborg to attempt salvage whilst third-party salvors were appointed."

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Meet the adventurers scouring the sea for long lost treasures

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More than four million shipwrecks are said to be hidden beneath the waves. BOAT meets the bold adventurers dedicated to discovering them - and bringing their cargo to the surface.

Suspended in 57 metres of murky water in the Java Sea above an enormous pile of cups, plates and jars, Luc Heymans had an eerie feeling. “I felt like I’d had one too many drinks,” he says.

He wasn’t intoxicated. What made him dizzy, aside from the depth he was no longer accustomed to, was the realisation that he was looking at a treasure of unimaginable value. What lay beneath him that day in February 2004 was the wreck of a 10th century open deck cargo ship and a half a million artefacts piled on a tumulus more than 30 metres high and spread over an area of nearly 1,600 square metres. “I knew I was in front of something phenomenal,” he says. The unidentified wreck was later called Cirebon, after a village 145 kilometres away on the coast of the island of Java.

Heymans spent 20 years as a world-class sailor before embarking on new adventures on board a converted Russian trawler that he chartered to various organisations. One of his clients was renowned underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, who has brought to light civilisations that vanished in cataclysms and ships lost on ancient trade routes.

Heymans worked with Goddio in the Philippines before he decided to go it alone. “In the Philippines, you get a lot of information but very little of it turns out to be real, ”he says. “We wasted a lot of time, but it was fun.”

Then he got an interesting call about a wreck in Indonesia. Local fishermen are often the best source to identify wrecks. They know their waters better than anyone and can identify variations in colours and currents that can escape others. Sometimes a clue to what’s lying below comes to the surface, like a piece of pottery snagged in a fishing net. It was fishermen who tipped off the authorities about what became known as the Cirebon wreck. Heymans had heard lots of stories by now, but this time the local intel had been good. The wreck was real, and it was amazing. He negotiated with multiple Indonesian government modalities and permits, set up his company Cosmix Underwater Research and set out to work with a team of 75 people, 25 to 30 of them working on land to desalinate the pieces retrieved from the ocean floor. In all, it took 22,000 dives – each one lasting 25 minutes followed by around 90 minutes of decompression – to get most of the artefacts out.

He worked closely with specialists in ancient wood and metals and several museums, most notably The Royal Museum of Mariemont in his native Belgium, in addition to the Indonesian government who at the time proved less interested in the historical significance of the wreck than its monetary value.

The ship, somewhere around 32 metres, is thought to have sunk in the year 970, falling prey to the area’s strong currents and a heavy load of raw materials and goods from East Africa, Persia, India, Southeast Asia and China.

The discovery of this wreck showed historians that Islam had already reached Indonesia in the 11th century, two centuries earlier than commonly thought. Among the artefacts were Islamic prayer beads and a mould that served to make plates engraved with the name of Allah, plus 150 pieces in crystal rock, including a small fish that was designed to hold incense or perfume – one of Heymans’ favourite pieces. While aspirating the sand, the salvage team used a screen to prevent small pieces from getting trapped, recovering multiple coins, 4,000 rubies and 11,000 pearls in the process.

The recovery of such treasures is usually contentious. “Treasure is trouble,” says John Chatterton, an American wreck diver, who co-hosted the popular television series Deep Sea Detectives – and this find was no exception. When estimates for the hundreds of recovered objects reached sums in the tens of millions of dollars, the Indonesian government baulked at the agreement it had struck with Heymans and threw two of his head divers in jail. Eventually, after a much-publicised auction failed to attract bidders and the government was unable to find fault with the wreck salvage company, the Indonesian authorities relented. Cosmix was allowed to take the 50 per cent share that had been agreed to and quietly found a buyer. Qatar Museums was interested in what the treasure said about the country’s extensive historic trade connections and acquired the pieces.

Selling artefacts is what sets underwater archaeology and treasure hunting apart. But for a private salvage company, that is the only way to recoup expenses and maybe even make a profit, although that’s not easy.

Even successful treasure hunters, like the late Mel Fisher who became a multimillionaire after a nearly two-decade-long-search for the treasure of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha followed by a dogged legal fight against the state of Florida, have said they’re in it for the adventure. The gain is never certain. The old adage of finder’s keepers is more often than not a fallacy.

“You get out what you put in it,” says Jimmy Gadomski, a technical diver and yacht captain who has worked the wreck of the Pulaski, a steamship that sank off the coast of North Carolina in 1838 along with 128 of its crew and passengers and all their belongings. “There is money to be made, but the majority of this industry is going to be based on the thrill and excitement of treasure hunting.”

Finding shiny pieces of anything on the ocean floor often means entering a world of lengthy legal entanglements. Admiralty law is keeping courts busy globally, pitting investors, institutions and even entire countries against salvage companies. Spain has been particularly active in blocking dispersion of treasures it claims it owns, a fact that Heymans finds particularly ironic: “Where did Spain go steal all of this in the first place?”  He is also not a fan of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, which effectively prevents private companies from working wrecks 100 years and older. Few public institutions have the funds to salvage and preserve wrecks, and over time they degrade or fall prey to looters. “In the end, there remains no information for anyone,” Heymans adds.

More than 60 countries have signed on to the convention since 2001, the US being one exception, and that has redefined the business of treasure hunting at a time when it is easier than ever before to reach the bottom of the ocean.

This was very much on the mind of wreck divers seeking a pirate ship off the Dominican Republic in 2008, adding time pressure to the search. Chatterton and his partners were hired to locate the Golden Fleece, a ship that had been captained by British pirate Joseph Bannister. They were mindful the window was closing as the Dominican Republic looked to sign the convention. The country’s waters had been for years some of the most fertile for treasure hunters, along with the Bahamas and the American Southeast.

The floundering economies of Europe, and particularly Spain, fuelled the growing appetite for gold and silver extracted from the mines of the New World. During the early part of the 16th century, “virtually all shipping between Spain and New World was directed at Hispaniola”, according to pioneering treasure hunter and underwater archaeologist Robert F Marx. “Throughout the 16th century the waters of the New World were more or less a ‘Spanish lake’ and virtually all ships were Spanish built,” he writes in Shipwrecks in the Americas. The voyage was dangerous, the waters treacherous and five percent of the Spanish fleet never made it back home. Often the ships were wrecked in relatively shallow water and there were early attempts to recover the treasures they carried, even by contemporaries. However, early divers could not rely on much more than exceptional lung capacity, strong muscle and occasionally crude diving bells. More modern versions of these were used in early attempts to recover wrecks with some success.

Much more sophisticated technology has since come to the rescue. While technical divers are still essential to the recovery of sunken artefacts, a host of equipment is making it easier to pinpoint the location of wrecks.

Blue Water Rose , for example, a 24-metre commercial vessel operated by Blue Water Ventures International to search the Pulaski wreck is fitted with a side-scan sonar, caesium magnetometers, Overhauser gradiometers and advanced mapping and metal-detection software. It is also fitted, like many such ships, with prop wash deflectors that blow water straight down to create holes in the sand that divers then search for artefacts, pieces of iron, wood, anything that can establish the identity of the wreck. It is in one such hole that Gadomski found his most significant piece yet, the base of a candlestick with the inscription “SB Pulaski”, which established the identity of the wreck – and conferred rights to the salvage company.

Whereas in the 1970s treasure hunter Teddy Tucker surveyed the waters around Bermuda from a window washer chair hitched to a hot air balloon, today, ultralights that fit on a boat deck can be an integral part of the toolbox.

Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and pocket subs are also affording underwater explorers new opportunities to go deeper and find wrecks where no one could go in earlier years. The late Paul Allen was fascinated with battleships from the Second World War. His Vulcan organisation used ROVs to confirm locations of wrecks detected by a battery of high-tech equipment able to scan the sea floor. An early mission using his explorer Octopus resulted in the recovery of the bell of British Navy ship HMS Hood from the deep North Atlantic in 2015 and the largest navy wreck ever found, the Japanese battleship Musashi, among others.

A couple of years ago, it was a different Allen and his fleet that made the cover of BOAT International’s US Edition. When he retired, Carl Allen decided to pursue, at least some of the time, his long-held passion for treasure hunting. “It was Fisher and his revelation that the ocean floor was basically littered with treasure that sparked the fertile imagination of a 20-something amateur diver. Instantly I got the disease, I almost went to work for the man,” he says.

After that meeting, off and on when time allowed, he did some diving around Puerto Rico and the Turks and Caicos and researched a famous wreck in the Bahamas. Once he was free from his daily business duties, he set out on an actionpacked retirement plan. He assembled a fleet for his company Allen Exploration , acquiring a Damen support vessel with space for an Icon A5 aeroplane and a Triton 3300/3 submarine to run alongside his 50-metre Westport , Gigi . And then, having negotiated permissions with the Bahamian government, he began surveying the waters where the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas met her demise in 1656. Of all the galleons, she was one of the most famous and Allen had been studying her for years. “I don’t need the money; I am in it for the history,” he says.

Marx, who has been called the true father of underwater archaeology and was later knighted by Spain, located part of the wreck in 1972. A couple of wreck salvage operations took place since but, as far as records show, only managed to find a minimal amount of coins or gold, or at least far less than what she was known to carry. Often the galleons also carried contraband far exceeding the declared goods in their castles. The Maravillas’ manifest kept in the “General Archive of the Indies” in Seville’s old merchants’ exchange was thousands of pages long and Allen, like many others, believes the bulk of the treasure, including a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary and child in solid gold – a way, Allen says, for the ailing King Philip IV to buy his way into heaven – are yet to be found. Allen’s search was paused after Hurricane Dorian’s destruction refocused his efforts on helping the Bahamas recover, followed by Covid-19 this year. But plans are afoot for the creation of a museum dedicated to the wreck.

On the other side of the planet, Heymans spends a lot of time on his 26-metre sailing catamaran Lonestar, which he charters, but the lure of sunken treasures isn’t diminished. “It goes back to childhood,” he says, “What do kids do in their sandbox? They dig for treasure. It’s true what they say: adults are still children, only the toys get bigger.”

When we caught up with Heymans in Indonesia in May, he was evaluating another wreck from which was recovered a cannon dated from 1617 that belonged to the East India Company. “If this interests someone, even a TV company, to do a partnership with Indonesia, this is certainly an interesting wreck and an opportunity to do a great archaeological operation,” he says

All told, there are an estimated four million wrecks beneath the world’s oceans, from the antiquity wrecks of the Mediterranean to modern commercial wrecks. And it seems every so often, treasure just washes up on a beach.  But where is the fun in that? It’s the search that is so exciting.

“Treasure hunting conjures up many romantic notions, but in addition to shipwrecks there are aircraft, military hardware,” says Rob McCallum, co-founder of EYOS Expeditions, who has spent his fair share of time exploring the deep as a diver and deep-submarine expert. “Each item represents a piece of history, a rich tapestry of archaeological artefacts stretching back through time and spread across the seafloor.”

Treasure for the tking

The Treasure of Lima

British Captain William Thompson went rogue in 1820 after he was hired to carry the Peruvian capital’s riches to safety on board the Mary Dear. Instead, he and his crew headed for Cocos Island, 500km off the coast of Costa Rica, where they buried the treasure, including gold statues of Madonna and child – or so the stories tell us. Pirates were also said to regularly stash their loot on the island. Yet more than 500 expeditions have failed to turn up much more than a few coins. Among interested parties over the years were Lord Fitzwilliam, who arrived on Cocos on board the yacht Veronique. Sir Malcolm Campbell built Blue Bird to sail to the island but died before he could set sail. Tara Getty, who bought Blue Bird, picked up the mantle a few years ago, taking his family on an adventure that included a stopover in Cocos, thus realising Campbell’s dream (read the full story at boatint.com/gettycocos).

The San Miguel

This Spanish galleon was trying to escape a hurricane in 1715 when it was wrecked off Amelia Island in Florida. It was the fastest in a fleet of 11 and loaded with the greatest cargo – its treasure is estimated at $2 billion. Amelia Research & Recovery LLC has been searching for the wreck for several years, but the ship and her treasure have yet to be found.

Santa Maria

One of the three ships from Christopher Columbus’s fleet to the New World was reportedly lost off Haiti on Christmas Eve 1492. In 2014, experts contested the claim of a treasure hunter who professed to have found her. She may still be out there or, as some purport, may never have sunk at all and may have been beached by Columbus and later burned by indigenous Haitians.

Flor del la Mar

This 360-tonne Portuguese merchant vessel sank in a storm while navigating the Strait of Malacca in 1511 and was ripped in two. The ship, according to Robert F. Marx, was “the richest vessel ever lost at sea, with its hold loaded with 200 coffers of precious stones, diamonds from the small half-inch size to the size of a man’s fist.” Treasure.net puts its value at $2.6 billion.

First published in the September 2020 issue of BOAT International.

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9 Unbelievable True Stories About People Who Survived Being Lost at Sea

The sea can be harsh and unforgiving. These fortunate souls fought back against all odds.

lost at sea

→ Think you can survive anything? Let's brush up on our skills together.

A shipwreck out on the open ocean can be a death sentence. If a rescue team doesn't come in the first 48 hours, it probably never will. Learning to survive will take skill, courage, and a heaping of luck.

Here are nine stories of brave people who got lost at sea, and survived despite the odds.

(The following maps are only rough approximations of route and distance traveled.)

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Filo Filo, Etueni Nasau, and Samu Pelesa

lost at sea

In many Pacific island chains, people use small boats to sail from one island to the next. The islands are close enough together that sailing from one to the other is a relatively simple, cheap, and straightforward mode of travel.

For three teenage boys on the small island of Tokelau, sailing was routine. However, when Filo Filo, Etueni Nasau, and Samu Pelesa set sail on October 5, 2010, it would be a longer trip than any of them were expecting.

Shortly after sailing into the ocean, the three teens lost sight of the shore and became disoriented. Not knowing which way was home, the group became lost, drifting further and further from land.

They had brought enough water with them for two days, but that quickly ran out and they had to rely on rainwater . After a few weeks—with no food and no sign of rescue—they grew desperate enough to catch a bird and eat it.

Meanwhile, after a month with no news, their community believed that the boys were dead. Around 500 people attended a memorial service for the boys, representing about a third of the total population of the island chain.

Having spent more than a month adrift at sea, the three boys had no food and no water, and were suffering from extreme exposure. Their situation was so dire that they began drinking seawater , a sure sign that death is near. With only days or even hours left to live, a fishing boat halfway between Samoa and Fiji spotted them. They had drifted over 500 miles.

The sailor rescued the three boys and took them to a hospital in Fiji, and then back to their homes on Tokelau. They had been lost at sea for 50 days in total.

Brad Cavanagh and Deborah Kiley

lost at sea

Deborah Kiley was no stranger to the seas. She had spent most of her life working as a crew member on yachts around the world. So, she thought that signing up to crew the 58-foot sailing yacht Trashman in October of 1982 was just another job. It would turn out to be anything but .

John Lippoth, the captain of the ship, brought his girlfriend Meg Mooney along for the ride. The two other crew members on the trip were Mark Adams and Brad Cavanagh. The plan was to take the yacht from Annapolis, Maryland down to Florida to meet up with its owner.

The first half of the trip was pretty smooth sailing, although Kiley started noticing things that made her uneasy. Lippoth kept making excuses to go below deck, for instance, and Kiley soon realized that their captain was afraid of the ocean . Lippoth and Adams also spent the entire voyage completely drunk. Of the five people on that yacht, only Kiley and Cavanagh were experienced, capable sailors.

After the boat passed North Carolina, the trip took a turn for the worst. A massive storm appeared out of nowhere, and Trashman headed right into the heart of it. Kiley recalls wind speeds of over 70 knots, and 40-foot waves so powerful they ripped holes in the boat. Two days after they set sail, the yacht, torn apart by the sea, began to sink.

The crew managed to make it to a lifeboat , but not before the ship's rigging seriously injured Mooney, leaving severe lacerations on her arms and legs. Her bleeding attracted sharks, who followed the lifeboat for the remainder of the journey. The crew found themselves adrift with no supplies or water, miles from land.

Two days after the Trashman sunk, Lippoth and Adams, already dehydrated from alcohol and dying of thirst, began drinking seawater. They started hallucinating and rambling incoherently. On the third day, Lippoth—in a state of delirium—jumped into the water and attempted to swim to shore. He was immediately attacked and killed by the sharks . Soon, Adams jumped overboard as well, muttering something about going to get some cigarettes. The sharks attacked him also, so violently that the boat spun around and the water turned red.

That night, Mooney succumbed to her injuries, dying of blood poisoning. Kiley and Cavanagh, the only two left, had to toss her body overboard where she, too, was eaten by sharks. Shortly after, Kiley and Cavanagh, close to death themselves, were spotted by a Russian cargo ship off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The crew rescued them four days after they abandoned ship, and five days after setting sail.

Steven Callahan

lost at sea

Steven Callahan is an expert on sailing. Specifically, a naval architect who has been sailing ships since he was young. He even built his own boat, called the Napoleon Solo , and set sail from Rhode Island in 1981. His travels led him all over the Atlantic: first to Bermuda, and then to the coast of Europe. On his way back, bound for Antigua, he ran into trouble .

About a week after he set sail for home, a storm started brewing. The storm was relatively mild, and Callahan said he wasn't worried. But his boat hit something that tore a gaping hole in the bottom. Callahan suspected it was either a whale or a large shark.

The boat began filling up with water, and Callahan made it to his inflatable raft. But he needed the emergency supplies in the cabin, which was already underwater. Diving in again and again, he managed to retrieve food, water, flares, a spear gun, solar stills, and a handful of other items. All in all, he was particularly well-equipped to be adrift.

And a good thing too, because Callahan drifted on his raft for 76 days. During that time, he faced threats from starvation, dehydration, sharks, and raft punctures. Finally, some sailors off the coast of Marie-Galante, near Guadalupe, spotted him. He had lost a third of his weight and could barely stand, so they took him to a hospital for treatment. However, Callahan didn't even stay the night, opting instead to recuperate on the island, while hitchhiking throughout the West Indies.

Much later, Steven Callahan would work as an advisor on the movie Life of Pi , providing his sea survival expertise to make the film more realistic.

lost at sea

Poon Lim holds the world record for the longest survival on a life raft. It's not a record he hopes anyone will ever beat.

Poon was a Chinese sailor on the British Merchant vessel SS Benlomond during WWII. The ship had left Cape Town, South Africa on its way to New York when a German U-boat attacked it a few hundred miles off the coast of Brazil. That encounter destroyed the ship, but Poon managed to escape with a life jacket. He was the ship's sole survivor.

After about two hours, Poon found a small wooden raft and climbed aboard. Amazingly, the raft contained some survival supplies , like food, water, and flares. But as the days turned into weeks, and his food started to run low, Poon had to improvise.

He began by crafting a makeshift fishing hook and catching fish. With his new food supply and the water from his raft, he felt he might be able to make it. He still had his flares, and all he had to do was wait for a ship to come close.

Then things took a turn for the worst. A storm hit, and Poon lost all his food and water. With no supplies, and close to death, Poon had to go to extremes to survive. With the last of his strength, he caught a passing bird and killed it, drinking its blood to quench his thirst.

Poon realized that if he was going to survive, he would need a more permanent water source. The only one available happened to be protected by many sharp teeth. Still, Poon strengthened his fishing line and started trying to catch sharks. He managed to hook one, and brought it onboard. He drank the blood from the shark's liver to sustain himself.

After 133 days, Poon drifted close to the shore of Brazil, where some fishermen rescued him, and took him to a hospital to recover. Despite being lost at sea for almost half a year, he had only lost around 20 pounds and could walk by himself.

Maurice and Marilyn Bailey

lost at sea

In 1973, Maurice and Marilyn Bailey were planning to live out their dream of moving from their home in England to New Zealand. They sold their house, bought a yacht, and set sail with their possessions. They believed the trip would be a pleasant journey. They were wrong .

The first half of their voyage went well, and they passed through the Panama Canal in February of that year. Soon after, they ran into trouble, or more accurately, trouble ran into them.

While both of the Baileys were below deck, they felt a massive impact. Rushing onto the deck, the couple saw a whale diving below the water and a large hole in their hull. The ship quickly began to sink, and the Baileys grabbed what little they could and headed for their life raft.

The couple was stranded in the Pacific with a few days' worth of food, a compass , some flares, and little else. They collected rainwater to drink, and when their food ran out, they ate birds, fish, and even turtles.

During their time at sea, they spotted seven ships, which they attempted to signal, but no one noticed them. As the weeks stretched into months, they became badly sunburned and malnourished. Their life raft started to deflate, they were plagued by sharks, and they suffered multiple storms.

After 117 days stranded at sea, with no supplies and near the brink of death, they were finally rescued. A passing Korean ship spotted them in the water and changed course to bring them aboard. They could barely move and they were so weak that they couldn't eat solid foods.

The Korean ship dropped the Baileys off at Hawaii, where they immediately vowed to build another yacht and return to the sea, because they clearly didn't get the message the first time. With the proceeds from the book they wrote about their experiences, they did indeed build a second yacht, and spent years sailing around the world comparatively uneventfully.

Rose Noelle Crew

lost at sea

John Glennie, Rick Hellriegel, Jim Nalepka, and Phil Hofman were four friends who decided to take a winter vacation to the island of Tonga. They left on their ship, the Rose Noelle , and hoped for smooth sailing .

On June 4, 1989, three days after they set sail, a massive wave came out of nowhere and hit the ship, flipping it completely upside down and severely damaging it. The crew found themselves trapped in the ship's cabin, which began rapidly filling with water.

They set off a signal beacon in an attempt to get help, but the beacon went unanswered. Alone and trapped in a dark cabin, the crew had to chop a hole in the hull of the ship to escape. Fortunately the Rose Noelle , though now upside down, did not completely sink, and its wreckage served as a twisted vessel on which the men could still float.

A week later, with supplies running out, the signal beacon stopped working, still with no response or rescue. The crew were on their own.

After the ship's water reserves ran out, the crew rigged up a system to collect rainwater and started catching fish for food. They were still adrift, they had food, water, and shelter, so they were in no immediate danger as long as the weather didn't turn.

They drifted in this manner for weeks without rescue. Glennie began diving into the wreckage to recover pieces of the ship they could use. He managed to recover a gas cooker so the four men could have occasional barbecues.

On September 30, 118 days after they were set adrift, the four castaways and the wreckage of the Rose Noelle washed up on a beach in New Zealand. They were extremely lucky. A few months later, the wind and water currents would have taken them in the direction of South America.

Even the location on the beach where they washed ashore was fortunate. A few dozen yards to the left or right were rocky cliffs, and if the ship had landed there, it would have broken apart on the rocks.

Salvador Alvarenga

lost at sea

José Salvador Alvarenga holds the record for the longest solo survival at sea. He was adrift for 438 days, and traveled over 6,700 miles.

Alvarenga is a fisherman, and on November 17, 2012, he set sail from the fishing village of Costa Azul in Mexico. With him was Ezequiel Córdoba, another fisherman, whom Alvarenga had never worked with before.

Shortly after departing the shore, a storm hit their boat. It blew the ship off course, and damaged the motor and most of the electronics onboard. Alvarenga managed to contact his boss on the radio before it died, but he was unable to help.

The storm lasted for five days. When it ended, Alvarenga and Córdoba had no idea where they were or how to get home. The storm had destroyed most of their fishing gear, leaving them with only basic supplies. And with no motor, no sails, and no oars , their boat was adrift.

The two drifted for months, surviving on rainwater and catching sea animals like fish, turtles, and birds. After four months, Córdoba gave up hope. He stopped eating, and starved to death. Alvarenga says he considered giving up too, but persevered.

Even after four months at sea, Alvarenga was not even halfway through his ordeal. He tried signaling every ship he saw, but none of them spotted him. He continued surviving off rainwater and sea animals, and kept track of the time by the phases of the moon.

More than a year after the storm that set him adrift, Alvarenga spotted land. He abandoned his boat and swam for the shore, and found himself on one of the Marshall islands, on the other side of the Pacific from where he started. He was taken to a hospital, where he made a full recovery.

Louis Zamperini

lost at sea

Louis Zamperini first made national headlines in 1938 when he traveled to Berlin to compete in the Olympics. He ran in the 500-meter dash and placed 8th, which is more than enough to earn a spot in the history books. But Zamperini wasn't done yet .

In 1941, just a few months prior to Pearl Harbor, Zamperini enlisted in the United States military. He became a second lieutenant in the Air Force, and when the war began, he was deployed as a bombardier in the Pacific.

In 1943, during a search-and-rescue mission, his bomber suffered a mechanical failure that brought it down. It crashed in the ocean, and eight of the 11 crew members died. The three that survived were Zamperini and his crewmates Russell Allen Phillips and Francis McNamara.

The three crewmates were adrift in the Pacific Ocean, in enemy territory, with no food, water, or supplies. They managed to salvage two rafts from the wreckage of their plane, and collected enough rainwater to survive. They ate small fish and birds.

They drifted like this for weeks. After 33 days, McNamara died, leaving only Phillips and Zamperini. Two weeks later, their rafts washed ashore in the Marshall Islands and the two men were immediately captured by the Japanese.

Zamperini and Phillips were sent to various POW camps, and Zamperini eventually found himself at the Naoetsu camp in Northern Japan. There, he was tortured for two years by infamous prison guard Mutsuhiro Watanabe, one of Japan's most brutal war criminals. When the war finally ended in 1945, Zamperini was released and finally reunited with his family.

Oguri Jukichi

lost at sea

Jukichi was a sailor during Japan's Edo period, about 200 years ago. He was the captain of the freighter Tokujomaru and its crew of 14 men. He was transporting soybeans to the city of Edo, which would become present-day Tokyo, when his ship was caught in a massive storm. The storm damaged the ship's mast and set them adrift .

Very quickly, the crew exhausted their supply of food and water. They began surviving entirely on captured rainwater and the large stores of soybeans in the ship's hold. After several months, members of the crew began suffering from scurvy due to lack of nutrients.

One by one, over months, the crew started dying, while the Tokujomaru drifted further and further from home. After more than a year adrift, only three people were left: the captain Jukichi, and two members of the crew, Otokichi and Hanbe. All three were suffering the effects of scurvy and likely close to death when their ship was discovered off the coast of California in 1815.

The three Japanese sailors became the first people from that country to set foot on American shores. They had drifted over 5,000 miles and were lost at sea for 484 days.

The three sailors returned to Japan after recovering, however Hanbe died during the trip. Upon their return, Jukichi received numerous honors, and was granted a last name, Oguri. Even 200 years later, Jukichi still holds the Guinness World Record for longest time adrift at sea.

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Billionaire's luxury superyacht slips from cargo ship, gets lost at sea

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The billionaire owner of a 130-foot yacht , named MY Song, is singing the blues after his vessel got lost at sea when it fell off a cargo ship.

The $38 million superyacht, which was on the last leg of a journey that began in the Caribbean, was not secured correctly by the crew, according to the company that transported her , when it fell overboard last Saturday.

The owner is Italian  billionaire Pier Luigi Loro Piana, who is heir to a luxury clothing company. Forbes magazine puts his net worth at $1.6 billion.

"For anyone who loves the sea, his boat is like a second home, and it is as if my home has burnt down," Piana, 67, told Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

ANOTHER ITALIAN VILLAGE IS SELLING HOMES FOR LESS THAN $2 

yachts lost at sea

MY Song, which was built in 2016, was being transported to Ibiza to take part in the Logo Piana Superyacht Regatta, which is running in Porto Cervo from June 3 to June 6, when it broke loose over the weekend. (Baltic Yachts)

MY Song, which was built in 2016, was being transported to Ibiza to take part in the Logo Piana Superyacht Regatta, which is running in Porto Cervo from June 3 to June 6, when it broke loose over the weekend. MY Song won last year.

The yacht has since been located, with salvagers now working to prepare her for tow.

The head of Peters & May, the company that handles MY Song’s transporting, said in a statement to the press: “Upon receipt of the news Peters & May instructed the captain of the MV Brattinsborg to attempt salvage whilst 3rd party salvors were appointed."

LUXURY YACHT TESTER NEEDED FOR $93G DREAM JOB

“The vessel maintained visual contact with My Song until the air and sea search was initiated. As of 0900hr BST on 28th May 2019 the salvage attempts are still ongoing,” David Holley said.

yachts lost at sea

On social media, yachting organizations and publications lamented the misfortune that befell MY Song, a star in the regatta and luxury yacht worlds. Its past honors include Best Yacht at the World Superyacht Awards. (Baltic Yachts)

“A full investigation into the cause of the incident has been launched,” he continued. “However the primary assessment is that the yacht’s cradle (owned and provided by the yacht, warrantied by the yacht for sea transport and assembled by the yacht’s crew) collapsed during the voyage from Palma to Genoa and subsequently resulted in the loss of MY Song overboard. I will add that this is the initial assessment and is subject to confirmation in due course.”

On social media, yachting organizations and publications lamented the misfortune that befell MY Song, a star in the regatta and luxury yacht worlds. Its past honors include Best Yacht at the World Superyacht Awards.

yachts lost at sea

CEO and co-chairman of Italian fashion group Loro Piana, Pier Luigi Loro Piana, poses in Quarona on September 8, 2013. AFP PHOTO / GIUSEPPE CACACE (Photo credit should read GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images)

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GCaptain.com  noted that besides being an award-winning performer in competitions, MY Song was a jewel in luxuriating circles: “The interior accommodation is for six to eight guests including the owner, the focal point being a spectacular deck saloon with hull and superstructure ports, plus skylights providing panoramic outboard views.”

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Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months

In November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga went fishing off the coast of Mexico. Two days later, a storm hit and he made a desperate SOS. It was the last anyone heard from him – for 438 days. This is his story

A s they motored across the lagoon in the Marshall Islands , deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the policemen stared at the specimen laid out on the deck before them. There was no hiding the fact that this man had been at sea for a considerable time. His hair was matted upwards like a shrub. His beard curled out in wild disarray. His ankles were swollen, his wrists tiny; he could barely walk. He refused to make eye contact and often hid his face.

Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador, had left the coast of Mexico in a small boat with a young crewmate 14 months earlier. Now he was being taken to Ebon Atoll, the southernmost tip of the Marshall Islands , and the closest town to where he had washed ashore. He was 6,700 miles from the place he had set out from. He had drifted for 438 days.

Floating across the Pacific Ocean, watching the moon’s light ebb and flow for over a year, Alvarenga had battled loneliness, depression and bouts of suicidal thinking. But surviving in a vibrant world of wild animals, vivid hallucinations and extreme solitude did little to prepare him for the fact that he was about to become an international celebrity and an object of curiosity.

Days later, Alvarenga faced the world’s press. Dressed in a baggy brown sweatshirt that disguised his reedy torso, he disembarked from a police boat slowly but unaided. Expecting a gaunt and bedridden victim, a ripple of disbelief went through the crowd. Alvarenga cracked a quick smile and waved to the cameras. Several observers noted a similarity to the Tom Hanks character in the movie Cast Away . The photo of the bearded fisherman shuffling ashore went viral. Briefly, Alvarenga became a household name.

Who survives 14 months at sea? Only a Hollywood screenwriter could write a tale in which such a journey ends happily. I was sceptical, but as a Guardian reporter in the region, I began to investigate. It turned out there were dozens of witnesses who had seen Alvarenga leave shore, who had heard his SOS. When he washed ashore (in the same boat that he had left Mexico on), thousands of miles away, he was steadfast in his rejection of interviews – even posting a note on his hospital door begging the press to disappear.

Later, I would sit with Alvarenga for many hours, back at his home in El Salvador, as he described in detail the brutal realities of living at sea for more than a year. Over the course of more than 40 interviews, he described his extraordinary survival at sea. This is his story.

O n 18 November 2012, a day after being ambushed at sea by a massive storm, Alvarenga was trying to ignore the growing pond of seawater sloshing at his feet. An inexperienced navigator might have panicked, started baling and been distracted from his primary task: aligning the boat with the waves. He was a veteran captain and knew that he needed to regain the initiative. Together with his inexperienced crewmate, Ezequiel Córdoba, he was 50 miles out at sea, slowly negotiating a route back to shore.

The spray and crashing waves dumped hundreds of gallons of seawater into the boat, threatening to sink or flip them. While Alvarenga steered, Córdoba was frantically tossing water back into the ocean, pausing only momentarily to allow his shoulder muscles to recover.

Alvarenga’s boat, at 25 feet, was as long as two pick-up trucks and as wide as one. With no raised structure, no glass and no running lights, it was virtually invisible at sea. On the deck, a fibreglass crate the size of a refrigerator was full of fresh fish: tuna, mahimahi and sharks, their catch after a two-day trip. If they could bring it ashore, they would have enough money to survive for a week.

The boat was loaded with equipment, including 70 gallons of gasoline, 16 gallons of water, 23kg (50lb) of sardines for bait, 700 hooks, miles of line, a harpoon, three knives, three buckets for baling, a mobile phone (in a plastic bag to keep it dry), a GPS tracking device (not waterproof), a two-way radio (battery half-charged), several wrenches for the motor and 91kg (200lb) of ice.

the cooler box in which missing fisherman Salvador Alvarenga hid from the sun

Alvarenga had prepared the boat with Ray Perez, his usual mate and a loyal companion. But at the last minute, Perez couldn’t join him. Alvarenga, keen to get out to sea, arranged to go with Córdoba instead, a 22-year-old with the nickname Piñata who lived at the far end of the lagoon, where he was best known as a defensive star on the village soccer team. Alvarenga and Córdoba had never spoken before, much less worked together.

Alvarenga tensely negotiated their slow advance toward the coast, manoeuvring among the waves like a surfer trying to glide and slice his way through. As the weather worsened, Córdoba’s resolve disintegrated. At times he refused to bale and instead held the rail with both hands, vomiting and crying. He had signed up to make $50. He was capable of working 12 hours straight without complaining and was athletic and strong. But this crashing, soaking journey back to shore? He was sure their tiny craft would shatter and sharks would devour them. He began to scream.

Alvarenga remained sitting, gripping the tiller tightly, determined to navigate a storm now so strong that harbourmasters along the coast had barred fishing boats from heading out to sea. Finally he noticed a change in the visibility, the cloud cover was lifting: he could see miles across the water. Around 9am, Alvarenga spotted the rise of a mountain on the horizon. They were approximately two hours from land when the motor started coughing and spluttering. He pulled out his radio and called his boss. “Willy! Willy! Willy! The motor is ruined!”

“Calm down, man, give me your coordinates,” Willy responded, from the beachside docks in Costa Azul.

“We have no GPS, it’s not functioning.”

“Lay an anchor,” Willy ordered.

“We have no anchor,” Alvarenga said. He had noticed it was missing before setting off, but didn’t think he needed it on a deep-sea mission.

“OK, we are coming to get you,” Willy responded.

“Come now, I am really getting fucked out here,” Alvarenga shouted. These were his final words to shore.

As the waves thumped the boat, Alvarenga and Córdoba began working as a team. With the morning sun, they could see the waves approaching, rising high above them and then splitting open. Each man would brace and lean against a side of the open-hulled boat to counteract the roll.

But the waves were unpredictable, slapping each other in midair, joining forces to create swells that raised the men to a brief peak where they could get a third-storey view, then, with the sensation of a falling elevator, instantly drop them. Their beach sandals provided no traction on the deck.

Alvarenga realised their catch – nearly 500kg (1,100lb) of fresh fish – was making the boat top heavy and unstable. With no time to consult his boss, Alvarenga went with his gut: they would dump all the fish. One by one they hauled them out of the cooler, swinging the carcasses into the ocean. Falling overboard was now more dangerous than ever: the bloody fish were sure to attract sharks.

Next they tossed the ice and extra gasoline. Alvarenga strung 50 buoys from the boat as a makeshift “sea anchor” that floated on the surface, providing drag and stability. But at around 10am the radio died. It was before noon on day one of a storm that Alvarenga knew was likely to last five days. Losing the GPS had been an inconvenience. The failed motor was a disaster. Now, without radio contact, they were on their own.

The storm roiled the men all afternoon as they fought to bale water out of the boat. The same muscles, the same repetitive motion, hour after hour, had allowed them to dump perhaps half the water. They were both ready to faint with exhaustion, but Alvarenga was also furious. He picked up a heavy club normally used to kill fish and began to bash the broken engine. Then he grabbed the radio and GPS unit and angrily threw the machines into the water.

The sun sank and the storm churned as Córdoba and Alvarenga succumbed to the cold. They turned the refrigerator-sized icebox upside down and huddled inside. Soaking wet and barely able to clench their cold hands into fists, they hugged and wrapped their legs around each other. But as the incoming water sank the boat ever lower, the men took turns leaving the icebox to bale for frantic 10- or 15-minute stints. Progress was slow but the pond at their feet gradually grew smaller.

Darkness shrank their world, as a gale-force wind ripped offshore and drove the men farther out to sea. Were they now back to where they had been fishing a day earlier? Were they heading north towards Acapulco, or south towards Panama? With only the stars as guides, they had lost their usual means of calculating distance.

Without bait or fish hooks, Alvarenga invented a daring strategy to catch fish. He kneeled alongside the edge of the boat, his eyes scanning for sharks, and shoved his arms into the water up to his shoulders. With his chest tightly pressed to the side of the boat, he kept his hands steady, a few inches apart. When a fish swam between his hands, he smashed them shut, digging his fingernails into the rough scales. Many escaped but soon Alvarenga mastered the tactic and he began to grab the fish and toss them into the boat while trying to avoid their teeth. With the fishing knife, Córdoba expertly cleaned and sliced the flesh into finger-sized strips that were left to dry in the sun. They ate fish after fish. Alvarenga stuffed raw meat and dried meat into his mouth, hardly noticing or caring about the difference. When they got lucky, they were able to catch turtles and the occasional flying fish that landed inside their boat.

Within days, Alvarenga began to drink his urine and encouraged Córdoba to follow suit. It was salty but not revolting as he drank, urinated, drank again, peed again, in a cycle that felt as if it was providing at least minimal hydration; in fact, it was exacerbating their dehydration. Alvarenga had long ago learned the dangers of drinking seawater. Despite their longing for liquid, they resisted swallowing even a cupful of the endless saltwater that surrounded them.

“I was so hungry that I was eating my own fingernails, swallowing all the little pieces,” Alvarenga later told me. He began to grab jellyfish from the water, scooping them up in his hands and swallowing them whole. “It burned the top part of my throat, but wasn’t so bad.”

After roughly 14 days at sea, Alvarenga was resting inside the icebox when he heard a sound: splat, splat, splat. The rhythm of raindrops on the roof was unmistakable. “Piñata! Piñata! Piñata,” Alvarenga screamed as he slipped out. His crewmate awoke and joined him. Rushing across the deck, the two men deployed a rainwater collection system that Alvarenga had been designing and imagining for a week. Córdoba scrubbed a grey five-gallon bucket clean and positioned its mouth skyward.

Dark clouds stalked overhead, and after days of drinking urine and turtle blood, and nearly dying of thirst, a storm finally bore down on the men. They opened their mouths to the falling rain, stripped off their clothes and showered in a glorious deluge of fresh water. Within an hour, the bucket had an inch, then two inches of water. The men laughed and drank every couple of minutes. After their initial attack on the water supplies, however, they vowed to maintain strict rations.

map of missing fisherman Salvador Alvarenga’s  journey

After weeks at sea, Alvarenga and Córdoba became astute scavengers and learned to distinguish the varieties of plastic that bob across the ocean. They grabbed and stored every empty water bottle they found. When a stuffed green rubbish bag drifted within reach, the men snared it, hauled it aboard and ripped open the plastic. Inside one bag, they found a wad of chewed gum and divided the almond-sized lump, each man feasting on the wealth of sensorial pleasures. Underneath a layer of sodden kitchen oil, they found riches: half a head of cabbage, some carrots and a quart of milk – half-rancid, but still they drank it. It was the first fresh food the two men had seen for a long time. They treated the soggy carrots with reverence.

When they had several days’ worth of backup food, and especially after they had caught and eaten a turtle, Córdoba and Alvarenga briefly found solace in the magnificent seascape. “We would talk about our mothers,” Alvarenga recalled. “And how badly we had behaved. We asked God to forgive us for being such bad sons. We imagined if we could hug them, give them a kiss. We promised to work harder so they would not have to work any more. But it was too late.”

After two months at sea, Alvarenga had become accustomed to capturing and eating birds and turtles, while Córdoba had begun a physical and mental decline. They were on the same boat but headed on different paths. Córdoba had been sick after eating raw seabirds and made a drastic decision: he began to refuse all food. He gripped a plastic water bottle in both hands but was losing the energy, and motivation, to put it up to his mouth. Alvarenga offered tiny chunks of bird meat, occasionally a bite of turtle. Córdoba clenched his mouth. Depression was shutting his body down.

The two men made a pact. If Córdoba survived, he would travel to El Salvador and visit Alvarenga’s mother and father. If Alvarenga made it out alive, he’d go back to Chiapas, Mexico, and find Córdoba’s devout mother who had remarried an evangelical preacher. “He asked me to tell his mother that he was sad he could not say goodbye and that she shouldn’t make any more tamales for him – they should let him go, that he had gone with God,” Alvarenga told me.

“I am dying, I am dying, I am almost gone,” Córdoba said one morning.

“Don’t think about that. Let’s take a nap,” Alvarenga replied as he lay alongside Córdoba.

“I am tired, I want water,” Córdoba moaned. His breath was rough. Alvarenga retrieved the water bottle and put it to Córdoba’s mouth, but he did not swallow. Instead he stretched out. His body shook in short convulsions. He groaned and his body tensed up. Alvarenga suddenly panicked. He screamed into Córdoba’s face, “Don’t leave me alone! You have to fight for life! What am I going to do here alone?”

Córdoba didn’t reply. Moments later he died with his eyes open.

“I propped him up to keep him out of the water. I was afraid a wave might wash him out of the boat,” Alvarenga told me. “I cried for hours.”

The next morning he stared at Córdoba in the bow of the boat. He asked the corpse, “How do you feel? How was your sleep?”

“I slept good, and you? Have you had breakfast?” Alvarenga answered his own questions aloud, as if he were Córdoba speaking from the afterlife. The easiest way to deal with losing his only companion was simply to pretend he hadn’t died.

Six days after Córdoba’s death, Alvarenga sat with the corpse on a moonless night, in full conversation, when, as if waking from a dream, he was suddenly shocked to find he was conversing with the dead. “First I washed his feet. His clothes were useful, so I stripped off a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt. I put that on – it was red, with little skull-and-crossbones – and then I dumped him in. And as I slid him into the water, I fainted.”

W hen he awoke just minutes later, Alvarenga was terrified. “What could I do alone? Without anyone to speak with?” he told me. “Why had he died and not me? I had invited him to fish. I blamed myself for his death.”

But his will to live and fear of suicide (his mother had assured him that those who kill themselves will never go to heaven) kept him searching for solutions and scouring the ocean’s surface for ships. Sunrise and sunset were best, as blurry shapes on the horizon were transformed into neat silhouettes and the sun was bearable. With his eyesight fine-tuned, Alvarenga could now identify a tiny speck on the horizon as a ship. As it approached, he would identify the type of vessel – usually a transpacific container ship – as it growled by. These sea barges ploughed the sea effortlessly, and with no visible crew or activity on deck, they were like drones at sea. Every sighting pumped Alvarenga with an energy boost that jolted him to wave, jump and flail for hours. About 20 separate container boats paraded across the horizon, yet the maddening ship-tease still excited him. Storms battered his small boat, but as he got farther out to sea, the storms seemed to become shorter, more manageable.

Alvarenga let his imagination run wild in order to keep sane. He imagined an alternative reality so believable that he could later say with total honesty that alone at sea he tasted the greatest meals of his life and experienced the most delicious sex. He was mastering the art of turning his solitude into a Fantasia-like world. He started his mornings with a long walk. “I would stroll back and forth on the boat and imagine that I was wandering the world. By doing this I could make myself believe that I was actually doing something. Not just sitting there, thinking about dying.” With this lively entourage of family, friends and lovers, Alvarenga insulated himself from bleak reality.

When he was a small boy, his grandfather had taught him how to keep track of time using the cycles of the moon. Now, alone in the open ocean, he was always clear as to how many months he had been adrift; he knew he had seen 15 lunar cycles while drifting through unknown territory. He was convinced his next destination was heaven.

He was whizzing along on a smooth current, when suddenly the sky filled with shore birds. Alvarenga stared. The muscles in his neck tightened. A tropical island emerged from the mist. A green Pacific atoll, a small hill surrounded by a kaleidoscope of turquoise waters.

Hallucinations didn’t last this long. Had his prayers finally been answered? Alvarenga’s racing mind imagined multiple disaster scenarios. He could blow off course. He could drift backward – it had happened before. He stared at the land as he tried to pick out details from the shore. It was a tiny island, no bigger than a football field, he calculated. It looked wild, without roads, cars or homes.

With his knife, he cut away the ragged line of buoys. It was a drastic move. In the open ocean, with no sea anchor, he could readily flip during even a moderate tropical storm. But Alvarenga could see the shoreline clearly and he gambled that speed was of greater importance than stability.

In an hour he had drifted near the island’s beach. Ten yards from shore, Alvarenga dove into the water, then paddled “like a turtle” until a large wave picked him up and tossed him high on the beach, like driftwood. As the wave pulled away, Alvarenga was left face down in the sand. “I held a handful of sand like it was a treasure,” he later told me.

lost fisherman Salvador Avarenga making radio contact after landing on Ebon Atoll

The famished fisherman crawled naked through a carpet of sodden palm fronds, sharp coconut shells and tasty flowers. He was unable to stand for more than a few seconds. “I was totally destroyed and as skinny as a board,” he said. “The only thing left was my intestines and gut, plus skin and bones. My arms had no meat. My thighs were skinny and ugly.”

Although he didn’t know it, Alvarenga had washed ashore on Tile Islet, a small island that is part of the Ebon Atoll, on the southern tip of the 1,156 islands that make up the Republic of the Marshall Islands, one of the most remote spots on Earth. A boat leaving Ebon searching for land would either have to churn 4,000 miles north-east to hit Alaska or 2,500 miles south-west to Brisbane, Australia. Had Alvarenga missed Ebon, he would have drifted north of Australia, possibly running aground in Papua New Guinea, but more likely continuing another 3,000 miles towards the eastern coast of the Philippines.

As he stumbled through the undergrowth, he suddenly found himself standing across a small canal from the beach house of Emi Libokmeto and her husband Russel Laikidrik. “As I’m looking across, I see this white man there,” said Emi, who works husking and drying coconuts on the island. “He is yelling. He looks weak and hungry. My first thought was, this person swam here, he must have fallen off a ship.”

After tentatively approaching each other, Emi and Russel welcomed him into their home. Alvarenga drew a boat, a man and the shore. Then he gave up. How could he explain a 7,000-mile drift at sea with stick figures? His impatience simmered. He asked for medicine. He asked for a doctor. The native couple smiled and kindly shook their heads. “Even though we did not understand each other, I began to talk and talk,” Alvarenga told me. “The more I talked, the more we all roared with laughter. I am not sure why they were laughing. I was laughing at being saved.”

After a morning of caring for and feeding the castaway, Russel sailed across a lagoon to the main town and port on the island of Ebon to ask the mayor for help. Within hours a group, including police and a nurse, had come to rescue Alvarenga. They had to persuade him to get on a boat with them back to Ebon. While they nursed this wild-looking man back to health and tried to coax out details of his journey, a visiting anthropologist from Norway alerted the Marshall Islands Journal .

Written by Giff Johnson, the first story went out under the Agence France-Presse (AFP) banner on 31 January and outlined the remarkable contours of Alvarenga’s story. Reporters in Hawaii, Los Angeles and Australia scrambled to reach the island to interview this alleged castaway. The single phone line on Ebon became a battleground, as reporters tried to discover tantalising details. Alvarenga’s story had enough hard facts to make it plausible: the initial missing person report, the search-and-rescue operation, the correlation of his drift with known ocean currents, and the fact that he was extremely weak.

But a debate erupted online and in newsrooms around the world: was this the most remarkable survivor since Ernest Shackleton , or the biggest fraud since the Hitler diaries ? Officials tracked down Alvarenga’s supervisor, who confirmed that the registration number of the boat he had washed up in was the same as the one that had left port on 17 November 2012, and vanished. Guardian reporter Jo Tuckman interviewed Mexican search-and-rescue official Jaime Marroquín , who detailed the desperate hunt for Alvarenga and Córdoba that followed. “The winds were high,” Marroquín said. “We had to stop the search flights after two days because of poor visibility.”

I began to investigate, talking to people up and down the coast of Mexico. I looked at medical records, studied maps, and spoke to survival experts, ranging from the US Coast Guard to the Navy Seals, as well as Ivan MacFadyen and Jason Lewis , two adventurers who have crossed that stretch of the Pacific. I spoke with oceanographers and commercial fishermen familiar with the area. Everyone confirmed that Alvarenga’s version of life at sea was in line with what they would expect. When he arrived at hospital in the Marshall Islands, he was debriefed by US embassy officials who described multiple scars on Alvarenga’s very damaged body. “He was out there for a long time,” the US ambassador said.

missing fisherman Salvador Alvarenga back home in El Salvador in June 2015

Meanwhile back in the Marshall Islands, Alvarenga’s medical condition steadily worsened. His feet and legs were swollen. The doctors suspected the tissues had been deprived of water for so long that they now soaked up everything. But after 11 days, doctors determined that Alvarenga’s health had stabilised enough for him to travel home to El Salvador, where he would be reunited with his family.

He was diagnosed with anaemia and doctors suspected his diet of raw turtles and raw birds had infected his liver with parasites. Alvarenga believed the parasites might rise up to his head and attack his brain. Deep sleep was impossible and he thought often of Córdoba’s death. It was not the same to be celebrating survival alone. As soon as he was strong enough, he travelled to Mexico to fulfil his promise and deliver a message to Córdoba’s mother, Ana Rosa. He sat with her for two hours, answering all her questions.

Life on land has not been straightforward: for months, Alvarenga was still in shock. He had developed a deep fear of not only the ocean, but even the sight of water. He slept with the lights on and needed constant company. Soon after coming ashore, he appointed a lawyer to handle the media requests that came in from all over the world. He later changed representation, and his former lawyer filed a lawsuit demanding a million-dollar payout for an alleged breach of contract.

It wasn’t until a year later, when the fog of confusion subsided and he scanned the maps of his drift across the Pacific Ocean, that Alvarenga began to fathom his extraordinary journey. For 438 days, he lived on the edge of sanity. “I suffered hunger, thirst and an extreme loneliness, and didn’t take my life,” Alvarenga says. “You only get one chance to live – so appreciate it.”

  • José Salvador Alvarenga
  • Marshall Islands
  • Asia Pacific

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4 Suspected Smugglers Charged After Navy SEALs’ Deaths in Arabian Sea

The foreign nationals have been brought to the United States to face charges after being taken into custody when their boat was intercepted last month.

AJ McDougall

AJ McDougall

Breaking News Reporter

The US seized "advanced conventional weapons" bound for Yemen's Houthis last week near the coast of Somalia in international waters of the Arabian Sea on January 11, 2024.

U.S. Department of Justice

Four men were charged on Thursday in connection with the seizure of illegal Iranian weaponry allegedly bound for Yemen’s Houthi militia in a mission last month that left two U.S. Navy SEALs dead, according to the Department of Justice.

The suspected weapons smugglers were taken into custody in Richmond, Virginia, after their unflagged dhow–a sailing vessel that usually sports long, thin hulls– was intercepted by a U.S. Navy Ship in a risky night-time operation .

Detained as material witnesses in the matter were 10 other crew members aboard the vessel, eight of whom similarly made an initial court appearance in Richmond on Thursday.

It was previously reported that one of the SEALs fell into the water while attempting to board the vessel amid eight-foot swells on Jan. 11. The other, according to naval protocol, dove in after his teammate. Both were declared lost at sea until their status was changed to presumed deceased after a 10-day search.

One of the four men, Muhammad Pahlawan, is charged with unlawfully transporting a warhead and making false statements. The other three—Mohammad Mazhar, Ghufran Ullah and Izhar Muhammad—are charged with providing false information to U.S. Coast Guard officers regarding the vessel’s crew and cargo. All four were carrying Pakistani identification papers, according to the Justice Department.

None is charged directly with the deaths of the SEALs, identified as Navy Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Christopher Chambers, 37, and Navy Special Warfare Operator 2nd Class Nathan Gage Ingram, 27.

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement, “The flow of missiles and other advanced weaponry from Iran to Houthi rebel forces in Yemen threatens the people and interests of America and our partners in the region.

“Two Navy SEALs tragically lost their lives in the operation that thwarted the defendants charged today from allegedly smuggling Iranian-made weapons that the Houthis could have used to target American forces and threaten freedom of navigation and a vital artery for commerce,” she continued. “Alongside our partners around the world, the Justice Department will continue to deploy every available tool to combat this grave threat.”

Charging documents unsealed on Thursday revealed that the team of SEALs and a U.S. Coast Guard team seized “what is believed to be Iranian-made advanced conventional weaponry,” including critical components for medium-range ballistic missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles, much of it concealed inside tubing or among buoys.

The discovered weaponry was consistent with the kind used by the Houthis in a recent spate of attacks on U.S. military ships and international merchant vessels across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, according to prosecutors. Representatives for the Iranian-backed rebels have described the attacks, which began in earnest last November, as a campaign to pressure Israel into ending its bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip .

Prosecutors alleged that the dhow’s crew denied smuggling any weapons. A few claimed to be drug smugglers, despite the fact that no drugs were found onboard. Though nearly all of the crew identified Pahlawan as their captain, he told the Coast Guard that the real captain had disembarked the vessel before the raid, and that he was just an engineer.

Pahlawan also said that he’d been in Iran for approximately the last two years, and had been working on the dhow for about two weeks. He told investigators that he’d been given a satellite phone by the dhow’s Iran-based owner, his employer, who called him several times during the voyage to ask for updates on the vessel’s location. Tracing the calls, federal agents identified the employer as an affiliate of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organization.

After taking the crew into custody, Navy forces determined the dhow “unsafe and unseaworthy” and sank it according to protocol, according to the charging documents.

If convicted of unlawfully transporting a warhead, Pahlawan faces up to 20 years behind bars.”

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Florida man went to extreme measures to survive being lost at sea for nearly 2 days.

Sara Smart

Charles Gregory headed out for an early morning fishing trip Friday off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida – something he’d done many times before.

But the tide rose quicker than he thought. Then a wave hit his 12-foot jon boat – a lightweight and flat-bottomed vessel – and knocked him into the water.

He managed to get back on board but was quickly taken out to sea. For nearly two days the 25-year-old “struggled to stay alive” under the brutal Florida sun as he clung to the partially submerged boat, suffering jellyfish stings and spotting sharks, his father, Raymond Gregory, told CNN Sunday.

“He was scared to death,” Raymond said. “He said he’s had more conversations with God in that 30 hours than he’s had his whole life.”

Boat crews pulled Charles from the Atlantic Ocean Saturday morning after an aircrew spotted him about 12 miles offshore, the US Coast Guard said in a news release. Footage released by the Coast Guard shows the dramatic rescue and Charles seated in the inundated boat, its bow dipping beneath the surface of the water, before crews reached him.

Charles Gregory receives care from EMS after being rescued a dozen miles off Florida's coast on Saturday.

It all started Friday around 4 a.m. ET. Charles was last spotted leaving the Lighthouse Park Boat Ramp in the jon boat, the Coast Guard said.

As the tide took him out to sea, Charles fought to hang on to the boat and stay alive while in the direct sunlight, his father said. The nearly two days included desperate attempts by Charles to keep the boat afloat – even removing the vessel’s motor. It also led to frantic efforts to get help – removing his swimming trunks to use to flag down nearby boats and aircraft, his father said.

But the night was the worst.

“At night being sunburnt, and the wind would be blowing, he said it was freezing cold out there in that water,” Raymond said.

Charles is now at home resting. His father says “he’s exhausted, he’s dehydrated and is suffering from Rhabdomyolysis” – which causes the breakdown of damaged muscle and leads to muscle cell contents into the bloodstream, something the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can be worsened by dehydration.

The severe sunburn, the bruises and the bites are making it difficult for him to move and get out of bed but he is expected to be OK, his father said.

01 shark spotting carlos gauna

Americans are spotting more sharks in the water. Here's why that's a good thing

Raymond said he’s happy to have his son back and thankful to all the search teams and the community for his safe return.

“At the end of the day, the whole moral of the story is ‘don’t ever give up,’” he said.

Emergency services met Gregory at Vilano Beach Fishing Pier after he was rescued, the Coast Guard said in its release.

“While this case resulted in rescuing Charles from a life-threatening situation, it highlights the importance of having safety gear onboard and being prepared for the worst,” Coast Guard Sector Jacksonville Commander Nick Barrow said.

“If you plan to head out on the water, remember to have a life jacket, VHF marine grade radio, signaling devices and an emergency personal locator beacon to contact first responders in case you are in need of assistance,” he said.

CNN’s Dakin Andone and Susannah Cullinane contributed to this report.

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WSB Atlanta

7 metro Atlanta family members, including 6 kids, lost at sea after storm hits their boat in Haiti

A Douglas County family was celebrating the holidays in Haiti when tragedy struck.

The family was on a boat excursion while visiting Haiti on Dec. 30 when a storm overpowered their ship. Seven of them, six of whom are children, were thrown out of the boat and lost at sea.

“The last time everyone saw anyone was Saturday,” said Olna Dupre.

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Olna Dupre told Channel 2′s Larry Spruill that the Christmas holiday was the last time her family was all together. They’re from Haiti and wanted to bring in the new year on their family’s island.

“So December 30th, this was Saturday, right before New Year’s Eve. The family wanted to see everyone come back to our island. When it’s times like this, like New Years or Thanksgiving, everybody goes back home to our little island. That’s was one of those times and to get there, it’s by ship,” Dupre said.

Dupre said her family members all got on a local boat. That’s when things took a turn.

“Right about 11 o’clock at night, about 45 minutes to an hour from our island, the weather hits and it wasn’t on their side,” she recalled.

Dupre said large ocean waves swallowed the boat and everyone fell in the water, including some of her youngest cousins.

“They are all kids except for their uncles. We’re talking about kids. Five, six, nine, 10, 13 years old,” she said.

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The family says they took canoes out into the ocean in a desperate attempt to rescue their loved ones.

“My cousin took a canoe along with some of his brothers to go and save some of the people on the boat,” said Dupre.

Some were rescued including two of the kids but many of her family members are still missing.

“We don’t know where the rest of our family is,” said Dupre.

Dupre said the search and rescue is difficult because of the lack of resources.

“When you’re dealing with minimal resources. We have canoes for God’s sake,” she said.

Spruill asked Dupre if she’s hopeful search crews will find her loved ones.

“To answer your question, Larry, No, I’m [shakes head.]”

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7 metro Atlanta family members, including 6 kids, lost at sea after storm hits their boat in Haiti

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    The men on the boat range in age from 35 to 54, the Coast Guard said. Authorities said the men left the Marina Park boat ramp at about 8 a.m., Saturday, and were supposed to return that night.

  7. Unresolved Marine Incidents

    Oct 30, 2023 MV TROPHY Adrift Between Bermuda and the Virgin Islands Report from Boat Watch facebook group - CAUTION: Floating remains of a small vessel with TROPHY printed on the side spotted at 26.50.508'N 63.49.700'W between Bermuda and Virgin Islands. read more Missing Boater Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina Sep 1, 2023

  8. What the Wave of Ship Disasters Really Means

    February 24, 2022 Are the boats okay? They seem to be in a tough stretch. A ship called the Felicity Ace is currently afire and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Azores, with a reported 4,000...

  9. Missing Submersible Vessel Disappears During Dive ...

    June 19, 2023, 8:44 p.m. ET John Ismay John Ismay, a Pentagon reporter, served as a deep-sea diving and salvage officer in the U.S. Navy. Why are undersea rescues so difficult? The U.S. Navy's...

  10. Coast Guard Suspends Search for Four Missing Fishermen Off Florida Gulf

    By Derrick Bryson Taylor. Feb. 20, 2024, 7:44 a.m. ET. The United States Coast Guard has called off a search for four missing boaters who set out Saturday morning for a day of fishing off Florida ...

  11. Coast Guard suspends search for 4 fishermen missing off Florida ...

    The search for four fishermen missing off Florida's Gulf Coast has been suspended, the Coast Guard said. The search was called off at 8 p.m. Monday, "pending any new information," the agency ...

  12. List of missing ships

    [1] The list is organised by the marine region in which the disappearance or sinking occurred, or the closest country to the area. The year of the disappearance, last known location, and possible location of the wreck are included. Africa Madagascar South Africa North America Canada Newfoundland and Labrador Nova Scotia Ontario United States

  13. Missing Florida boaters: Coast Guard suspends search Monday evening

    The U.S. Coast Guard posted on X, formerly Twitter, just after 10 a.m. Monday that the search was ongoing. "The U.S. Coast Guard officially suspended the search at 8 p.m. for the four missing ...

  14. Greek migrant boat wreck may be Mediterranean's 'worst ever ...

    CNN — The sinking of a packed migrant boat off the coast of Greece may be "the worst tragedy ever" in the Mediterranean sea, according to the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson.

  15. Unlucky Billionaire's $38M Megayacht Falls Off Cargo Ship, Gets Lost at Sea

    The boat beat the previous record by nearly 1 hour and 20 minutes. Its mast is over 56 meters tall and the boat was capable of speeds of up to 30 knots. "We were informed of the loss of a yacht ...

  16. Worldwide ship losses by vessel type 2022

    Number of losses Cargo ships Fishing vessels Passenger ships Bulk carriers Tug boats Chemical and product tankers Ro-ro ships Container ships Offshore and supply vessels Dredgers Barges Tankers...

  17. Search for 38 lost at sea continues after survivor of capsized boat

    The U.S. Coast Guard continued the search for 38 people who were lost at sea after a boat capsized. A lone survivor alerted authorities about the 39 he was w...

  18. Meet the adventurers scouring the sea for long lost treasures

    3 December 2021 • Written by Cecile Gauert More than four million shipwrecks are said to be hidden beneath the waves. BOAT meets the bold adventurers dedicated to discovering them - and bringing their cargo to the surface.

  19. Lost at Sea Stories

    Filo Filo, Etueni Nasau, and Samu Pelesa PM In many Pacific island chains, people use small boats to sail from one island to the next. The islands are close enough together that sailing from one...

  20. Billionaire's luxury superyacht slips from cargo ship, gets lost at sea

    Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The billionaire owner of a 130-foot yacht, named MY Song, is singing the blues after his vessel got lost at sea when it fell off a cargo ship. The $38 ...

  21. Ukraine Has No Navy. But It's Hammering Russia In The Black Sea

    A soldier of Ukraine's coast guard mans a gun on a patrol boat as a cargo ship passes by in the Black Sea on February 7. After Russia seized Crimea in 2014, Ukraine moved its serviceable fleet ...

  22. Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months

    Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador, had left the coast of Mexico in a small boat with a young crewmate 14 months earlier. Now he was being taken to Ebon Atoll, the...

  23. List of people who disappeared mysteriously at sea

    Throughout history, people have mysteriously disappeared at sea, many on voyages aboard floating vessels or traveling via aircraft. The following is a list of known individuals who have mysteriously vanished in open waters, and whose whereabouts remain unknown.

  24. What Happens When Containers are Lost at Sea?

    The worst year occurred in 2013, when the MOL Comfort sank in the Indian Ocean with a loss of 4,293 containers. Another spike happened between Nov. 2020 and April 2021, when it is estimated that ...

  25. 4 Suspected Smugglers Charged After Navy SEALs' Deaths in Arabian Sea

    Both were declared lost at sea until their status was changed to presumed deceased after a 10-day search. One of the four men, Muhammad Pahlawan, is charged with unlawfully transporting a warhead ...

  26. Florida man went to extreme measures to survive being lost at sea for

    It all started Friday around 4 a.m. ET. Charles was last spotted leaving the Lighthouse Park Boat Ramp in the jon boat, the Coast Guard said. As the tide took him out to sea, Charles fought to ...

  27. Mystery At Sea

    America's most renowned single-handed offshore sailor, Michael Plant of Jamestown, R.I., had been lost at sea for 32 days when his 60-foot racing yacht, Coyote, was spotted on Sunday morning—the day that Plant had originally intended to begin a nonstop race around the world. The sighting was made by a Greek-owned tanker, Protank Orinoco, 460 ...

  28. 7 metro Atlanta family members, including 6 kids, lost at sea ...

    The family was on a boat excursion while visiting Haiti on Dec. 30 when a storm overpowered their ship. Seven of them, six of whom are children, were thrown out of the boat and lost at sea.