S.F. charity sailboat race ends in tragedy
Monday, March 17, 2008
(03-16) 19:12 PDT San Francisco -- A sailing race from the San Francisco Bay into the open sea turned deadly this weekend when two Marin County sailors and their boat vanished in heavy swells.
One of the men's bodies washed up Sunday morning, while the other remains missing.
The race from the Golden Gate Yacht Club in San Francisco to a buoy about 12 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, began Saturday on a clear winter morning marked by 12- to 16-foot swells and high winds, authorities said. But when the three dozen competing boats finally struggled back to port at the end of the day, the 32-foot Daisy was missing.
The first clues to what might have happened emerged at 10:30 a.m. Sunday when officials retrieved debris from the boat about 5 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. And then, an hour later, the body of one of the missing sailors, Anthony John Harrow, 72, of Larkspur, was pulled out of the water at Moss Beach in San Mateo County, officials said.
The other sailor, and owner of the boat, 68-year-old Matthew Kirby Gale, has not been found. The Coast Guard suspended the search for Gale on Sunday night.
Gale's family members waited anxiously Sunday for news about the retired neurologist, who is married.
His stepdaughter, Megan Howard, said Sunday by phone from the family home in Mill Valley that Gale was an experienced sailor who did some racing. She was crying, and declined to comment further.
Coast Guard Capt. Paul Gugg declined to speculate about what went wrong on the boat. He said that sailing in any vessel can be dangerous, particularly in the open ocean but that Saturday's race took place in particularly treacherous waters.
"Racing is a thrill sport, and they went out in challenging conditions," said Gugg. "We don't know if they did anything wrong; we don't know if there was an equipment failure. It's risky and very challenging out there." A person cannot survive more than four hours in 50- to 55-degree water, the estimated temperature this weekend. But Coast Guard officials said that they did not know what type of emergency equipment, including a lifeboat, the pair might have had onboard.
Coast Guard officials have been unable to locate any Mayday calls or other calls for help from the boat in their records, officials said.
"We are working feverishly," Coast Guard Cmdr. Pat DeQuattro said earlier in the day. "We want to push until we cannot reasonably assume success."
At 6 p.m. Sunday, the Coast Guard suspended the search due to lack of new information and an "extremely low probability of survival due to water temperature and sea state," according to a Coast Guard news release.
DeQuattro said that weather and sea conditions were likely factors in any problems the men ran into, noting that the swells reached at least 16 feet and winds were hovering around 30 mph. The Coast Guard had issued a small craft advisory, but the men were sailing a fairly large boat called a Cheoy Lee Offshore 31.
"I would not underestimate the weather in this," said DeQuattro. "It's a challenging environment when seas are 12 to 16 feet, and it can be arduous and dangerous."
The debris fetched from the water included wooden plankings, a refrigerator door and a rudder that matched descriptions of the Daisy, a white and green sailboat. The pieces were floating in the area where the Daisy and the crew were last seen around 1 p.m. Saturday, said DeQuattro.
Based on inspections of the debris, authorities did not believe the boat crashed into another vessel, said Gugg, but he would not rule it out as a possibility.
The men left Richardson Bay Marina around 9 a.m. to participate in the Island Yacht Club's 27th annual Double Handed Lightship race, a benefit for United Cerebral Palsy.
Gale's family called the Coast Guard around 6 p.m. Saturday after the pair failed to return from the race, which was scheduled to end around 4 p.m. The Coast Guard and other local law enforcement agencies immediately launched a search from air, water and land, which continued through Sunday. Authorities also investigated all vessel traffic headed in and out of San Francisco Bay hoping to gain more information about Daisy's whereabouts.
Janet Frankel, staff commodore for the Island Yacht Club, said it was sunny and clear when the approximately 40 boats participating in the race left from the Golden Gate Yacht Club in San Francisco, where the race began.
"The weather forecast predicted thunderstorms but that didn't pan out," she said. "All the (other) racers came back by 2:45 p.m., and we started hailing Daisy then, not because we were concerned but mostly because we wanted to go home. We wanted to know what its intentions were."
Frankel said she did not know Gale or Harrow personally. She could not recall a similar mishap in the club's 27 years of hosting the race, but said it's a difficult course.
"I've raced it ... and boats sometimes don't finish," she said. "At one point (Saturday) the wind died down and the boats were just bobbing around for 45 minutes. Then they all came back in quite a cluster."
Frankel described Gale's boat as a "full-keeled oceangoing vessel," and said the craft was large and well suited for such a race.
"His was not the boat we were worried about, it was the smaller boats we were worried about," said Frankel.
Anyone with information should call (415) 399-3547.
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