Death at the Island
Thanks Loren,
Here's the story.
Death at the Island
October 8 - Two Harbors
The body of the a 53-year-old man who has been a frequent visitor to Catalina aboard his Hunter 42 Romancing the Seas was found floating three miles off the island early on Sunday morning. Authorities, including homicide detectives
from Los Angeles, are still trying to figure out what happened.
The victim, whose name has not been released, is said to be a veteran cruiser, a licensed captain, and a certified diver. He and his wife had apparently spent the afternoon of October 7 relaxing with their kids and having cocktails on their boat in Cherry Cove. Later on they took their 10-ft hard-bottom dinghy to the Isthmus Cove dinghy dock to check out the Buccaneer Day festivities ashore. We've been
told that this was somewhat unusual, as the couple apparently didn't care for big and noisy crowds, and the Buccaneer Day crowd at Two Harbors is about as big and noisy as you can get.
Once ashore, the man and woman split up - he to use the restroom and she to get drinks for the two of them at the indoor bar. Battling one's way through the crowd to the indoor bar, ordering drinks, and coming back outside again was no small task that night. It could - and apparently did - take a half hour or more. Once outside, the woman couldn't find her husband in the throng.
Apparently, he returned to the dinghy dock to see if his wife might be there. Not liking the chaotic scene at the dinghy dock, he got into their dinghy and drove it up on the nearby beach - as a number of others had done to avoid the dinghy dock congestion.
Somehow the couple eventually hooked up again, but when they did there apparently were some angry words based on their frustrations. We're told they returned to their boat, at which point the husband - to the wife's surprise - took
off in the dinghy without saying where he was going. It was about 9 p.m.
Some time later, the Marina del Rey Flyer, on its way from Two Harbors to Avalon, spotted what appeared to be a dinghy on their radar, heading east at a low rate of speed. It was a little to the east of Blue Cavern. On the way back from
Avalon, they noticed the dinghy on the radar again and decided to investigate. They found Romancing the Seas' dinghy with nobody aboard.
When they alerted the Two Harbors office on channel 16, the victim's wife was listening. Devastated, she contacted harbor officials and was brought to shore. The Coast Guard and Bay Watch were immediately alerted, and a helicopter with heat sensing equipment began searching a grid based on where the dinghy had been found. The search was called off at 4 a.m.
About two hours later, a boat returning to the mainland spotted the victim's body floating about three miles off the island, with some kind of wound to the head. Had the victim fallen off his dinghy and it came around and hit him in the head? Maybe. But the dinghy's 10-hp outboard had a prop-guard that is designed to prevent such accidents. In addition, when found, the dinghy had been motoring forward, not in a circle, with the throttle at idle. Had the man been hit by another dinghy or boat? There was a lot of dinghy and vessel traffic that night.
At this point the only things known for certain are that the man is dead, his family is grieving his loss terribly, and the staff at Two Harbors are heartbroken at
having lost one of 'theirs'.