Something went 'catastrophically wrong' in San Francisco Bay. What caused deadly boat sinking?
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Set us as preferred James Smith, a veteran seaman and captain of the charter fishing boat California Dawn, was sailing his vessel under the Golden Gate Bridge Tuesday when he heard the call on his radio: a vessel was in distress near Alcatraz Island.From a distance, Smith saw what looked like steam or smoke rising from a speck in the water.As he sped to the scene, he saw that a large motor boat was rapidly sinking.
Some passengers were frantically clinging to the hull of the partially-submerged vessel, he said, as rescuers administered CPR to a man on a San Francisco police boat.“Something went catastrophically wrong with the boat to to make it go down like that,” said Smith, who has operated charter boats for 35 years.
“It wasn’t just because a wave hit it and it just turned over.”Rescue teams scrambled to pull 17 people to safety, but after reaching the shore the man who was given CPR was pronounced dead.On Thursday, a female passenger was recovered from the bay and pronounced dead.
Two passengers remain missing.As search teams continued to scour the bay Thursday to find the missing passengers and recover the wreckage of the sunken vessel, it is not yet clear what caused the 49-foot boat with three levels to roll on its side and topple into the water.According to Capt.Jarod Toczko, the U.S.
Coast Guard’s San Francisco sector commander, survivors of the incident reported that a wave hit the boat, causing it to list heavily and suddenly roll over.But maritime investigators and experts, including the captain who was out in the Bay that day, told The Times that a single wave was unlikely to cause such a large cabin cruiser to sink.While the exact cause will not be determined until officials retrieve the boat from the ocean floor and conduct a full investigation, they said the vessel, which was carrying 20 passeng...