SAN FRANCISCO — Rescuers were still searching for three people missing after a boat involved in a memorial service sank in the cold, choppy waters of San Francisco Bay near Alcatraz Island, authorities said Wednesday.
One person was pulled from the water but later died, and 16 others were rescued Tuesday afternoon after the boat took on water and capsized, San Francisco Fire Chief Dean Crispen said. He said the passengers on board were mostly family members and that a dog also died.
Witnesses reported “rough seas,” the fire chief said, with rescuers saying swells reached up to 5 feet (1.5 meters). Marine weather conditions, however, didn't warrant a small craft advisory from the National Weather Service.
The vessel was a 50-foot (15-meter) pleasure craft with a cabin and upper deck named Volare, said Lt. Mariano Elias, a fire department spokesperson. It was registered out of Stockton, California, which sits at the eastern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
Kirk Miller, an experienced local sailor with a master mariner license, said an uneven distribution of passengers could have caused the Volare to tip.
“As it rocks in the waves, it leans over a little bit,” Miller said. “And as it leans over, the stability would decrease. If you had weight down below it acts as ballast. There was nothing in the conditions that were extreme in any regard. There was no massive gust of wind, no huge wave.”
Like a ‘Titanic’ scene, rescuer says
Two rescuers who jumped into action while fishing for halibut said the boat that sank was more than capable of being out in the bay. Justin Marceline and Michael Montoya said they saw smoke and arrived to find the vessel halfway submerged.
“We just started yanking people out,” Marceline told The Associated Press. At least two people bobbed in the water without life jackets, while others clung to a windsurfer’s board.
Marceline could see people trapped inside the rapidly sinking boat through its windows. He threw lead fishing weights to survivors in the water, hoping they could smash the glass, but they were too weak.
“It was like Titanic in real life,” he said. “There was stuff everywhere. People were banging on the glass.”
Montoya estimated they pulled eight or nine people aboard, including the captain, before first responders arrived.
Initial callers reported what appeared to be smoke coming from the boat, but San Francisco police officers who first reached the vessel said it was steam.
Sudden immersion in water under 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) can lead to cold water shock, a condition where people lose dexterity in minutes. That can be dangerous or deadly when trying to escape a sinking watercraft.
The person who died was identified as Clifford Boisa, 79, from rural Sutter County in the Sacramento Valley, the San Francisco medical examiner said.
The owners of the boat are John Boisa and Miriam Boisa of Stockton, Coast Guard records show. They did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
High-tech tools used in search
The U.S. Coast Guard was leading the search effort and hadn’t yet determined how long crews will keep looking before switching to a recovery operation, Petty Officer Kenneth Wiese said Wednesday.
“We want to consider every single option,” Wiese said.
A Coast Guard cutter named the Barracuda, other vessels and a fixed-wing aircraft were involved, he said. Teams were using thermal imaging, tide prediction and modeling to guide their efforts, the fire department said.
The boat departed a San Francisco marina, passed under the Golden Gate Bridge twice and visited Angel Island State Park, the largest natural island in the bay, before the apparent return trip near Alcatraz, according to the ship-tracking website VesselFinder.
“The wind was coming underneath the Golden Gate and blowing toward Alcatraz,” said Lt. Joseph England of the Richmond Police Department, who responded to the scene. “If you have a smaller vessel and you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re hitting those swells sideways, it can lead to disaster.”
The maximum-security federal prison at Alcatraz Island, which closed more than 60 years ago, was infamously inescapable due to the chilly waters and strong currents that surround "The Rock." It is now a popular tourist attraction, about a mile (1.6 kilometers) off San Francisco.
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Associated Press writers Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; Ed White in Detroit; Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles; and photographer Noah Berger in San Francisco contributed to this story.