A Pacific search and rescue operation for a 45ft yacht with a man and his son aboard, instead discovered a solo ocean rower who had just abandoned ship into his liferaft.
Skipper Dave Wysopal and his son, Zach, lost contact with friends and family ashore more than six weeks after setting sail aboard their yacht Yasukole from La Paz, Mexico, bound for the Marquesas and then American Samoa.
They'd registered with the Pacific Puddle Jump (PPJ) rally, which is an informal gathering of crews who set sail independently with no set start/finish times, but did not share their locations with the fleet. Wysopal used a Spot satellite texting device to broadcast their GPS coordinates to relatives but sailed out of the device’s coverage range on 13 May.
“After several weeks without updates, friends and family had become quite concerned, despite Dave’s reputation as being a highly experienced and self-reliant seaman,” reported a friend of Wysopal via Facebook.
“We alerted the US Coast Guard, JRCC Tahiti, and the PPJ fleet of the situation in early June. Coast Guard JRCC Honolulu dispatched a longrange, low-flying C-130 Hercules aircraft from Hawaii to French Polynesia."
But by the third and final day of the low-altitude search effort [15 June], the flight crew had found no clues about Yasukole’s whereabouts.
While bidding to make a wholly unconnected crossing of the Pacific, solo ocean rower Aaron Carotta had lost power aboard Smiles, his ocean rowing vessel. After several weeks of rationing battery usage, Carotta lost all power on 13 May.
Carotta calculated that his next landfall was 1,600 miles away and that he could make 40 miles per day,
