On Sunday, September 17, a fellow in the Houghton-Hancock area went fishing in his 14-foot outboard boat in Lake Superior. About 1 p.m he launched his boat from a ramp at Chassell, Michigan, on Portage Lake, and likely passed down the waterway into Lake Superior to the East. With him were a friend and his 9-year-old son. When they did not return by late afternoon, the USCG was notified and a search began. The search area was vast: it extended from Keweenaw Bay into Lake Superior. The USCG published this plot of the search areas and patterns flown:
- USCG graphic of search patterns
- searchMapKeweenawMissingBoatCrop.jpg (58.41 KiB) Viewed 4863 times
Joining the search were airborn assets from U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Traverse City, Coast Guard aircrews from Detroit, Cape Cod, Elizabeth City, N.C., the Canadian Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Air Force. USCG boat crews, the cutter USCGC BISCAYNE BAY, and many state and local agencies also participated in the search. The formal USCG seach continued until September 21, 2016, five days after the boat went missing. After 151-hour of searching, covering 14,000-square miles, the boat and its occupants could not be found, and the USCG search was ended.
On Saturday, October 1, 2016, about two weeks after the boat went missing, volunteer searchers from a non-profit organization using SONAR located the missing boat and three bodies on the bottom of Keweenaw Bay in 280-feet of water and about five miles offshore. Eventually all three bodies were recovered using remote-control submersible vehicles.
The 14-foot boat can be seen in the image below:
- missingBoatKeweenawBay2016.jpg (20.77 KiB) Viewed 4875 times
Since approximately c.1978, all boats less-than 20-feet in length at the time of their original manufacture must have enough reserve buoyancy to keep some part of the hull above water if flooded. Floatation for outboard boats is regulated in 33 CFR 183.101 - 105, which provides
§ 183.101 Applicability.
This subpart applies to monohull inboard boats, inboard/outdrive boats, and airboats less than 20 feet in length, except sailboats, canoes, kayaks, inflatable boats, submersibles, surface effect vessels, amphibious vessels, and raceboats.
§ 183.105 Quantity of flotation required.
(a) Each boat must have enough flotation to keep any portion of the boat above the surface of the water when the boat has been submerged in calm, fresh water for at least 18 hours and loaded with:
(1) A weight that, when submerged, equals two-fifteenths of the persons capacity marked on the boat;
(2) A weight that, when submerged, equals 25 percent of the dead weight; and
(3) A weight in pounds that, when submerged, equals 62.4 times the volume in cubic feet of the two largest air chambers, if air chambers are used for flotation.
(b) For the purpose of this section, “dead weight” means the maximum weight capacity marked on the boat minus the persons capacity marked on the boat.
With the discovery of the missing boat on the bottom of Lake Superior, is seems the boat did not have adequate flotation. Perhaps the boat was manufactured before the regulations cited above came into effect. Perhaps the floatation was old, damaged, or had been removed.
The loss of three lives from a fall fishing trip on a Saturday afternoon is extremely unfortunate, and no one can say exactly what happened to cause the boat to sink. Whenever I read of an incident like this, I am again reminded of my faith in my Boston Whaler boat to stay afloat and the comfortable feeling that gives me.
