‘Sinking Boat’ Call Is Found to Be a Hoax

A frantic, two-day aerial hunt for a “sinking boat” in the San Clemente area ended Thursday afternoon after Coast Guard officials decided that the distress call that triggered the search had been a hoax.

The garbled cry for help that started the two-day search came at 11:31 a.m. on Wednesday, and it was heard on Coast Guard radios in Long Beach and San Diego.

A man “who sounded very panicky” radioed that his boat was sinking and that two people from the boat had already jumped into the cold ocean water, Coast Guard officials recalled. “The radio operator said, ‘We’re five miles east of Clemente’ and he said he was abandoning ship, and that’s all we heard from him,” Chief Petty Officer Joseph Hartline said.

The brief call never mentioned an exact location nor the name of the boat. The man operating the distress radio also failed to specify if “five miles east of Clemente” meant San Clemente Island or the city of San Clemente.

The call was very brief, partially garbled and with an urgent, frightened sound in the voice of the man seeking help, Coast Guard personnel said. “It sounded like a real emergency,” Hartline agreed.

But after almost 14 hours of aerial searching on Wednesday and Thursday, the Coast Guard concluded that there was no boat in trouble. The search was called off at 12:45 p.m. Thursday.

“We now think the call was a hoax,” said Coast Guard Lt. John Ochs, in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon. “Conditions were perfect today (Thursday) for spotting anything, and our planes could even detect a paper cup floating in the ocean. If there had been anything out there, we’d have seen it.”

Ochs said the apparent fake call “cost the taxpayers a lot of money--I don’t have figures, but it’s very expensive to put those planes and helicopters up there.” The perpetrator of the false call also violated federal law, Ochs noted. “We had a case down in San Diego where a person got five years in prison for making a false alarm call like this,” he added.

Ochs said that if a boat had really been in trouble, a rescue could have been made very quickly. “We had a Navy plane searching east of San Clemente Island just five minutes after we got that call on Wednesday,” Ochs said.

Also on Wednesday, Coast Guard planes and helicopters from San Diego and Los Angeles flew to the scene. The aircraft searched the waters on all sides of the island, 60 miles offshore from Orange County. The planes then searched the waters off the city of San Clemente before stopping at darkness Wednesday.

The aerial search resumed at 7 a.m. Thursday and continued until 12:45 p.m. Ochs said that only one boat was reported missing in the meantime, and it was a vessel that was discovered safe in the Santa Catalina Island area.