10 Feared Dead as Fishing Trip Ends in Tragedy

Ten of the 12 friends who set out on a sportfishing boat from a San Diego marina late Tuesday are now presumed to have died in the cold waters and swift currents off Baja California, where their boat was swamped Thursday by a rogue wave.

The only known survivors late Friday were a 29-year-old Riverside man who was rescued by Mexican fishermen near San Martin Island and the only woman aboard, a 38-year-old crew member who had watched search planes pass above her before they finally noticed her life raft.

“It just went belly up,” said survivor Jim Sims, recalling how the 20-foot wave engulfed the boat. “ . . . One of them broke down over the top of us, hitting the bow and flipping the boat over.”

With tears in his eyes, Sims described his friends’ futile attempts to reach land.

“The first one to go was Ken Baldwin,” he said in an interview with The Times at his Riverside home. “He started falling behind. After about an hour, he just disappeared. The next one was Rusty (Paxton). He said he couldn’t make it. I tried to encourage him, to keep him going, but when I turned around, he wasn’t there.”

After seven hours in the water, Sims neared a beach but could no longer see or hear any of his friends. He kept going.

“I knew if I stopped, I would die. I saw the beach. And I could see lights. . . . I started yelling. Some fishermen on the beach heard me. They brought out a boat and they pulled me in. . . . If they hadn’t come out in the boat, I wouldn’t have made it.”

The other survivor was Kathy Compton of San Diego.

“I don’t know where the bodies are, but I just would like to know where my friends are,” Compton said in a television interview late Friday in San Quintin, Mexico. “ . . . And if my friends are watching, I love ‘em and I’m sorry it happened and I would have helped some more if I could have.”

Crying, Compton added: “But I couldn’t help anybody else. The Lord saved me and nobody else.”

At dusk Friday, the Coast Guard called off its search of the 300-square-mile area off the Mexican coast where the 57-foot boat, the Fish-n-Fool, went down Thursday afternoon 150 miles south-southeast of San Diego. The search for survivors was not expected to resume unless warranted by new information.

“We’ve determined that the chances of survival based on these particular conditions are very slim,” Coast Guard Capt. David Andrews said. He said ships and aircraft had combed the area and it seemed unlikely that any more survivors would be found.

Neither Andrews nor other Coast Guard officers could remember a shipwreck of similar magnitude in the enormously popular sportfishing waters off Baja California.

“This is unusual in the number of fatalities we’ve seen,” said Andrews, speaking in the crowded operations center of the Coast Guard air station in San Diego. “ . . . I would certainly say it’s one of the most severe boating accidents we’ve had.”

Just one body, that of 40-year-old George M. Stinson of Orange, had been recovered late Friday. Coast Guard searchers in a helicopter spotted the body Friday morning floating in the general area where the Fish-n-Fool went down. Stinson’s body was being returned to San Diego on a Coast Guard patrol vessel that had been used in the search.

According to Sims and friends of the boat’s skipper, Gary LaMont of Spring Valley, the three crew members and nine passengers had set off from Point Loma late Tuesday for four days of yellowtail fishing in the rich waters around San Martin.

The trip was a gift among friends, not a charter, said Phil Lobred, an operator of H&M; Landing, where the Fish-n-Fool was based. The passengers ranged from Sims, a self-employed tile contractor, to a 64-year-old man from Huntington Beach.

“Gary is one of the most experienced skippers in the fleet,” Lobred said Friday. Since 1957, LaMont had worked on sportfishing boats, skippered oil crew boats, run long-range fishing expeditions and served for four years on a large research vessel traveling to Alaska, South Africa and the western Pacific.

But shortly after noon Thursday, about five miles south of San Martin Island, the boat was struck by a large wave and capsized, according to the two survivors’ accounts.

“All of a sudden, we saw this wall of water coming,” Compton, the boat’s second officer, told San Diego television station KFMB. “You couldn’t even see the sky above it. It kept coming and coming. It was at least 20 feet (high), and I remember hanging on the poles that go down to the bunk room.

“And I hung on . . . and the boat rolled and rolled and rolled. Then I looked up and I saw (passenger) Kent (Springman of Riverside). . . . I said, ‘Kent, Kent, grab wood, it floats!’

“He had a gash out of his head, with no hair even, probably this big,” she said, holding her finger three inches apart. “And he was bleeding pretty profusely.

“And he hung on and I helped him and helped him and helped him . . . then he slid down . . . and he’d come back up, and his eyes would roll back and he was in shock.”

The boat sank within minutes, Compton said.

Sims told Coast Guard investigators that the wave appeared to have hurled the wood and fiberglass boat against some partly submerged rocks. Though the sea was relatively calm in the area, Sims told the Coast Guard that there was surf in the area because of the rocks.

A Coast Guard aircraft on routine patrol Thursday picked up an electronic distress signal about 3:30 p.m. The Coast Guard dispatched another aircraft to begin searching the area. The Fish-n-Fool was found at 5:40 p.m. with just its bow sticking out of the water.

Nearby, the searchers spotted the boat’s four life rafts, bound together, and Compton was sitting in one of them. A helicopter, dispatched from San Diego, rescued Compton at 8:20 p.m. and brought her ashore to the town of San Quintin, where townspeople arranged for a doctor.

By then, the seas and winds were calm, Coast Guard officers said. The area was littered with many of the 30 life preservers kept aboard the boat, leading Coast Guard officials to “suspect that the people didn’t have a chance to put them on.”

About midnight Thursday, word began to trickle home.

In Riverside, Shirley Pfost received a call from a night-shift officer with the San Diego Harbor Patrol asking questions she was unable to answer about who had gone fishing with her 52-year-old husband, Max. Three hours later, Roberta Sims called.

“I asked, ‘Was it the boat?’ ” Mrs. Pfost recalled Friday. “She said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Pfost said Jim Sims had been asking her husband, an insurance agent in San Bernardino, since December whether he wanted to join the fishing trip. It was Max Pfost’s second deep-sea fishing trip ever, she said. “He could swim . . . (but) it wasn’t his forte.”

Also aboard the Fish-n-Fool was Steve Rhoads of Costa Mesa, a mechanic, avid fisherman and general outdoorsman. “A guy who used to jet ski, go hunting and motorcycling on weekends,” said his roommate, Mark Jones. “He was very athletic and very tough.”

At Christmas, Rhoads had showed off his new prized possessions--two new, custom-built, deep-sea rods and reels. He immediately had coined them “tuna sticks,” Jones recalled. “He loved fishing.”

Back in Riverside, Penny Manson spoke with her brother, Jim Sims, upon his return Friday morning. Fighting back tears, she recalled: “I talked to him at 10 a.m. and he told me, ‘They were all gone.’ ”

Late Friday night, another sportfishing boat from the marina where LaMont kept his boat returned from a fruitless search of its own in the waters off San Martin. A friend said the searchers from the Blue Horizon had gone home, defeated.

The Coast Guard intends to conduct a formal investigation into the incident, as it does in all accidents at sea involving loss of life, said Lt. Debra Harbaugh. That investigation is to begin with detailed questioning of the two survivors of the wreck.

Still missing late Friday were Lamont, in his early 40s; Springman, 37; Pfost; Rhoads, 25; Paxton, age unknown, of Riverside; Baldwin, 64, of Huntington Beach; Scott Milliron, 20, of Lakeside; Timothy York, 25, of Huntington Beach, and Terry Milam, 39, of Norco.

Times staff writers Eric Malnic, Kathie Bozanich, Louis Sahagun, Barry M. Horstman and David Reyes contributed to this story.