Wife Keeps Alive Hopes for Victim of Tragedy at Sea

It wasn’t until her granddaughter brought in the Saturday morning paper and screamed, “Grandpa’s name is right here” that Ruth Baldwin fell apart.

She knew her husband, Ken, was aboard the fishing boat that capsized off Baja California under the weight of a 20-foot wave Thursday, but she could not imagine that the 64-year-old World War II paratrooper had not somehow survived.

“I don’t care if he said he saw him go down,” she said, referring to survivor Jim Sims’ account that her husband “was the first to go” after an hour of frantic swimming in the frigid waters. “I haven’t given up hope.”

Of the 12 people on board the 57-foot Fish-N-Fool, only Sims, 29, and crew member Cathy Compton, 38, survived. Compton had stayed afloat on the ship’s lifeboats until Coast Guard aircraft spotted her.

Ruth Baldwin, huddled with her family around the couple’s kitchen table in Huntington Beach on Saturday, replayed the details of the last 24 hours over and over in her mind.

“I kissed Ken goodby on Tuesday afternoon as he left to drive down to San Diego for the fishing trip,” she recalled, explaining that her husband, a senior street inspector for the city’s public work’s department, went on trips of three to five days every year. “He was supposed to be home today.”

The next thing she remembered was hearing a radio report Friday morning. “I was in the bathroom and heard the news about the boat--it was 10 before 7 a.m,” Baldwin recalled. “My daughter heard the same report and called me.”

“We all just sat here and made phone calls whenever we could think of somebody,” said the Baldwins’ daughter, Jennece Distler, describing the anxious hours that followed as they waited for definitive word from the Coast Guard.

Search Is Abandoned

Distler was disappointed that the Coast Guard decided to abandon its search of a 300-square-mile area off San Quintin at dusk Friday after recovering one body, that of George M. Stinson, 40, of Orange.

The towering “rogue wave” that slammed down on the sportfishing boat was described by experts Saturday as a relatively common phenomenon apparently caused when two waves merge and produce a single wave twice as high.

“These are not out of the ordinary, or freak things,” said Dan Atkin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, “and they are not always dangerous. It’s a matter of the conditions--the weather, the currents, the wave frequency--coming together at once.”

Typically, offshore waves tend to cancel each other out and turn into harmless swells, Atkin and others said. But when the frequency of waves increases, overlapping may occur--a process some scientists call “constructive interference”--and a giant wave can be created.

“Some vessels are able to ride these waves out,” U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Michael Parks said. “But if you’re not positioned right--if you’re sideways to the wave, for example--and a wall of water two stories high descends upon you, then you’ve got trouble.”

Disaster at Noon

That, a preliminary investigation suggests, was the scenario that spelled doom for the Fish-N-Fool.

The voyage of the sportfishing craft apparently went smoothly until the wave capsized the boat just after noon Thursday, according to survivors’ accounts. The craft reportedly sank in minutes.

A widely circulated rumor Saturday that apparently began with the family of one of the passengers suggested that the Mexican Navy had rescued six of the passengers, but a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman said the rumor appeared to be based on “miscommunication.”

Coast Guard officials were attempting to contact the commandant of the Mexican Navy in an effort to clear up the mystery.

Meanwhile, the Baldwin family kept their vigil.

“We were going to do so much together next year when we retired,” Mrs. Baldwin said, breaking down in tears. Her mouth quivering, she turned to her daughter and added, “I won’t believe it until I see a body.”

“If he could have arranged his death,” the daughter said, “he may have arranged it to happen this way (while fishing), but I don’t think he’d want all the family to go through all the wondering of ‘Do we give up? Do we hang on?’ ”

In addition to Baldwin, those still missing and presumed dead Saturday were skipper Gary LaMont, in his early 40s; Kent Springman, 37, of Riverside; Max Pfost, 52, of Riverside; Steve Rhoads, 25, of Costa Mesa; Rusty Paxton, age unknown, of Riverside; Scott Milliron, 20, of Lakeside; Timothy York, 25, of Huntington Beach, and Terry Milam, 39, of Norco.

Times staff writer Jenifer Warren in San Diego contributed to this story.