Dedicated Outdoorsmen With ‘Well-Spent’ Lives : Friends Eulogize 10 Lost in Boating Accident

Ten California men, presumed drowned when a fishing boat was overturned Feb. 5 off Baja by a huge wave, were eulogized Saturday as dedicated outdoorsmen who “loved to hunt, loved to fish and loved to have a good time.”

The Rev. Lee Leeder, standing amid 10 bouquets of flowers, asked the nearly 1,000 people who attended a memorial service for the men at South Coast Community Church in Irvine to see the gathering as “a time of celebration” for the lives the men had led.

Only the body of George Marius Stinson, 41, of Orange, was recovered after the 57-foot Fish-n-Fool went down about 150 miles southeast of San Diego, where the boat had been based. The nine missing men are Kenneth T. Baldwin, 65, of Huntington Beach; Gary Arthur Lamont, 44, the captain, of Spring Valley; Terry Drake Milam, 37, of Norco; Scott Milliron, 21, of Lakeside; Max G. Pfost, 52, of Riverside; Steven Michael Rhoads, 26, of Hawthorne; Kent Roger Springman, 37, of Chino; Robert Scott (Rusty) Paxton, 40, of La Sierra, and Timothy Paul York, 24, of Huntington Beach.

Only two survived the wreck of the $200,000 plywood and fiberglass craft: Jim Sims of Riverside and Cathy Compton of San Diego.

Sims, 29, joined a score of family members and friends addressing the gathering. He said Lamont “was a fine skipper” and that “no one was 100% responsible” for the deaths of the men.

“My house, my heart are open to all of you,” Sims said.

Divers Thursday found the wreckage of the boat in 170 feet of water near San Martin Island, but no bodies were found.

Sims discounted the possibility of salvaging the Fish-n-Fool.

“I don’t think raising that wreckage will tell you anything,” he said after the service.

Ralph Roberts spoke of his nephew, Steven Rhoads, in the present tense, he said, “because we are still hoping that he is just late coming home,” as he had been so often.

But Roberts also asked “why nobody came to their aid within the six hours that we believe they could be recovered from the sea.” Roberts said “there should be a better safety system established for alerting people in the area when accidents occur, so that a timely response can be made to a call for help.”

The boat went down at 12:30 p.m. in Mexican waters, and an electronic distress signal from the boat was picked up at 3:30 p.m. by the U.S. Coast Guard, which dispatched a small airplane to search the area. But Sims said he saw no helicopters until he was standing on the beach, seven hours after the boat sank.

“Where were they?” Sims asked. “Where was the Coast Guard?”

The Rev. Tim Timmons, pastor of South Coast Community, urged family and friends of the men to “take advantage of everything you can hold on to, to go on” and “go on wisely” with the rest of their lives. He also told them to examine “what it means to have a well-spent life,” as those being memorialized had.

“They made a mark in their world,” he said. “Take advantage of this crisis and use it to spend your life more wisely.”

Several of the songs and poems made reference to the sea, the water and the weather.

A soloist sang “When You Walk Though a Storm,” which urges the listeners to continue “though your dreams be tossed and blown.” Later a guitarist, standing in the rear of the auditorium, sang “Sunshine on My Shoulder,” including the line “sunshine on the water looks so lovely.”

Gary Mullen and Mike Crawford, close friends of Gary Lamont, read the poem, “Song of the Sea,” by San Francisco poet Robert Sexton:

I go to the sea

for there, at peace ,

my soul converges

with its source

and turns its touch

from earthly care

and feels

the pulse of God