2 Vietnamese Refugee Fishermen Found Dead Aboard Drifting Boat

When Vietnamese refugee Luong Van Vo and a partner scraped together enough money to refurbish a 41-foot fishing boat earlier this year, Vo decided to call it the Gold Rose.

“I think gold was for prosperity and rose was for happiness,” the partner, Thach Nguyen said Wednesday. “He’d been working as a fisherman for others since he came here in 1979. This was his first chance to have a boat of his own.”

But the dream died.

Coast Guard officials said Wednesday that the bodies of Vo and a crewman were discovered aboard the Gold Rose when it was found drifting in heavy seas about 65 miles southwest of Los Angeles.

The officials said it appeared that Vo and Hong Van Le, a friend and fellow immigrant, were asphyxiated Monday night or Tuesday morning--possibly by carbon monoxide from the boat’s main engine, which was in the same cabin in which they had bedded down for the night.

“When I went in through the cabin door, I found them both inside,” said Petty Officer 3rd Class Deric R. Wright, first member of the Coast Guard rescue team to board the boat.

“It looked like they both had run out of air,” he said. “One of them was in his bed. The other one looked like he’d tried to crawl to the door to get air, but he just couldn’t make it.”

Le’s wife, Tam; his daughters, Thuy, 12, Trinh, 9 and Phuong, 7, and his 5-year-old son, John, clung to one another sobbing as the boat--the men’s bodies still aboard--was towed into a Coast Guard slip on Terminal Island Wednesday afternoon.

Friends said the 33-year-old Le and his family lived in Garden Grove. So did Vo, a 30-year-old bachelor.

FBI agents, Coast Guard personnel and deputies from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office began a painstaking investigation of the vessel Wednesday afternoon in an attempt to determine conclusively how the two men died.

Nguyen, 55, said he and Vo had pooled about $47,000 to refurbish the boat--”we had a hull and an engine when we started.” Nguyen said that after a maiden fishing voyage a few weeks ago--”we didn’t make any money on that one”--the Gold Rose set out from Terminal Island’s Fish Harbor on June 2 for a second try.

In addition to Vo and Le, the crew included a third man--Phuoc Nguyen, 30, a student at Mesa College in San Diego who had signed on for a summer job. Like Le, Phuoc Nguyen, who is not related to Thac Nguyen, had never worked as a fisherman before.

The Gold Rose joined up with another, larger fishing boat, the Saint-Ann, and the two vessels went in search of rock cod in the waters southwest of San Nicolas Island, according to Hoang Ha, a crewman from the Saint-Ann.

“We go together so we can help each other,” Ha said. “If we get separated, we stay in touch with the radio.”

By Monday night, the seas were getting rough and Phuoc Nguyen was getting seasick. His companions decided he’d probably feel better on the larger boat, so after the Gold Rose crew paid a dinner visit to the Saint-Ann, he stayed on board. Vo and Le returned to the Gold Rose, and the smaller boat chugged off into the night.

Ha said he made routine contact with the Gold Rose Monday night, but when he tried again Tuesday morning, he couldn’t raise her.

He said the Saint-Ann found the smaller boat at about 9 a.m. Tuesday, but saw no one on deck and couldn’t raise the Gold Rose on the radio. He said that because they were in an area where radio reception is poor, the men aboard the Saint-Ann assumed that was why they couldn’t raise the Gold Rose and that Vo and Le were simply asleep.

But Ha said that when the Saint-Ann returned several hours later to find the Gold Rose still adrift and silent--despite repeated yelling and hurling a piece of equipment across to the deck of the smaller boat that landed with a loud clatter--he became concerned.

Ha said seas were too rough to board the other boat, so the Saint-Ann sailed about 11 miles to San Nicolas Island, where a Navy security detachment radioed the Coast Guard at 4:45 p.m.

Coast Guard officials said the 82-foot patrol boat Point Camden responded to the call, finding and boarding the Gold Rose at about 7:45 p.m. A few minutes later, the men aboard the Saint-Ann learned what had happened to their friends.

“I remembered afterward that every time we went to sleep (on the Gold Rose), I smelled the engine,” Phuoc Nguyen said. “Maybe that was what made me sick, I don’t know.

“I feel now I was very lucky.”