Abandoned Boat Goes With Flow : Sailing: Six months after capsizing, the Pandemonium is spotted on its way to Hawaii.

Pandemonium--upside down, six months abandoned and all but forgotten--has been found.

The 66-foot sailboat was sighted by a freighter last week halfway between Los Angeles and Hawaii, bobbing toward the islands. It was about 700 miles from where it flipped on Aug. 4, 300 miles off San Francisco.

The four-year-old boat competed in the Transpacific Yacht Race from Pt. Fermin to Honolulu last July. A crew of five was ferrying it back to its home port of San Francisco when, without warning, its keel fell off and it slowly rolled over, with the 70-foot mast intact and sails attached.

The crew scrambled first onto the hull and then into two inflated rafts. They were rescued late that night by a freighter after a Singapore Airlines flight picked up their distress signal.

“It’s kind of fascinating that the thing’s still afloat,” said Desmond McCallum, the Los Altos doctor who leased the boat to another sailor for the race.

But McCallum wasn’t sure whether its sighting was good news or bad news.

“I’m not sure whose boat it is anymore,” he said.

He might prefer that it belong to somebody else. Commercial Union, the San Francisco firm that insured the boat, paid a claim of $280,000 about a month after the incident.

“But it’s still his boat,” said Stan Gibson, an attorney representing the firm. “When the underwriters paid him, they don’t automatically own it. If somebody goes out there and brings it in, they would be entitled to a portion of the value of what they saved. It’s not a fixed value.”

McCallum said: “The amazing thing is that nobody could find it before now. Right after it (capsized), two flights went out to look for it, although at the time the cloud cover was low--about 500 feet--and it was windy with a lot of whitecaps.”

With its white hull, the upside-down boat would be difficult to find in a sea of whitecaps. But the sea was calm and solid blue last Wednesday when the Matson Navigation Co.’s Maui, skippered by Capt. Scott Abrams, spotted it only four miles south of the Great Circle route shipping lane followed by vessels between Los Angeles and Hawaii.

Abrams noted that the rudder was intact and the bare keel bolts still protruding, as the crew had described, and radioed Capt. Robert Buell, aboard the Matson ship Lurline two days behind. Buell, however, was unable to find the Pandemonium.

Abrams and Buell took special interest in the boat because they are veteran Transpac sailors. Abrams’ grandfather was a founder of the biennial event.

“This is the route we take every week.” Buell said. “We’ll be looking for it on the way back.”

After the boat was abandoned, general speculation was that it would drift onto a beach in Mexico, if it stayed afloat long enough.

But Buell said Monday from Honolulu: “The currents are more westerly than we thought. The pilot chart shows these currents pushing it directly for the Hawaiian Islands.”

At its current pace of three to four miles a day, it would reach or pass the islands in 250 to 300 days.

“I would imagine once the insurance company gets wind of this, they may start looking for it,” Buell said.

Gibson said: “I’d just assumed it was a goner. Now I’m very interested in looking at those keel bolts.”

He would like to determine why the keel fell off. The boat was built in Newport Beach, but the keel was made in Mexico and installed in Long Beach.

McCallum said: “I don’t know if anybody’s going to go and try to drag a boat 1,200 miles (to port). We had a salvage group already to go and recover it if we could sight it again. Six months later, I don’t know. Anything that’s metallic is probably gone. And it’s hard to know what the deck is like. Maybe the whole thing is OK.”

Marshall Duffield Jr. of Duffield Marine, which supervised the construction in Newport Beach, said: “I never heard of any boat surviving six months at sea upside down with the mast up and the sails up.

“It has a one-inch-thick balsa-core hull. I took a one-foot-square section of the hull and threw it in a tub of water, and it floats . . . floats great. Most of the hull has enough core in it that it’s probably contributing to the flotation.

“(But) I have visions of the (700-pound) motor hanging upside down for six months and falling out of the mounts and crashing through the deck. It’s probably an eerie-looking thing.”

It seems unlikely that the boat could be salvaged at its present location.

“It’s probably so full of water that if you tried to tow it, it would rip it apart,” McCallum said. “The divers we had organized were going to try to put air bags inside of it and try to saw off the mast and get the thing to right itself so they could tow it like a canoe.

“I suppose in another six months it might make it to Hawaii, and as it gets close it probably makes sense to try and salvage it.”