Firm Hopes to Retrieve Capsized Boat

A Balboa marine salvage company has been granted conditional title to the capsized racing boat, Pandemonium, which is believed to be floating upside down about 800 miles from Los Angeles and drifting toward Hawaii.

The condition is the company has to go get it.

“That’s no big deal,” said Gary Hill, operator of Hill’s Marine Service, which has a 77-foot seagoing tug.

Pandemonium was sighted by a freighter about a month ago, 700 miles southwest of where it flipped over last August when its keel fell off on the way back to San Francisco from Honolulu after the Transpac race. The five-person crew was rescued that night.

The boat’s owner, Desmond McCallum of Los Altos, has received a $335,000 settlement from an insurance company, which now owns the boat but may turn it over to Hill.

Stan Gibson, attorney for the San Francisco insurance company, said: “We’re going to work out a deal with him where he could take title to it, as long as we got the keel section and the keel bolts. We’re mainly interested in the evidence.”

Gibson would hope to prove that the design, construction or installation of the keel was faulty.

“My job is to see if we can get that money back from somebody,” he said.

Hill was unable to go after Pandemonium last month when Newport Bay was closed because of the American Trader oil spill for 10 days. Now, he says, because the derelict is drifting three to four miles a day, its position is too uncertain, so he’s waiting for somebody to spot it again.

“There’s a little bit of money the insurance company is willing to pay me to go get it,” Hill said. “They really want those keel bolts. And we think there’s a value for the boat.

“It’s a gamble, but the way the boat flipped over and the way it’s floating, we visualize that it’s floating like a bubble, barely above the surface (and) isn’t getting tossed. We’re assuming that the mast is still in it and the hull is still good. The engine is junk, and if the mast is junk, that’s no big deal, but there’s some value to the boat.”