3 Drown After Waves Split Open Boat’s Hull

Three men drowned off Anacapa Island Sunday after their fishing boat’s wooden hull was split open by the force of 15-foot waves, authorities said.

A U.S. Coast Guard rescue team plucked all six passengers from the chilly waters, but only three survived. The rescue was complicated by high winds and pitching seas that snapped towlines and nearly drove a Coast Guard boat into Anacapa’s rocky shoreline.

“All I could think of was my kids,” said survivor Derrick E. Heller, who spent an hour in the turbulent waters of Santa Barbara Channel.

The Ventura County coroner’s office identified two of the dead as Ronald Bailey, 50, and his nephew, Thomas Lee Moyd, 33, both of Oxnard. The third victim was the boat’s owner, Billy Joe Halfacre, 62, of Culver City.

The preliminary cause of death for all three men was listed as drowning, with severe hypothermia a contributing factor, said Deputy County Coroner Craig Stevens.

The six-member party departed from the Channel Islands Harbor at 8:30 a.m. Sunday to fish for halibut off Anacapa Island, Heller said. The harbor in Oxnard was the home dock of the 30-foot boat, the Galliano.

As they departed, swells were only two to three feet high, Heller said. But as they neared the halfway mark of the 12-mile voyage to their fishing grounds, the swells grew to 12 feet or higher.

“It started really hammering us, so we tried to head to the island,” said Heller, the manager of a farming supply company.

But the force of the boat smacking the water as it rode over the crest of each wave eventually ripped it to pieces, said survivor Ron Scott, 33, of Venice. About three miles off Anacapa, he said, “the hull banged the water so hard it split open, and we were down in less than five minutes.”

“I’ve been on the boat a couple hundred times,” added Scott, a garage-door builder. “I guess the old boy just died.”

Coast Guard Petty Officer Ray Manacio was in the radio room at the Channel Islands Harbor station when the distress call came in at 11:18 a.m. “The last transmission I heard was ‘We’re going down! We’re going down!’ ” he said.

Heller said everyone on board anticipated trouble and was wearing life jackets. But Moyd removed his for an unknown reason and held onto the boat as it capsized and began to sink, he said.

Heller said the group urged Moyd to join them as they huddled together in the water, clutching a flotation mattress. But he said Moyd ignored their pleas.

The five were in the water when the boat flipped over, said Heller, who last saw Moyd clinging to the capsized hull.

Scott said the five men held firmly to the mattress for about 40 minutes before it became waterlogged and lost buoyancy. All five men let go at the same time, Scott said. “It became too hard to keep together, and no one had the strength to hold hands.”

Heller said he and the others knew Bailey and Halfacre were having difficulty staying afloat, but “it got so choppy and we got so spread out, there was nothing we could do.”

It was about that time that a Coast Guard helicopter from Los Angeles arrived, followed by the Coast Guard cutter Point Judith from Channel Islands Harbor.

“It was a beautiful sight seeing that big old boat coming over the waves,” Scott said.

Lt. Thomas A. Greger, the cutter’s commander, said conditions in the channel were the roughest he had ever seen, with swells reaching 15 feet high.

“When we got there, it had already sunk. There were only pieces floating around,” Greger said. “It looked like it took a wave to the bow, the bow disintegrated and it went down.”

Rescue team members found all six men floating within 600 yards of each other, Greger said, but not without considerable difficulty.

Initially, Greger launched a 13-foot, inflatable craft from his 82-foot cutter to retrieve the victims. But the rescue boat lost its engine after retrieving Heller, Scott and Halfacre, who apparently died in the water. Swift currents swept the small boat toward Anacapa’s rocky coastline.

Greger said that as the disabled boat drifted to within 20 yards of the rocks, the helicopter dropped a towline and pulled it 50 yards farther out to sea before the towline snapped.

The cutter used a shot-line gun to get a second towrope to the disabled boat, which was again approaching the rocks. “They couldn’t even pull anymore because they were getting so tired,” Greger said. The second line snapped as well.

Meanwhile, the helicopter’s pilot tried unsuccessfully to use the force of the wind from his spinning blades to push the boat out of harm’s way. Eventually, a second Coast Guard rescue boat came alongside the boat and towed it to calmer waters on the opposite side of the island. There, the two survivors were taken aboard the cutter along with Halfacre’s body.

Meanwhile, the cutter had retrieved the three other passengers. They were survivor Ernest Hanson and the bodies of Moyd and his uncle, Bailey, who showed signs of life but no pulse, Greger said.

“The helo dropped me a paramedic and they jolted him” to try to restore his heartbeat, Greger said. Bailey was flown to St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, where he was pronounced dead at 4:11 p.m., Stevens said. “They worked on him like crazy but they never got anything out of him.”

Stevens said Hanson, 45, of Port Hueneme, was flown by a second helicopter to St. Johns, where he was treated for mild hypothermia and released.

Times staff writer Vivian Louie contributed to this report.