Friends Fear Foul Play in Disappearance of Doctor, Boat : Search: Flyers are distributed at Balboa Peninsula, where plastic surgeon was last seen before he vanished at sea a week ago. Scant clues leave a mystery.

Like any dutiful husband, Robert Axelrod left a note for his wife: He was headed down to Newport to check out his boat; he would meet her that evening for dinner at a friend’s house.

With that, the 43-year-old plastic surgeon vanished.

Axelrod traveled Jan. 25 from his Newhall home to Newport Harbor, where he boarded his powerboat, which had been gathering winter cobwebs, and headed out for a short shakedown run. He never returned.

An extensive, three-day search by the Coast Guard, covering waters from Mexico to Oxnard, turned up only an inflatable life raft that the doctor had kept stowed on his 30-foot powerboat, Aimee.

With the search now suspended and police investigators left scratching their heads, friends and family of the Newhall physician gathered Saturday in Newport Beach in hope of lending a hand.

A few relatives and several dozen friends fanned out across the beaches and streets of Balboa Peninsula and combed the maze of docks lining the shores of the harbor to distribute flyers and canvass the community for clues.

They hope that the effort will turn up someone who might have seen the Aimee when Axelrod motored out to sea in the early afternoon of Jan. 25.

But as the case drags on, friends feel increasingly certain that Axelrod--who maintained practices in Newport Beach and the San Fernando Valley community of Mission Hills--fell victim to a hijacking or other foul play.

“Basically, it continues to be a total curiosity,” said David Pincus, a lifelong friend of Axelrod’s and one of the organizers of Saturday’s effort. “It doesn’t add up to any of us.”

Friends say Axelrod and his wife, Julie, were not having marital problems. There were no financial worries.

This was a man who had everything. His practice was flourishing. His three-page resume outlines an eminent medical career replete with lofty accomplishments as a physician and teacher, as well many published research papers.

The doctor was training for the L.A. Marathon and was looking forward to an upcoming scuba trip with friends. He was supposed to hit a Super Bowl party the next day.

“I haven’t found anyone who has a bad word to say about Dr. Axelrod,” said Bill Morrison, a private investigator hired by the family. “It’s just very puzzling. That’s why we’re down here today, just to canvass and talk to people.

“We’re trying to locate boaters or anyone else who might have been on the beach last Saturday who might have seen something, even just what direction he was headed in.”

Charles Lincoln, a fellow physician and friend, said he went running with Axelrod the morning of the disappearance. Everything seemed perfectly normal, Lincoln recalled. They ran more than seven miles in the hills near their homes, trading “stupid jokes” most of the way.

Axelrod also showed off the family’s 6-month-old Labrador retriever and pointed out a new brick walkway he had built, Lincoln recalled.

Axelrod was supposed to return by 6:30 p.m. for dinner at Lincoln’s home. When he did not show up right away, the Lincolns and Julie Axelrod joked that the doctor was probably purposely running late so he could avoid cutting up the vegetables. By 8 p.m., jokes were replaced by worry. They called the California Highway Patrol. It turned up nothing.

When the surgeon had not shown up by 9:30 p.m. or so, his frantic wife and Lincoln returned to the Axelrod house to find a phone number for a boat owner who has the berth next to the Aimee. The boater said he had helped Axelrod work on the powerboat’s batteries, then the doctor decided to take the Aimee out for a quick, one-hour cruise.

They called the Coast Guard, which launched a search of local waters. During the next three days, the Coast Guard scoured nearly 5,000 square miles of ocean. Searchers found only the inflatable craft.

For a time, friends and investigators wondered whether the Aimee, named after Axelrod’s daughter, might have exploded suddenly and violently, sinking so fast that not a trace was left.

But the weather was clear that day and the seas calm. Any explosion and fire could have been seen or heard for miles around.

Friends also reason that the inflatable craft, which was always stored below deck, would surely have been tattered or scorched.

Even more curious, that craft was discovered with one of Axelrod’s two identification placards attached to it. He never put the removable placards on the little craft unless it was going in the water, friends figure, so in a sudden accident Axelrod certainly would not have bothered putting the placards on.

“If that boat sank, there would have been too many things that would have floated,” suggested Andy Stewart, a family friend who lived near Axelrod and often went boating with the doctor. “There are two cushions in the back, for instance, that would have popped up like a cork. Something else happened.”

Perhaps most perplexing of all was the location where the inflatable was found, said Morrison, the private investigator. Although the ocean current heads south, he said, the craft was found floating upside down Jan. 26 near Santa Catalina Island, where the current would not have taken it.

“It really just doesn’t make sense,” said Marc Jacoby, a certified financial planner and scuba buddy of Axelrod’s. “He is just too accomplished an individual all the way around for an accident to happen. . . . He made checklists for his checklists.”

What Jacoby and other friends fear is that Axelrod may have been the victim of piracy. His powerboat is a high-speed, long-range type most common to Florida waters. Drug smugglers, they theorize, might have set up a ruse to lure Axelrod close so they could commandeer his craft.

With its big gas tanks and powerful engines, the boat could have been in Mexican waters by the time the Coast Guard even began to search. Moreover, Coast Guard officials in Mexico were drawn into the case only in recent days, these friends said.

As the mystery drags on, Axelrod’s friends try not to ponder what fate might have befallen the doctor.

“We’re definitely still holding out hope,” Jacoby said. “The most difficult thing for all of us is the uncertainty, the unknown. It’s almost easier to deal with a dead body than this.”