Fatal Voyage : It’s been 6 months since the commercial trawler Vil Vana and its even crewmen vanished in waters off Santa Cruz Island. But unanswered questions still haunt the families left behind.

NORMA WATKINS talks about her 11-year-old granddaughter, who has been prone to sleepless nights and dark moods ever since the child’s father was lost at sea last year. One evening recently, Watkins says, the family was watching a TV movie about ‘30s aviator Amelia Earhart when the youngster made a haunting connection.

“Amelia Earhart just disappears,” Watkins says, “and my granddaughter goes, ‘That’s just like . . . . ‘ But she couldn’t make herself say it. Her grandfather finally said, ‘Just like Dad.’ ”

Nearly 16 months have passed since the commercial trawler Vil Vana and seven crewmen vanished just north of Santa Cruz Island. While families of the victims are still tormented by the mysterious and seemingly implausible event--one of the worst maritime disasters in Ventura County history--they are also exasperated and angry with the U.S. Coast Guard, which has neither solved the mystery nor finished its official report on the investigation.

“We should have had answers by now,” says Laura Huffman, the mother of the three children of crewman Donnie Watkins.

Without an official report, the tragedy lacks finality for relatives, preventing them from letting go. “For all I know,” Norma Watkins says, “my son is alive.”

And without definitive answers, rumors and imaginations run wild. How could a 41-foot wooden trawler and everyone on board just vanish in the middle of Santa Barbara Channel? Conjecture around the docks ranges from drug snuff to UFOs.

SPECULATION

Norma and Don Watkins speculate that the Vil Vana was sunk in a collision with the U.S. Navy’s black stealth ship, the 160-foot Sea Shadow, a scenario straight out of a Tom Clancy novel but with a touch of credibility: The Sea Shadow just happened to be at Santa Cruz Island that day, the Navy confirms.

The drawn-out official report and the Sea Shadow’s presence fuels the conspiracy theories. “Something big-time happened on that ocean,” Norma Watkins says, sitting under a shade tree outside her La Conchita trailer.

“I don’t know . . . with that report taking so long . . . The whole thing is fishy.”

But the Coast Guard sees thoroughness behind its lengthy investigation--after all, Amelia Earhart’s disappearance hasn’t been solved in 57 years. While most fatality reports usually take only weeks to complete, running just a few pages, the Vil Vana report has grown to 60 pages and “is the largest investigation file I’ve ever seen in my two years here,” says Lt. Commander Adeste Fuentes, who is in charge of the investigation for the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Office in Long Beach.

The Coast Guard investigation has been stymied by a lack of hard evidence and a total absence of eyewitnesses. But next of kin, Fuentes says, want intrigue and revelation, where none exists. “If you’re looking for answers,” he says, “the answer is, ‘We don’t know (what happened).’ ”

This much is known: The blue-and-white Vil Vana was last seen at 4:30 a.m. on April 9, 1993, easing away from E dock at Ventura Harbor Village Marina and setting a course for the shrimp beds off Santa Cruz Island. That afternoon, satellites began picking up distress signals.

At 8:43 p.m., the pilot of a search helicopter spotted an emergency strobe light amid a small debris field floating 1 1/2 miles north of the island, off an area called Chinese Harbor. But no boat and no bodies were ever discovered.

The Coast Guard turned up “nothing significant” during its investigation, but Fuentes has been able to piece together several parts of the puzzle. A revised copy of the nearly completed official report, reviewed by The Times, rules out collisions, fires or any scenario evoking the Bermuda Triangle.

What probably happened? “All evidence points to the Vil Vana capsizing and sinking quickly without prior warning,” Fuentes says.

Fuentes’ own scenario will be an addendum to the final report, which is expected by the fall. He believes the Vil Vana was unstable in the water because of changes made to the boat before its last voyage. He believes pilot error may have caused the boat to veer sideways to a wave; broadsided by waves, the trawler tipped to one side, took on water and rolled over.

Fuentes thinks the vessel went down with all seven men trapped inside, some in the hold, some in the pilot’s cabin, some in the work area, which was enclosed by a 2-foot-by-4-foot lattice cage running from the pilot’s cabin to the transom.

Rollover “may have been caused by a deadly combination of two or three factors,” Fuentes says.

But relatives of the victims refuse to accept rollover as the reason their men didn’t come back. “That doesn’t satisfy me,” says Norma Watkins, frowning and lighting a cigarette. “It’s hard to believe not one of those men was able to get off that boat and make it to the island. Even if they all drowned, not one body popped up. Bodies float.”

Unfortunately, the truth now sits at the bottom of Santa Barbara Channel. Recovery of the hull--which Fuentes believes lies beneath 600 feet of water--could clear up several key questions, including the fate of the victims and whether another ship was involved. But the Coast Guard has no plans to find and salvage the Vil Vana.

“It’s not part of our tasking,” Fuentes says, explaining: “The Coast Guard isn’t in the salvage business. If we were, we wouldn’t have any money to do anything else.”

QUESTIONS

The Coast Guard investigation doesn’t resolve many essential questions: If a crewman had the time to manually activate the emergency transmitter, why wasn’t the ship’s radio or cellular phone used to call for help? Why did the transmitter malfunction at the time of the incident but work properly later during a Coast Guard bench test? What time did the accident happen and where? Why were no personal belongings found among the debris? Where are the bodies?

The Coast Guard’s hard evidence is minimal. Investigators traced the origins of the Vil Vana to a back-yard San Pedro boat maker who built the vessel as a net trawler 45 years ago. In December, 1992, it was purchased for $18,000 by a 30-year-old Korean immigrant, Seong Choi of Oxnard. Choi became partners with a fellow Korean, John Kim, 25, of Glendale. According to Fuentes, Choi and Kim “were businessmen trying to be fishermen.”

At the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, Fuentes says, the new owners converted the Vil Vana into a shrimp trawler. The net wheel in the stern and the swordfish plank on the bow, equipment weighing about 1,400 pounds, were removed. To store 200 or 300 shrimp traps, the stern area was rigged with the 2-by-4 cage, known as a hayrack or corral. A hydraulic drum for hoisting traps to the surface was installed on the starboard side of the cage. And, to make room for four 20-cubic-foot saltwater tanks in the hold, the 3,000 pounds of stone ballast were removed.

Did the changes make the boat unstable? Boating experts aren’t sure, but Fuentes believes the tanks may have raised the vessel’s center of gravity, making it prone to tipping.

In February, Choi and Kim sailed the Vil Vana to Ventura Harbor. Instead of leasing a slip, they paid a day rate to avoid paying insurance, which runs about $6,000 a year and would have required a safety inspection, boating experts say.

Choi hired harbor resident Dan Pelton, 33, to provide the fishing expertise and drive the boat, although Choi reportedly often took the helm. Pelton didn’t have a captain’s license, but friends and associates considered him an able, experienced fisherman and skipper.

The Vil Vana initiated its first fishing trips weeks before the accident and went out every day the week of the fateful voyage, hauling in large quantities of spot-fin prawns, fishermen say. Reportedly, Choi and Kim became unpopular around the docks for overfishing the area.

Until the morning of April 9, three of the seven crew members had never been on the Vil Vana. Kim took his 17-year-old nephew to dive for abalone. Pelton asked his friend and longtime sailor, Donnie Watkins, to crew. Watkins, 41, brought along Ben Jordan, 24, also of La Conchita. Jordan had known Watkins since he was 6.

“Ben called me at 3:30 in the morning (April 9) to tell me he decided to go with Donnie instead of going to stay with his girlfriend in Oxnard,” says Jordan’s mother, Barbara.

Like Norma Watkins and Laura Huffman, Barbara Jordan launched her own tenacious investigation of the accident, interviewing Coast Guard officials and harbor locals. She learned that the Vil Vana came in early on April 8 because of trouble with its 150-horsepower diesel engine.

“I talked with people moored next to them and they said (the crew) was doing work on the engine the morning they went out,” Jordan says.

Although Don Watkins calls the Vil Vana “a big lumbering piece of junk,” it was not a shipwreck waiting to happen, says Chuck Connor, a friend of Dan Pelton and a Ventura lobster fishermen who had been aboard the boat once. “It seemed perfectly fine,” he says. “It was a typical older boat, heavy built. But I know Dan Pelton. If that boat wasn’t seaworthy, he wouldn’t have been on it.”

At a top speed of seven or eight knots an hour, the Vil Vana probably needed a good three hours to reach the east end of Santa Cruz Island, about 25 miles from Ventura Harbor. The seas were average--three to five feet with occasional eight- to 10-foot swells--and the winds were normal, increasing later in the afternoon to 15 to 20 knots. Patches of fog were reported, but otherwise the weather was clear, and visibility was 20 miles.

Mike Pelton, Dan’s brother, says the crew planned to set about 300 traps off Chinese Harbor--a task that involved placing open cans of cat food in each trap and lowering a string of traps to the bottom--and pick up about 200 traps a few miles to the west off Painted Cave.

Mike Pelton, who searched the area in boats and also flew over in a hired plane shortly after the accident, says he found the newly set traps at Chinese Harbor, indicating that the Vil Vana was probably still afloat at midmorning. But he does not know the fate of the traps at Painted Cave.

Fuentes, however, doubts the traps exist. “They swept the whole area (during the search) and found nothing, no traps,” Fuentes says.

Originally, the Coast Guard reported the time of the accident at about 5:30 p.m., when a COSPAS / SARSAT satellite received a 121.5 megahertz distress signal from the Vil Vana’s emergency transmitter, the Emergency Positioning Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB for short). But the official report now says a satellite recorded a 121.5 MHz signal from the Vil Vana at 2:58 p.m. In actuality, the Coast Guard now says, it has no idea when the flash point occurred.

“We don’t really know exactly when the EPIRB was activated,” Fuentes says. “It could have been as early as noon. We don’t know.”

The EPIRB malfunction is a critical factor in the Coast Guard’s response time and, possibly, the crewmen’s fate. If the emergency system worked correctly, its 406 MHz signal would have transmitted the ship’s location to within three miles and brought help in one or two hours. But in water temperature of 59 degrees, Vil Vana survivors would not have lasted more than four hours without wet suits, Coast Guard manuals say. The accident probably occurred at least six hours before the helicopter pilot spotted the EPIRB’s strobe.

The failure of the EPIRB only compounds the mystery. Who adjusted it from automatic to manual and why? How did the antenna become bent? Why was the signal detected by some satellites and missed by others? Why did the EPIRB’s 406 MHz signal place its position, at various times, 800 miles off Northern California, 500 northeast of Oahu and 1,500 miles west of Mexico? Why wasn’t its 121.5 MHz signal--receivable by satellite as well as FM radio--picked up by the direction finder at the Channel Islands Harbor Coast Guard Station, which would have launched a rescue boat immediately?

ANSWERS

The answers will probably never be known, but Fuentes believes the EPIRB was damaged in the turmoil and desperation of the rollover. After switching it on manually as the boat quickly filled with water, Fuentes says, a crewman may have freed the basketball-size device by forcing it outside the corral. The EPIRB may have floated under debris for a while, and its submersion, along with a bent antenna, “probably impacted the accuracy of the signal,” Fuentes says.

Fuentes believes the Coast Guard response was by the book. A rescue effort couldn’t begin until satellites began transmitting accurate information to U.S. Mission Control Center computers, he says. Based in Langley, Va., Mission Control receives information from satellites all over the world. The control room is often chaotic, with dozens of distress blips on the screen and no way to automatically determine which is a hoax, a mistake, or real. As many as four confirmations are needed before alerts are dispatched to various rescue agencies.

“For the sake of using Coast Guard resources effectively,” Fuentes says, “we don’t search for signals that disappear. It costs too much.”

At 6:35 p.m., the Coast Guard had enough information to order a helicopter from its air station at Los Angeles International Airport, but the craft didn’t take off until 7:43 p.m.--a normal lag, Fuentes says. By 8:30, the helicopter was honing in on the 121.5 MHz signal. The pilot saw the EPIRB’s strobe a few minutes later and dropped a flare, which illuminated a small debris field, mostly deck fodder from outside the cage. Despite a 42-hour search that covered 2,800 square miles and involved a C-130 transport, two helicopters, three auxiliary aircraft and five ships, no other evidence of the Vil Vana’s existence was found.

Because the Vil Vana was fishing close to shipping lanes in the Santa Barbara Channel, next of kin speculate that it was either sideswiped or swamped by a deep-draft cargo vessel or oil tanker, behemoth ships that might not have seen a small vessel visually or on radar.

“It doesn’t have to be a direct collision,” Mike Pelton says. “The bow wake on those ships can be as high as 20 or 30 feet. Fog comes in from the west, the same direction as those ships. If you don’t watch your radar, a ship could come up on you in a minute and you could get run over in a second.”

But the Coast Guard inspected all seven vessels that sailed through the channel that day, Fuentes says. No evidence of a collision--paint scrapings or dents--was found. All seven captains were interviewed, “but they said they didn’t see any vessel,” Fuentes says. The last large ship passed Santa Cruz Island, headed to Los Angeles about 1:30 p.m. and was in sight of two other southbound deep-draft vessels, Fuentes says.

Fuentes also checked out the possibility that a Navy submarine could have snagged a line and dragged the Vil Vana under. But the Navy told him none of its ships, including subs and the Sea Shadow, was involved in an incident or a collision. The Navy also has issued a statement saying the stealth ship was in its berth on the south side of Santa Cruz Island all day on April 9.

Even if the Vil Vana did roll over, next of kin and others don’t believe it could have sunk with such speed that crewmen were unable to extricate themselves. “Those things don’t go down like a rock,” Chuck Connor says. “It never makes sense that nobody got off. The first thing Dan would have done was get his wet suit on--he was capable of doing that in the water and he was a great swimmer.”

But Fuentes and other boating experts believe the sea can indeed swallow ships with sudden swiftness. “(Next of kin) know their sons and husbands are survivors and it would take more than a vessel rolling over to take their lives,” Fuentes says. “But I’ve seen videos of ships sinking in 30 seconds.” A ship’s descent into the depths creates a vacuum and sucks flotsam down with it, experts say.

Separating fact from fiction will get more difficult as time goes by, making the Vil Vana’s vanishing act even more inscrutable. But there are those who think the disappearance isn’t as mysterious as it appears. The sea is cruel, arbitrary and unfathomable. The unthinkable happens. In 1917, the U.S.S. Cyclops, a 600-foot Navy destroyer, vanished without a trace in the Atlantic.

“Boats have been known to disappear routinely,” says John Johnson, president of Ventura Harbor Boatyard. “No bodies. No nothing. My wife and I have lost friends. We had a friend lost at sea in a steel-hulled fishing boat that rolled over for no apparent reason and sank quickly. These things happen more often than most people realize.”

The Santa Barbara Channel--once referred to in local newspapers as “the graveyard of the Pacific,” can be unexpectedly treacherous--the weather and currents confusing many experienced sailors. In December, 1835, the side-wheel steamer Winfield Scott hit rocks off Anacapa Island and sank, with no fatalities. In February, 1876, the 469-ton iron schooner Kalorama was beached by heavy seas, and broke up at the foot of what is now Kalorama Street in Ventura, again without casualties.

The Vil Vana took seven men to a watery grave, making the accident the county’s worst boating disaster since the Marie, a 40-foot charter engaged in work for the U.S. Department of Defense, exploded off Santa Cruz Island on June 9, 1960, killing seven people. Only two bodies were recovered.

The common notion that bodies float is misleading, experts say. When a body sinks, strong currents often bury it under silt on the ocean floor, entombing it. Bodies not buried will rise slowly to the surface because of gas resulting from decomposition. But bodies rising from a depth of 600 feet would likely be picked clean by lobsters, shrimp, crabs and hagfish, all of which are plentiful off Santa Cruz Island.

“We’ve had other people never surface,” says county Deputy Coroner Mitch Breese. “This happens. They never come up.”

Families have looked to politicians for help in getting answers, but they think they are being stonewalled. “I’m upset with (Elton) Gallegly,” Norma Watkins says, waving a letter from the Republican congressman. “He hasn’t done a damn thing.”

Watkins and Laura Huffman have written several congressmen, sought assistance from the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” and made dozens of calls to the Coast Guard. Norma Watkins doesn’t ever plan to give up. “I’m not going to stop pestering people,” she says.

They also have asked the Navy to find the Vil Vana, but the Navy doesn’t do non-military salvage work, a spokesman says. Private salvage operators charge about $10,000 a day, Fuentes says.

“I’d be happy if I knew in fact the boat was there,” Huffman says, “and if Donnie was there. R.I.P. At least he died the way he wanted to die.”

Huffman, the Watkinses and Barbara Jordan have filed a $5-million negligence lawsuit against John Kim’s wife, whose name appears on the boat’s title. U.S. citizenship is required to buy and use a ship for commercial purposes, so Choi and Kim had the ownership papers signed by Patricia Kim, an American. (Efforts by The Times to reach her were unsuccessful.)

CHANGING LAWS

The Coast Guard has ended its investigation; it’s the writing of the report that’s now delaying completion. Fuentes, who has only been able to work on the report intermittently because of other administrative duties, says he is fine-tuning, making sure he sticks to the facts.

Jammed with diagrams, technical jargon, legalese and military talk, the finished report will go to the Coast Guard commandant’s office in Washington. Fuentes is including recommendations for improving safety in the fishing industry and doesn’t want his credibility undermined by letting guesswork slip into the report.

“I don’t want (Coast Guard officials) saying, ‘He guesses. Why should we listen to his recommendations?’ ” Fuentes says. “It’s going to be really hard to take an incident with no hard evidence and support the recommendations I want to make to headquarters. I want to change laws, so I have to have my act together.”

Fuentes wants to improve training for commercial fishermen, tighten other boating regulations and educate the public not to rely exclusively on EPIRB’s to save their lives. If he accomplishes this, Fuentes hopes to avoid another Vil Vana.

“I know (the mystery) is disheartening to next of kin,” Fuentes says, “but I have a message for them: I’m not letting this go away without action from headquarters.”

Still, Norma Watkins will step from her La Conchita yard and look across the channel every day, her heart still not whole. “It bugs me to see that island,” she says. “It’s so damn close.”

The Story of the Vil Vana

The Vil Vana, a commercial trawler, vanished just north of Santa Cruz Island on April 9, 1993. It was last seen at 4:30 a.m. that day, leaving the E dock at Ventura Harbor Village Marina. That afternoon, satellites picked up distress signals. The Coast Guard has only recovered debris from the boat. Neither the vessel nor the seven men aboard have been found.

1) Shrimp traps found

2) Sonar detects possible wreck

3) Emergency Positioning Radio Beacon and debris found

4) Possible second set of traps

* Seong Choi, 30, of Oxnard, co-owner of the Vil Vana.

* John Kim, 25, of Glendale, co-owner of the Vil Vana.

* William Choi, 17, nephew of John Kim. No relation to Seong Choi.

* Unidentified male crewman, thought to be a Salvadoran immigrant.

Sources: U.S. Coast Guard, families and friends of victims