Inquiry Fails to Solve Mystery of Missing Trawler

Coast Guard officials Friday closed a two-year investigation into the disappearance of a commercial shrimp trawler and its seven crew members without offering any conclusion about the boat’s fate.

In a three-page report, Lt. Cmdr. Peter Rennard, who headed the investigation for the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Office in Long Beach, said after two years of extensive search, they did not find any evidence revealing what happened to the trawler Vil Vana in April, 1993.

“I feel that we did everything we could to locate the vessel. We followed every clue that we had, we spent a lot of money,” Rennard said in an interview. “We did have a strong willingness to find the answers, but after two years we concluded that we had found all the answers we would ever find.”

That did not satisfy La Conchita resident Norma Watkins, whose son, Donnie Watkins, 41, was one of the crewmen on the Vil Vana.

“I’m very disappointed. We don’t know any more now than we did when it happened,” Watkins said. “I want to know what happened to my son. What they found does not satisfy me.”

The 41-foot trawler left Ventura Harbor at 4:30 a.m. on April 9, 1993, setting a course for the shrimp bed off Santa Cruz Island, and was never seen again.

Witnesses saw seven people aboard the vessel, and one was never identified. Officials were never able to find any bodies or the vessel.

The mystery surrounding the trawler’s disappearance has led the crew’s families and friends to speculate on possible scenarios: everything from a government conspiracy to a plot to kill some of the crew members, who had recently immigrated to the United States.

“I can’t accept that a boat with seven people just disappeared like that,” Watkins said. “I think there is much more to it than we’re being told.”

But Rennard said while disappearances such as the Vil Vana’s are unusual, they do happen.

The families also complained that it took too long for the Coast Guard to produce a report and finish its investigation. But Rennard said the delay occurred because investigators wanted to follow every clue to the boat’s whereabouts.

The Coast Guard spent more than $20,000 over the past 28 months investigating what happened to the fishing vessel and its crew members, Rennard said.

On the afternoon the trawler disappeared, satellites began picking up distress signals, and at about 9 p.m. a helicopter search turned up a small amount of debris 1 1/2 miles north of the islands. But despite an intense 42-hour search, no boat and no bodies were ever found.

Investigators believe the boat was unstable because 3,000 pounds of stone ballast had been removed by the Vil Vana’s owners to make room for saltwater tanks in the hold.

The Coast Guard also eliminated the possibility that the trawler had been either struck or swamped by one of the deep-draft vessels that ply the Santa Barbara Channel shipping lanes.

The mystery seemed close to resolution in January when marine researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara located what they believed was the wreck while they were attempting to recover a valuable research instrument snagged on the bottom.

But what they brought to the surface was 30 shrimp traps and two collapsed fenders marked with the name Vil Vana.