3 Fishermen Die After Spending Hours in Ocean

Three Ventura County men died after spending up to six hours in the Pacific Ocean when their Ventura-based commercial fishing boat sank off San Nicholas Island early Thursday.

The victims were identified by boat owner Moui “Timmy” Duong, 36, of Los Angeles as his brother Tam, 29, and Vietnamese nationals San Nguyen and Tan Le. He said he did not know the ages of the two latter crew members.

Dr. Franklin Pratt, co-director of the Torrance Memorial Medical Center emergency medical unit, where the men were taken, said the water temperature and the time in the water led to the deaths. The water temperature was estimated to be in the 50s.

“All three had evidence of significant drowning and hypothermia,” Pratt said. Survival in the conditions the men faced “is a couple of hours, or usually less,” he said.

The crew of the Lindy Jane was fishing for rockfish seven miles west of the island when the boat began to take on water. At 3:30 a.m., Tam Duong of Oxnard put out a distress call via marine radio that was picked up by the Coast Guard in Long Beach, Coast Guard Petty Officer Dan Tremper said. Twenty minutes later, Duong radioed that the crew members had put on life jackets and were about to go into the water.

The Coast Guard launched a helicopter from San Diego about 3:47 a.m., and another from Los Angeles International Airport at 4:05 a.m. Both choppers arrived at the scene, 80 miles southwest of San Pedro, about 4:35 a.m.

However, they were unable to find the men in the fog and dark. A third helicopter took off from LAX at 7:12 a.m. and arrived on the scene 30 minutes later.

Thirty minutes into the search, the first chopper from Los Angeles made an emergency landing on the island when a warning light went off indicating a malfunction in the gearbox, according to Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Ed Greiner.

It took the crew of that helicopter about two hours to determine that the problem was a malfunctioning warning light. It rejoined the search and about 9:35 a.m. spotted the fishermen 20 miles west of the island. All three were floating face-down.

“There were no signs of life,” Greiner said.

Two of the men were wearing life jackets over casual clothing. The third was partially clad in a survival suit and was not wearing a life jacket, according to Greiner.

After being airlifted to Torrance Memorial Medical Center, they were pronounced dead shortly after 11 a.m.

“I feel really bad about this,” Timmy Duong said Thursday afternoon. He, his father, Nam Duong of Oxnard, and his brother’s girlfriend, 21-year-old Thu Hoang, comforted one another at Timmy Duong’s house in Los Angeles.

This was the first trip of the month for the Lindy Jane. Timmy Duong said the crew set sail from Ventura Harbor on Tuesday at 4 p.m. The Lindy Jane underwent transmission repairs last week. At the same time, the drive shaft was replaced, Timmy Duong said.

“The area of the drive shaft where the water could get in was not leaking. If it did leak right there, the leak should have been slow. It would have been [more than] 20 minutes before the boat was all the way down in the water,” Timmy Duong said.

He believes the boat, which he valued at $10,000, probably went down after striking rocks. The crew probably drifted while rescuers conducted their search, Duong said.

Officials said the boat’s transponder sent out a signal intended to aid the search. But the signal soon died, only to start up again hours later. Coast Guard officials said that malfunction hampered the search.

“The hours that it was not signaling is when most of the searching took place,” Greiner said.

It is unlikely that the malfunctioning light aboard the helicopter contributed to the deaths by slowing the search, Pratt said.

“Based on what we saw, unless someone had been there, they were really, really at almost no chance” of survival, Pratt said.

Duong, his five brothers and parents came to the United States from Vietnam in 1979. Like their father, he and his brother wanted to make a living as commercial fishermen.

“We tried to do the business, just like my father before,” Timmy Duong said. “My father was a fisherman. We try to make a living like him. We bought the boat and tried to make a living. But the last couple of years, it’s been real hard. It’s hard to make a living.”