Crews Search for Man After Boat Is Found

Authorities searched the waters from Santa Monica Bay to Santa Catalina Island on Friday morning for a 70-year-old Westchester man whose fishing boat was found aground at Dockweiler State Beach.

Richard Davison’s wife reported him missing Wednesday after the retired aerospace engineer failed to appear for a doctor’s appointment that morning, she said.

Mary Davison told officials that their 30-foot fishing boat was missing from its Marina del Rey slip and that her husband’s car was parked there.

When the Venturess III was found Thursday evening on the beach near Los Angeles International Airport, nobody was aboard. It was not known if Richard Davison was wearing a life vest or if anybody else had been on the craft.

Using rescue boats and helicopters with heat-seeking devices, Los Angeles County lifeguards and the U.S. Coast Guard began searching the ocean from Hermosa Beach to the Santa Monica Pier, said Coast Guard spokesman Dennis Hall.

“Because Mr. Davison has been to Catalina on occasion, according to his wife, we’re [also] searching the waters off Catalina,” Hall said Friday morning. The couple wed on the island and visited regularly.

But later in the morning, after a C-130 plane combed the waters around Catalina, the effort was suspended, Hall said, adding, “We pretty much saturated the area.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Woolner said Davison’s boat bore “no indications of foul play. There were no bloodstains in sight.” The Los Angeles Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit took over the investigation later Friday.

Mary Davison said that her husband told her he would be back from his appointment in the afternoon and that it was strange he didn’t say he was taking the cabin cruiser out. She suspects he was heading to Catalina but was forced back by engine trouble. She called him an avid sailor who liked solitude at sea but said it was abnormal for him to miss an appointment merely to go cruising.

“Somehow he decided that he wanted to get away for a while,” she speculated. “It was a beautiful day.”

Richard Davison, who retired from Rockwell International Corp., had back surgery a couple years ago and increasingly turned to boating to replace two favorite pastimes he could no longer enjoy--hiking in the Sierra Nevada and jogging. “That’s tough to take way from an active person,” said friend Winnie Jagodowski. “But he was a sailor for years. That was his life.”