Family, Friends Comb Beaches for Man Missing in Boat Accident

Under the weak morning sun, five men and a dog spread out across the beach from the shoreline to the dunes on Tuesday and started walking.

They walked at a fast clip, their feet sinking into the soft, deep sand.

Their eyes scanned the beach and dunes, searching for 35-year-old Scott Sullenger, the sixth paddler from an outrigger canoe that flipped its occupants into cold, rough seas Sunday.

After spending hours clinging to a single pontoon in 50-degree waters with 6-foot swells, one man, John Deblin, 50, was dead, and the other five were being swept out to sea.

Against the advice of the group’s leader, Ben Taitai, 50,--a paddler with 20 years experience--Justin Heard, 28, headed for shore to get help. Half an hour later, Sullenger followed.

Taitai and fellow paddlers Faustino “Tino” Rico and Mike Davis, along with Deblin’s body, were pulled from the water by passing Vietnamese shrimp fishermen. Heard was picked up while treading water two miles from shore. Sullenger has not been found and is presumed dead. Despite the odds, residents and friends cling to the hope that he may still be alive, lying exhausted on shore somewhere, too weak to get help.

“I know Scott. He’s a strong swimmer,” said Dennis Finch, a friend of Sullenger’s who organized Tuesday’s search. “I’m hoping and praying that somehow he made it to land and is somewhere in the dunes.”

He added: “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, and you don’t even know if the needle is there.”

As he scoured the beach, Finch kept repeating the same sentence over and over under his breath like a mantra: “He was a really good swimmer. He could make it to the beach.”

Stubbornly, Finch clung to hope. “God works miracles,” he said. “You gotta hope.”

Finch was not alone. From the beaches near Point Mugu to Point Conception in Santa Barbara County, countless people headed for the shoreline singly and in groups to search for Sullenger.

Finch himself walked the beaches of Oxnard on Monday until his legs were too sore to continue.

That evening he called six radio stations and asked them to broadcast a message: Anyone who wanted to search for Sullenger should meet at the fruit stand at the corner of Harbor Boulevard and Gonzales Road in Oxnard at 8 a.m. Tuesday. Four people turned up.

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Surfer Andy Chapman of Oxnard heard Finch’s request on a public radio station just 15 minutes before the meeting time. With a day off from work, Chapman said he decided to lend a hand to search for a man he had never met.

“I lived in Hawaii and I used to paddle, too,” he said. “I identified with someone out there struggling on the beach.”

Like Finch, he believed Sullenger could still be alive.

“What a great thing it would be if I found him out there and he was still breathing,” he said.

Finch and the volunteers marched like a rake across a mile of beach, spreading themselves evenly 30 feet apart. Then they turned around and walked back, moving farther inland.

Twenty minutes later, they heard the rumble of a Sheriff’s Department helicopter and a U.S. Coast Guard chopper resuming an air search for Sullenger. The Coast Guard also sent a 41-foot boat to Anacapa Island to look for the container company executive.

Finch talked to his dog, Kuma, as they climbed up and down the dunes. “Come on, boy, you can find him.”

When Finch returned to his car there was a handwritten note on the windshield from Sullenger’s family thanking him for his efforts.

Family members were on their way up the coast to search near Santa Barbara, said Sullenger’s niece, Shelby McGuire, 26.

“Everyone is out now, looking everywhere,” she said. “Step on the beach between Santa Barbara and Ventura County and you will find someone looking.”

She said people had been calling the Sullenger household throughout the day and night asking where they should go to help search.

Bill Coulter, pastor of the Channel Islands Vineyard Church in Oxnard, attended by Sullenger and Rico, was out on his jet ski Tuesday morning, searching inaccessible parts of the shoreline near the Rincon, McGuire said.

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Meanwhile, friends of Deblin continued to mourn the loss of the big man with the heart of a child who loved the ocean.

“He died doing what he loved best,” said a friend who asked not to be identified. “He either surfed or did that.”

Those who knew him said Deblin was in tremendous physical shape, and prided himself on not having an ounce of body fat--a fact that may have contributed to his succumbing to hypothermia. They said he worked jobs in construction or outdoors, just because he could not stand to be confined.

“He was like Jeff Bridges in ‘The Big Lebowski,’ ” she said. “He was still like a big kid at 50. I never met anyone who didn’t like him.”

Meanwhile, Rico and Heard, who both were treated for hypothermia at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, were released Tuesday.

Those who survived Sunday’s boating accident have so far refused to be interviewed, but Rico’s wife said Tuesday that the survivors plan to eventually tell their story.

Times photographer Spencer Weiner contributed to this story.