Posted on 01/29/2007 7:41:32 PM PST by LurkedLongEnough
The U.S. Coast Guard is searching for a prize-winning computer scientist who failed to return from a quick trip to the Farallon Islands on Sunday.
Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Amy Marrs, said Jim Gray, 63, was reported missing by his wife at 8:35 p.m. A ten-year veteran of Microsoft and winner of the prestigious A.M. Turing Award, Gray is a technical fellow whose work focuses on databases and transaction processing systems.
Gray set out from San Francisco alone on Sunday morning in his 40-foot sailboat named ``Tenacious.'' The conditions were good, and Gray was expected back Sunday evening.
Gray's wife alerted the Coast Guard after her husband failed to return and did not answer cell phone calls.
``Our thoughts are with Jim and his family as we hope for his safe return,'' said Doug Free, a spokesman for Microsoft.
Marrs said Gray is an experienced sailor and that his boat was fully outfitted with emergency gear, including a radio and life raft.
The Coast Guard mobilized a C-130 Hercules fixed-wing airplane, an HH-65 Dolphin helicopter, an 87-foot patrol boat and a 47-foot motor life boat for an all-night search, but did not find any sign of the missing vessel and did not pick up any distress signal.
On Monday, two more boats were added to the search, which was extended 78 nautical miles west of the Farallons for a total of about 4,000 square miles. ``We are searching a huge area,'' said Marrs. The Farallons are 27 nautical miles off the San Francisco coast.
In 1998, Gray was awarded the A.M. Turing Award by the Association for Computing Machinery for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research.
Recently, Gray had been working to create a world-wide telescope -- a distributed database of the entire world's astonomy information. He was also helping to build a digital library that would include all the world's scientific literature and data.
Can't even find the boat? Sounds like he defected.
This guy was good at computer science. I followed his career when he started on System R at IBM. We were building a similar system for Honeywell mainframes at the same time.
He wrote a super book on transaction processing.
something ain't right if the boat is lost as well.
A boatload of money is pretty worthless as a flotation device...
It can be a dangerous ocean between large waves and floating containers that have been washed off their ships. The Pacific moreso than the Atlantic. Let's hope all is well.
We were enroute Australia back in 1989, and came upon a sailboat steering one course with no one on deck. We tried to raise the vessel on VHF with no response. The cockpit was open, and so we sent a small boat to see if anyone was aboard.
We found no one. The iron mike was on, so we figured this guy fell overboard, had no tether or epirb, so the sailboat sailed off without its captain.
We called in another unit to tow her back. Eerie.
ping
I hope they find him. Lord knows the database field can use all the help it can get.
Lots of large Great Whites hang out at the Farollans.
Hmmm...there's no 'quick trip' to the Farallones in a sailboat. It's about a 60 mile round trip from the Golden Gate and a sailboat under sail, with the prevailing winds we've had lately (westerlies), would have to make at least a few tacks to get there. That adds even more to the mileage. Plus add in tidal and current influences...
Even under power averaging around 6 knots and a straight-line course, it's still a good bet that the round trip will take at least 12 to 14 hours, probably more.
Wave height for the last few days has been 4 to 6 feet and has been characterized by NOAA as swell.
For a boat to disappear like this, in these conditions, it has to be on the bottom. And it went there quickly. This is the classic 'ramming at sea' scenario. Big ship, little boat, inadequate look-out.
You're right. Spooky. The sea is still the sea, and it is both beautiful and deadly.
I've sailed this area for years. This guy went out during daylight, the sea was good, as was visibility. Even a collision, however unlikely, would have left some remnant of the boat. BTW, the Farallons are not at all that far from the SF bay inlet, so the search area was fairly well designated. I've never seen a floating container in this area.
Not finding the boat indicates he took the boat elsewhere.
Dangerous waters, plenty of sharks. Doesn't sound good.
The westerly wind prevails, as you said, and tacking is a routine procedure for sailing to the Farallons. But, this guy had good visibility and could easily see an oncoming freighter. If he wasn't keeping watch, he's a dead fool.
When under sail, the consistent and stiff westerly wind in this area will heel the boat to the gunwales. With good trim and the Genoa unfurled, 14-17 knots are typical. I've done a round trip in 10.5 hrs. Not tacking, of course, on the return. We would run the spinnaker, and the mainsail as a staysail, on the return. The boat did 12-14 knots and the breeze for the crew was dead.
The scientific journals have been recently grumbling about free scientific information available on the Internet. Hmmmmm.....
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