Posted on 01/30/2007 12:38:18 PM PST by BenLurkin
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Authorities were scouring the waters off Northern California on Monday, looking for a man who embarked alone on a day sailing trip to the Farallon Islands to scatter his mother's ashes and never returned.
Jim Gray, 63, a noted computer scientist who founded Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, last spoke to a family member at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, when he called from his 40-foot yacht called Tenacious to say he was sailing out of cell phone range, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. He had left for the Farallons, about 27 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, that morning and planned to return by evening.
Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Amy Marrs called Gray's disappearance a mystery because the weather was good, he was in good health and the boat was equipped with radios and flares. There have been no distress signals.
A C-130 cargo plane was called in Monday evening to help search 4,000 square miles of the Pacific, from Point Ano Nuevo in the south to Tomales Bay in the north.
Well-known in Silicon Valley, Gray won the A.M. Turing Award the so-called ``Nobel Prize of computer science'' in 1998 for his body of work, which helped paved the way for automatic-teller machines, computerized airline reservations and e-commerce. He earned the first Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley's computer-science department in 1969.
The Farallons are a great white's happy hunting ground.
It's only been a couple days. He may turn up fine.
Sometimes things don't always compute.
Is he anymore missing than he was when this was posted last night?
I wonder if he is now in communist china or North Korea.
If it was after the sailing trip, why are they looking in the ocean?
Sorry -- I searched under this title.
Please link to the earlier thread.
Sailing alone -- a very romantic idea until something goes wrong.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1775896/posts
We had an interesting discussion about this last night...
There are some nasty patches of water between the coast and the Farallons, though. His boat could easily have been capsized by a rogue wave that swept him overboard.
Perhaps his global-positioning device got a "blue screen of death".
Not to cast any aspersions, but I've read both threads and haven't seen anything but the wife's phone call that indicates he left at all.
Maybe he wanted to get lost, or someone wanted to lose him.
/Dashiell Hammett
If that were the case it wouldn't be a good idea to drag a 40 foot boat around with you.
There's a lot of maybes and couldas in this story but I tend to think its a simple 'lost at sea' thing. There's no indication that he had any shady dealings or any reason to take it on the lam.
After all, he was intending to spread his dead mothers' ashes. More ironic than mysterious in my view.
Likely he'll show up frozen in the Oregon wilderness.
I took courses under him in the 70s--a brilliant man. I pray that he's well.
Maybe his bilge pump was running Windows. ;-)
Perhaps people like this who choose to do such things should be ignored.
Sunday was absolutely beautiful out on Monterey Bay. It couldn't have been the weather.
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