Woman in harrowing sea survival had beacon but didn’t use it
HONOLULU » Two Hawaii women who say they were lost at sea on a sailboat for months never activated their emergency beacon, the U.S. Coast Guard said, adding to a growing list of inconsistencies that cast doubt on their harrowing tale of survival.
The women previously told The Associated Press that they had radios, satellite phones, GPS and other emergency gear, but they didn’t mention the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB.
A Coast Guard review of the incident and subsequent interviews with the women revealed that they had an EPIRB aboard their boat but never turned it on.
Jennifer Appel confirmed in an interview Tuesday that they had the beacon and did not use it. She said that in her experience, it should be used only when you are in imminent physical danger and going to die in the next 24 hours.
“Our hull was solid, we were floating, we had food, we had water, and we had limited maneuverable capacity,” Appel said in Japan, where the U.S. Navy took them after they were rescued by a Navy ship. “All those things did not say we are going to die. All that said, it’s going to take us a whole lot longer to get where we’re going.”
In retrospect, though, Appel said there were two times that she would have used it — once when she and Tasha Fuiava were off Hawaii around late June to early July, and a second time off Wake Island on Oct. 1.
“That’s a lesson learned for me, because that was the best chance we had in the ocean to get help,” Appel said of the Wake Island missed opportunity.
Previously, Appel and Fuiava had said they were close to giving up when the Navy rescued them last week, thousands of miles off course.
The EPIRB communicates with satellites and sends locations to authorities. It’s activated when it’s submerged in water or turned on manually. The alert signal sends a location to rescuers within minutes.
A retired Coast Guard officer who was responsible for search and rescue operations said that if the women had used the emergency beacon, they would have been found.
“If the thing was operational and it was turned on, a signal should have been received very, very quickly that this vessel was in distress,” Phillip R. Johnson said Monday in a telephone interview from Washington state.
Johnson described the device as sturdy and reliable, but added that old and weak batteries could cause a unit not to function.
Appel and Fuiava also said they had six forms of communication that all failed to work.
“There’s something wrong there,” Johnson said. “I’ve never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time.”
The two women met in late 2016, and within a week of knowing each other decided to take the trip together. Fuiava had never sailed a day in her life. They planned to take 18 days to get to Tahiti, then travel the South Pacific and return to Hawaii in October.
They set off on May 3 along with their two dogs and were rescued by the Navy last week, thousands of miles off course.
Key elements of the women’s account are contradicted by authorities, and are not consistent with weather reports or basic geography of the Pacific Ocean. The discrepancies raised questions about whether Appel and her sailing companion, Tasha Fuiava, could have avoided disaster.
On their first day at sea, the two women described running into a fierce storm that tossed their vessel with 60 mph (97 kph) winds and 30-foot (9-meter) seas for three days, but meteorologists say there was no severe weather anywhere along their route during that time.
After leaving “we got into a Force 11 storm, and it lasted for two nights and three days,” Appel has said of the storm they encountered off Oahu. In one of the first signs of trouble, she said she lost her cellphone overboard.
“We were empowered to know that we could withstand the forces of nature,” Appel said. “The boat could withstand the forces of nature.”
But the National Weather Service in Honolulu said no organized storm systems were in or near Hawaii on May 3 or in the days afterward. Archived NASA satellite images confirm there were no tropical storms around Hawaii that day. Appel expressed surprise that there was no record of the storm. She said they received a Coast Guard storm warning while sailing after sunset on May 3.
The pair said they thought about turning back, but the islands of Maui and Lanai didn’t have harbors deep enough to accommodate their sailboat. At 50 feet (15 meters) long, the vessel is relatively small, and both islands have harbors that accommodate boats of that size. Plus, the Big Island — the southernmost island in Hawaii — has several places to dock.
Appel, though, said she modified her sailboat, called the Sea Nymph, by adding six tons of fiberglass to the hull to make it thicker and heavier and extend the keel to a depth of 8.5 feet to give the boat greater stability. Similar vessels typically have a keel of 5 to 7 feet, she said. The extra-long keel meant it couldn’t get in to nearby harbors.