How the heck was a cell phone still on board? As you say, why wasn't an EPIRB attached? I think the CG needs to review their protocols.

Children need to not only be taught how to swim but they must learn how to never panic, to remain calm and how to float on their backs with minimal effort while breathing deeply and resting. Their have been reports of people swimming many miles back to shore and that is how it's done.

You said exactly what I was thinking, but under these circumstances I just figured I would not state the obvious, why add insult to injury? I can tell you this, we were all 14 years old once and I am sure all of us made a poor decision or two....or ten. Fortunately most of us survived our poor decisions and most of us were smart enough to learn for our poor decisions.....it's called life. I'm 44 years old now, I've been boating since my early teens as my father always had boats when I was growing up. The first real boat(besides a pontoon with a 25hp OB) I ever drove was my dads 1988 Ranger bass boat, it was only about 19 ft, sat about a foot off the water and could run 65mph. Then in 1989 he bought a Sea Ray Pachanga 22, I got some experience on Lake Michigan with that boat and honed my skills. Then in the early 90's he bought a Donzi 25. By then I was in my early 20's and my dad hardy ever had time to take out the Donzi but I had plenty of time :), I would sneak that boat out all the time. I put more hours on that boat than he did and he was clueless as back then most boats didn't come with hour meters. He started suspecting stuff when one day he told me to try launching the boat at the ramps and I launched it quicker and better than he ever did, he was like "wow, you're pretty good at that". My demise was the time I chewed up a prop very badly, fortunately for me my dad ran aluminum props and I didn't kill the outdrive. The point to my story is kids do stupid **** and I guarantee we all did stupid **** behind our parents back so don't be so quick to blame the parents on this one.

At 14 in our boats we were limited to how far our gas would take us. We had rules but out of sight out of mind.

This thread just won't die....

The reason it got resurrected was they found the boat again, this time off the coast of Bermuda (last week). It had an Iphone in the center console but the boat has been capsized for months so just another clue to a mystery I guess.

Local paper indicated the families are feuding and the family that owns the phone wants it back, the other family wants the state officials to keep the phone in their possession.

I missed that, I just saw more bickering and assumed, well you know, the norm :)

I don't understand why the families are having such a issue with the phone.
I think they said on the news that now lawyers are involved etc. kind of sad.

Do yourself a favor and read my whole post.

This is exactly correct. The Coast Guard uses computer models to create search patterns based on environmentals and search object (person, boat, overturned boat, raft, etc). But now that the boat was found, thats hard DATA, not just theory. So now that they know where the boat drifted, they can recreate the search with a more accurate area.

Theres two huge glaring issues here. First, the boat was over 60 miles offshore. Thats going to take several hours for a CG boat to get on scene. Thats several hours that the helicopter is remaining on scene, not searching. (It was an MH-60 that deployed the swimmer, so they do carry that much gas, but an MH-65 only carries 2 hours of gas total so they can't remain on scene anyway..) Also probably the majority of a day that the small boat is not searching while they go to this boat, get a line on it, and tow it in. So now you have hard data on the drift of the boat and a more accurate search area, and two assets that aren't searching for several hours..?

The other issue is that the Coast Guard is not a salvage company, nor are they a towing company if you run out of gas. They will if there is a dire emergency or the DIW vessel is a hazard to navigation. But the CG is not trained to salvage boats, so trying to tow in a capsized boat? Theres a good change that it would have sank trying to tow it in, then how does that look..?

What protocol does the CG need to review? When the vessel was found, an SLDMB was deployed. Thats a self-locating data marker buoy. What that does is sends a signal the Coast Guard can track in order to obtain that DATA on drift and speed. One was deployed near the boat, however the boat wasn't able to be relocated later. Again, the CG is busy searching for two people now. EPIRBs are expensive, the CG finds adrift boats every day, who is going to pay for all those EPIRBs when the CG budget shrinks every year..?

Also, the people who extract data from cell phones and other electronic devices, even after being in saltwater, work for the CG. All other LE agencies send their stuff to the CG to extract the data...things you didn't know ;)

Let's be clear, this was the largest search the CG has ever conducted, something to the effect of 50,000 square nautical miles covered. The CG went above and beyond on this search. In district 7 (Georgia to Cuba basically) the CG has well over 400 search and rescue cases per year. Did you know there was a missing paddle boarder case at the same time as this one in Palm Beach? Nope, because celebrities didn't get involved in that case...