This is a puzzler. Jim Gray disappeared while making a day trip to the Farallone Islands. I did this same trip a few years ago when living aboard in Sausalito. It was fun but didn’t seem at all dangerous or difficult.
The Farallones are 27 miles offshore. You can’t see them from the coast – they appear on the horizon about half way there. The California coast is pretty high, what with Mt Tam there so you never lose sight of that. We set out around 8:00, crossed under the Golden Gate bridge about 9:00, completed our rounding of the islands about 5:00 pm and ran back to get home about 9:00 pm.
Wind is nearly always onshore so it is a beat out, and run back. Progress is futher slowed by a current that set us south about 1.5 knots. Which is why we made it back about sunset even though we didn’t arrive until 5:00 pm.
It sounds like Gray had similar conditions so I really can’t imagine how he was able to disappear unless he meant to, perhaps hugging the coast and heading south, which would throw off the search.
In one of the most imaginative uses of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, volunteers examined satellite photos to try to locate his boat. Ongoing info is at http://helpfindjim.com/
