Gray's searchers modeled currents and wind patterns to estimate where Tenacious might lie, then sent out planes and boats even after the Coast Guard had ended its search.
Although they were frequently competitors in the high-tech industry, the technologists and scientists pulled together to look for Gray. "It would have been harder for Jim to plan a better set of friends to help him when he went missing," said former Oracle executive Mike Olson, who was the spokesman for the team of amateur searchers.
Weeks later, with no sign of Gray or Tenacious, friends told Gray's wife, Donna Carnes, that it was time to hold a funeral. The community needed a forum to try to make sense of Gray's disappearance.
Carnes declined, saying it was too soon for remembrances. The family was still looking for Gray. Carnes had quietly commissioned a painstaking underwater search for any sign of Tenacious alongside the Golden Gate Bridge. Fugro Pelagos Inc., a San Diego firm, scoured the ocean floor using sonar and an underwater robot.
"I searched for what I dreaded to find," Carnes said.
More than three months passed. Carnes halted the underwater hunt last May with no new information. Again, friends told her it was time for a service. Again, she declined. The family was exhausted, she told people. And besides, they weren't ready to have a funeral when they still had no idea what happened to Gray.
"Memorials are for people who are dead," Carnes said in an interview in her home atop Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. "You can't bury an empty casket and be done with it, just as I can't, as some people suggest meaning well, grab onto a fact and build a story around that as to what happened to Jim and believe it. I never believe my stories for more than a few hours."
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Over the summer, Carnes entered a period she calls "adrift" -- she couldn't make many decisions. She imagined that when she looked out her window to the San Francisco Bay, she was looking at the very spot where Gray's body and Tenacious lay. She returned to Wisconsin, where she grew up, and took classes in prehistoric-tool making and the ancient Mediterranean. She hiked in the high Sierra.
Helland, of Microsoft, considered Gray his mentor and worried that there wouldn't be a public tribute to honor him properly. He told Carnes he wanted to celebrate Gray's life at the October biennial meeting of the High Performance Transaction Systems workshop -- of which Gray was a founder.
