Boat

Thirty years after Natalie Wood died off Santa Catalina Island, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced Thursday that it was reopening the investigation into one of Hollywood's most enduring mysteries. Wood, 43, was boating off the island on Thanksgiving weekend 1981 with her husband, Robert Wagner, fellow actor Christopher Walken and others when she somehow went overboard and died. Officials at the time ruled her death an accident, but there has been much speculation since over whether there was more to the story.

MIAMI - The Carnival Destiny cruise ship hasn't even left port, and half the ship's guests are already wasted. Passengers pack the lobby bar, balancing luggage with buckets of ice-soaked beer bottles, and flashing room keys that double as charge cards to keep the drinks flowing. When it's time for a mandatory safety drill, the life-saving instructions playing over the vessel's intercom can barely be heard over sounds of drunken guests stumbling over one another, spewing obscenities, cheering, slapping high-fives and yelling chants like "Ain't no party like a … Kid Rock party.

Only in Cannes do you overhear, "Sorry, I'm late. I got stuck on this yacht. " By the height of the festival, the azure horizon is studded with floating sea monsters. (Legend has it that Errol Flynn moored his own yacht here in 1949 and demanded that the recreational flotilla leave the dock, lest those boats draw attention away from him.) Fashion royalty Alberta Ferretti and Roberto Cavalli are not so proprietary about the port, since both entertain every year at Cannes on their respective yachts.

On Tuesday morning, 80-year-old Bobby Salisbury took the last of his items from his boat moored at Colonial Yacht Anchorage in Wilmington and stuffed them inside his gray Nissan off-road truck. "I'm the happiest guy today," he said sarcastically. For years, Salisbury has lived at the marina. Then last month, the Los Angeles Harbor Department ordered him and more than 90 other tenants to leave by May 1, calling the dock and 138 slips in Berth 204 too dilapidated to be safe.

Teen sensation   Miranda Cosgrove has canceled her Sept. 16 appearance in Henderson , Nev., as she recovers from a broken ankle suffered in a tour bus accident last week …. Bring your boat - or even an inner tube - to celebrate Lake Havasu's free AquaPalooza Concert and Festival, Sept. 17 . . . . 73% of exterminators say bed bugs continue to be the most difficult pest to treat , according to the 2011 “Bugs Without Borders Survey” conducted by the National Pest Management Assn . . . .  Need a trail pal for a day hike?

Detectives decided to reopen the investigation into the death of actress Natalie Wood in part because of statements made by the captain of the boat Wood was on at the time of her death. L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca told The Times that homicide detectives want to talk to the captain based on comments he had made recounting the case on its 30th anniversary. Baca did not detail what the captain said regarding the case "He made comments worthy of exploring," Baca said. A law enforcement source added that the department had recently received a letter from an unidentified "third party" who said that the captain had "new recollections" about the case.

The Sunstar is in an Oxnard boatyard, up on screw jacks under a canopy of sun-beaten tarps. The orange wheelhouse is peeling, with scraps of plywood standing in for missing window panes. The blue of the hull is scuffed off along the angles . Spots of fiberglass are coming off in brown lesions. The Herzik brothers are hunkered down in the hold, sanding the corners of two new gas tanks they built of plywood and fiberglass. Terry is the captain, 64 years old, solid, broad-shouldered, a bit craggy from the years of sun and sea. Doug is 61, leaner, smoother, with blond-gray hair and hooded, slightly wary eyes.

The unfinished wooden boat rocks gently in the backwater of Cap-Haitien Bay, lulling 17-year-old Douna Marcellus and two dozen others to sleep as tight balls of mosquitoes hover overhead. Cicadas serenade them from the reeds on one bank and, on the other, black pigs root through smoldering trash. Like the others in the boat, Douna is a refugee from Port-au-Prince and the unspeakable horrors of the earthquake and its aftermath. Her parents and sister were crushed in their home, just seconds after Douna walked out the front door to run an errand for her mother.

Harold Hazelton can't imagine living on land. For more than 30 years, the 76-year-old and his wife, Donna, 75, have resided on their 43-foot Grand Mariner at Colonial Yacht Anchorage in Wilmington. That soon will end, however. "I don't know what we're going to do," he said. "I don't like living on land. I've been on water all of my life. " The Hazeltons are among 95 tenants who face eviction May 1, the result of port officials having labeled the marina's dock and its 138 slips in Berth 204 as too dilapidated to be safe.

Regarding the Susan Spano's Her World column ("For the Widowed, Travel, Like Time, Helps Heal All Wounds," Feb. 6): How wonderful it would be if she would do something to unite all us widows who enjoy cruises but who are hindered by 200% "single supplements." Let's get the cruise companies to reconsider their positions to help in our "quest for getting out in the world" of travel. If there are 11 million widowed women, as the article says, someone is missing the boat in not making good cruises available to us. EILEEN AARON Huntington Beach

Organizers of the famed Newport Beach-to-Ensenada sailing regatta were stunned by the mysterious loss of four crew members aboard a 37-foot boat that disappeared in mid-race, marking the first fatalities in the event's 65-year history. While the U.S. Coast Guard was still investigating the accident, regatta organizers said they believed the boat was hit and demolished by a much larger ship - perhaps a freighter or tanker - passing in the dark early Saturday. The boat disappeared from the online tracking system around 1:30 a.m. Saturday.

Teddy Charles, a jazz vibraphonist who performed with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and other bebop-era jazz greats before becoming a charter boat captain in the Caribbean, died Monday at Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead on New York's Long Island. He was 84. Charles died of complications from heart disease, according to a niece, Sally Phillips. Although he was grouped with Milt Jackson and Terry Gibbs as a premier vibraphonist of the bebop years reaching from the late 1940s through the '50s, Charles was also well-regarded as a pianist and composer whose cutting-edge recordings of the mid-1950s were forerunners of the avant-garde jazz of the following decade.

One of the biggest draws at the 39th Newport Boat Show in Newport Beach this weekend might not be a boat at all. JetLev Southwest will have demonstrators taking off and flying as high as 30 feet in the air with a water-propelled jetpack called the JetLev R200. Visitors can enter to win a free flight and try their hands at flying, hovering and landing. This is the second year Jetlev has performed demos at the boat show. Of course, the show is really about getting a firsthand look at more than 200 of the newest and flashiest  yachts, tugboats, sailboats, motor yachts and all sorts of pleasure boats.

SAN FRANCISCO — The winds gusted above 25 knots and the swells topped 12 feet. In short, sailors participating in this year's race around the craggy Farallon Islands, 27 miles west of the Golden Gate, faced typically grueling conditions. Then something went terribly wrong. A rogue wave pummeled the 38-foot Low Speed Chase as it rounded the islands Saturday, knocking five crew members overboard. As the captain sought to rescue them from the 50-degree water, the boat capsized and was hurled onto the rocks.

Harold Hazelton can't imagine living on land. For more than 30 years, the 76-year-old and his wife, Donna, 75, have resided on their 43-foot Grand Mariner at Colonial Yacht Anchorage in Wilmington. That soon will end, however. "I don't know what we're going to do," he said. "I don't like living on land. I've been on water all of my life. " The Hazeltons are among 95 tenants who face eviction May 1, the result of port officials having labeled the marina's dock and its 138 slips in Berth 204 as too dilapidated to be safe.

                                        Drone aircraft have played a central role in modern warfare, taking out targets with missile strikes in the skies above battles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. But the same robotic revolution hasn't taken place on the world's oceans. Textron Inc., maker of the RQ-7 Shadow spy drones used by the  Army and Marine Corps, has developed a ship drone for the Navy that the company envisions carrying out a variety of missions, including minesweeping, submarine spotting, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Two people were killed and four others injured when a hydroplane hit another speedboat and crashed into a spectator wharf at the Valleyfield, Canada, Regatta. Driver Daniel Brossoit of St. Timothee, Quebec, and a spectator were killed in the accident during qualifications for the North American championship in the Grand Prix class, in which boats reach speeds of 130 m.p.h.

The Coast Guard recovered the bodies of three men whose 24-foot recreational boat was found capsized near Santa Cruz Island after a family member reported it missing Sunday morning, officials said. Searchers spotted the body of a fourth man who was on the boat but were unable to recover it, Petty Officer Adam Eggers said Sunday night. None of the men was wearing a life jacket. Eggers said he was prohibited by Coast Guard policy from releasing the victims' names. No one answered the phone at the Santa Barbara County coroner's office, which is involved in the case.

It was a clear day off the Dana Point Harbor last weekend as one of the many leisure boats headed off to search for the coast's regular visitors these days: migrating gray whales. It didn't take long before the captain announced two large adults had been spotted. Squeals of delight rippled through the passengers. "Everyone turns into a 5-year-old child when they see one of these magnificent creatures," said Doug Thompson, onboard marine naturalist for an excursion with Dana Wharf Sportfishing and Whale Watching.