Boat Accidents

Two NFL players were in a group of four boaters missing Sunday in the choppy seas off Florida's Gulf Coast. Oakland Raiders linebacker Marquis Cooper and defensive end Corey Smith, a free agent who last played for the Detroit Lions, were in a group of friends that left in Cooper's 21-foot boat early Saturday morning for a day of fishing off the coast of Clearwater, Fla., and did not return that evening as expected. Officials did not receive a distress signal from the missing craft.

He went looking for his daughter and found bodies stacked in garbage bags. A man told him she was in bag No. 123. She wasn't. She has never been found, and that is the hardest thing, to wonder where the sea took her. In the predawn hours of Feb. 3, 2006, the ferry carrying Tareq Sharaf's family caught fire and capsized in high winds on the Red Sea between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. His wife and four of his children, along with 1,029 other passengers, drowned or died in the blaze.

The life of Darrin Bunker, described by family members as an enigmatic loner, has taken a perplexing twist after his sailboat was found bobbing off Hawaii last weekend with no sign of him. He had left Dana Point Harbor three months earlier, bound for San Diego. The 30-foot vessel, damaged by fire and its mast broken, was found drifting off the Kauai coast on Sunday by fishermen. It was still stocked with provisions and Bunker's laptop computer was still aboard.

Two months after an oil spill blackened San Francisco Bay, authorities Friday were investigating what caused another vessel to hit one of the region's signature bridges. This time, a 300-foot barge loaded with oil struck a piling that supports the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, but no oil spilled. The accident occurred in dense fog and darkness about 6 p.m. Thursday, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. The crews of two tugboats that were towing the oil barge Cascade passed sobriety tests.

Fifteen illegal immigrants aboard a rickety boat were rescued by U.S. authorities off the San Diego coast Wednesday morning after an apparent botched maritime smuggling attempt. The dehydrated and sunburned passengers were taken off the 24-foot boat named "Seaulater" by federal authorities nearly a day and a half after leaving Rosarito Beach bound for Southern California, authorities said.

Divers managed to get inside a capsized ferry today but found only bodies and no survivors, three days after the vessel carrying more than 800 people capsized during a powerful typhoon, officials said. Philippine navy spokesman Lt. Col. Edgard Arevalo would not speculate on whether anyone still might be found alive but indicated that the amount of time that had passed since the disaster made it unlikely. He said the ship's interior was too dark to even determine how many bodies were there.

Four crew members of a fishing boat were plucked alive from a life raft in frigid, stormy seas in a remote Alaskan island chain Wednesday, hours after their vessel was reported in distress, a Coast Guard spokesman said. Five crew members died, and two remained missing. The search continued for the last crew members of the Katmai, a 93-foot fish processor based on Alaska's Kodiak island, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Levi Read.

An e-mail from a doomed fishing boat to a nearby vessel said it was taking on water in the rear, where the steering was housed, the Coast Guard said Thursday as it searched for two crew members. The Katmai sank early Wednesday in the icy waters off Alaska's Aleutian Islands with a crew of 11 aboard. Four survived in a life raft, and the bodies of five have been recovered. "We are devastated by what has happened," said Jeff DeBell, chief financial officer of Katmai Fisheries Inc.

Ken Barnes Jr. put everything he had into his dream. The 47-year-old Newport Beach man sold his house and his swimming pool maintenance business and poured the proceeds into buying and equipping a 44-foot sailboat, dubbed Privateer, for a solo trip around the world. Barnes sailed out of Long Beach on Oct. 28, but on Wednesday was the subject of an intense search-and-rescue effort off the coast of Chile. Heavy storms near Cape Horn on the tip of South America crippled his boat.

Long before Ken Barnes Jr. tried to sail around Cape Horn, the roaring winds and savage seas in the abyss off the tip of South America brought fear to even the most experienced seamen. Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, for example. "He was dreading doing that," said author Laurence Bergreen, whose "Over the Edge of the World" tells the story of history's first circumnavigation of the globe. "He thought it was certain death."