Vanished at Sea - Legendary Jim Gray's Story

by Steve Silberman,Wired Magazine on 23 Jul 2007 It may remain one of the great sailing mysteries of the decade. Not only was the weather fine, the route innocent and simple, the sailor was experienced and of stable personality. In addition, Jim Gray's personal renown in the Microsoft world caused one of the largest and most high tech privately inspired hunts for a missing boat the US has probably ever seen – with no result..

Here is the timeline of Jim Gray's extraordinary disappearance:

It looked like a fine day for a sail. On Sunday, January 28, 2007, Microsoft researcher Jim Gray woke up on his boat, a red 40-foot fiberglass cruiser called Tenacious. The water in Gashouse Cove, a cozy marina in San Francisco Bay, was nearly flat. The 63-year-old programmer phoned his wife, Donna Carnes, who was on an annual vacation with friends in Wisconsin. He said he was heading out to the Farallon Islands, a wildlife refuge 27 miles offshore, to scatter the ashes of his mother, Ann, who died in October.

As Gray steered out through the Golden Gate to the open ocean, both tide and wind were in his favor. At 10:30 am, he called Carnes again and said that he was approaching a channel marker buoy 15 miles out. She asked him if he was wearing his harness; single-handed sailors can drown if a wave pitches them overboard and the ship sails on. 'Yes, dear,' he replied, saying that he would get in touch as soon as Tenacious came back into range.

A few minutes later, he left an upbeat voicemail for his daughter, Heather, in Santa Barbara. 'I'm taking Granny out to her final resting place. I'm surrounded by dolphins out here. It's a little cloudy but very pleasant. No whales but lots of dolphins and very pretty. Love and kisses, take care, bye.' At 11:50 am, his smartphone synched with Microsoft's email server one last time, pinging a Cingular tower south of San Francisco. A couple of hours later, on Southeast Farallon Island, a naturalist named Brett Hartl spotted a sailboat with a reddish hull a mile or two offshore, sailing north.

Then Gray and his boat vanished. The Coast Guard received no Mayday call, and Gray's EPIRB — an emergency radio beacon designed to broadcast a homing signal if it sinks — stayed silent. No sailors in the area reported seeing the boat adrift, and not a single life vest, flashlight, or scrap of debris belonging to Tenacious washed up on local beaches.

He and his wife Donna were both avid sailors who periodically lived on their boat on the San Francisco Bay.

The news that Gray was missing shocked the high tech community. The lanky coder had been a computing legend since the 1970s. His work helped make possible such mainstays of modern life as cash machines, ecommerce, online ticketing, and deep databases like Google. 'Jim's work inspired us and many other computer scientists to seek out and tackle very ambitious projects,' says Google cofounder Sergey Brin. 'He never shied away from problems involving large-scale data and computation.'

When Gray joined Microsoft in 1995, he convinced the software behemoth to launch a research center in San Francisco so that he and his wife wouldn't have to move to Redmond. 'If Jim had wanted a lab in Monte Carlo, we would have built a lab in Monte Carlo,' says Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid. In 1998, Gray's peers gave him the highest honor in computer science, the A.M. Turing Award.

His influence reached far beyond the insular world of coding and computers. Each morning, as Gray strolled down to the lab from his rustic Victorian on Telegraph Hill, he chatted on his cell with one of the many scientists who became regular guests on his boat. He could talk to astronomers, oceanographers, geologists, geneticists, or fellow programmers and seem like a native in each field. And he felt equally comfortable hiking along the Tahoe Rim Trail or sailing up the Sacramento River delta with his wife.

Gray's mysterious disappearance inspired one of the most ambitious search-and-rescue missions in history. First the Coast Guard scoured 132,000 square miles of ocean. Then a team of scientists and Silicon Valley power players turned the eyes of the global network onto the Pacific. They steered satellites and NASA planes over the Golden Gate and mobilized the search for Tenacious on blogs and on Amazon.com. This group included some of the best minds in science and technology, among them Amazon.com chief technologist Werner Vogels and top executives at Microsoft and Oracle, including Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. Oceanographers and engineers from the US Navy, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute joined the effort, as did astronomers from leading universities.

The search became national news and gripped the imagination of the blogosphere. Some commentators tried to cast the programmer as a digital-age D. B. Cooper, who disappeared in 1971 with a suitcase full of cash by leaping from the back of an airplane — though Gray had no evident motive to flee.

During the search, Carnes stayed in seclusion with a security guard posted at her door, refusing to talk to the press. But as salvage boats and remotely operated underwater vehicles scanned the seafloor along California's north coast, she met with me in the house she shared with Gray. 'I am determined to find out what happened to my husband,' she said. 'And I am determined to find Tenacious, because she is the key to Jim, and to this strange, singular, very painful mystery.'

Carnes spent the last normal afternoon of her life skiing near a remote lakeside lodge in northern Wisconsin. On Sunday night, concerned that she hadn't heard back from her husband, she phoned the harbormaster at Gashouse Cove, who verified that Tenacious' berth was still empty. Then the harbormaster called the Coast Guard.

When David Swatland's phone rang at his Berkeley home that night, he hoped it would turn out to be a routine case of an overdue sailboat with the usual happy ending. The deputy commander of the busiest Coast Guard sector on the West Coast, Swatland and his team fielded 1,705 search-and-rescue calls in 2005 alone. Most were relatively minor — drifting kayaks or hikers stranded by the tide. A former triathlete with a reassuring manner, Swatland says he gets several reports a week of boats late coming home from the bay, but they usually turn up in a marina somewhere within a couple of hours. He gets fewer than 10 calls a year about boats gone astray in the ocean, though these cases too are usually solved in a day.

'Most sailors are pretty careful outside the Golden Gate, because they're aware that this is a particularly unforgiving stretch of coastline in a particularly unforgiving ocean,' Swatland says. 'There are only a few good anchorages, it's often windy, and there's a fair amount of boat traffic. Things can get squirrely out there.'

The Coast Guard, which became an arm of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, keeps watch on the San Francisco sector from a command center on Yerba Buena Island, under the Bay Bridge. After the harbormaster's call, Swatland's crew broadcast a description of the black-masted sailboat to mariners. Later that night, an 87-foot patrol boat roared out from the command center, joined by a motor lifeboat capable of handling a 360-degree roll in the surf. By 1 am, a helicopter and a C-130 turboprop plane, both equipped with thermal-imaging radar, began flying tight grids out to the Farallon Islands. Carnes stayed up all night, getting updates every half hour.

In the morning, the Coast Guard sent out its standard press release about a missing sailor. Swatland was unaware that Gray was well known in tech circles until local news reporters made the Microsoft connection and descended on Yerba Buena Island with TV cameras. The news spread quickly among the programmer's colleagues and friends.

On Monday night Paula Hawthorn, a former VP at Info