Newport sailors keep watch for Flying Colours
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 15, 2007
projo.com
By Amanda Milkovits
Journal Staff Writer
Where the Coast Guard search left off, Newport’s community of sailors has stepped in.
The missing 54-foot sailboat Flying Colours and its crew of four, all with ties to Rhode Island, vanished in the storm-whipped seas off North Carolina last Monday. The Coast Guard searched for six days, employing planes and cutters over thousands of miles of ocean, before suspending the search late Saturday night.
Now, the Coast Guard has asked the other eyes on the water — the pleasure craft, the tanker ships, the fishing fleets — to watch for anything that would end the mystery of the missing Little Harbor-made sailboat.
The sailing community is a tight-knit group, with sailors crossing paths in harbors, crewing together on sailboats and hearing each other’s voices over the radio at sea. The missing four — Christine Grinavic, 26, Patrick Topping, 39, Jason Franks, 34, and Rhiannon Borisoff, 22 — were all experienced sailors. Their fellow sailors aren’t letting their own just disappear.
Sailors on dozens of sailboats leaving have been urged to keep watch by a sailboat captain from Newport.
Before sailing from Bermuda to Newport, Tim Dargan, captain of the Encore, went from harbor to harbor telling other captains to look for the Flying Colours, said Mary Grinavic, of Cumberland, whose daughter Christine had crewed with Dargan last year on the luxury yacht Arabella, which docks in Newport.
A weather announcer from Canada whom sailors listen to over the radio has been advising the nautical community every day to keep watch for the Flying Colours, Grinavic said.
On Friday, the families and Newport’s sailing community will hold a vigil from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at the Newport Shipyard on Washington Street. The families are bringing in bands, food and yellow balloons, which have the same symbolism as yellow ribbons — to bring loved ones home. The owner of the Flying Colours, Robin West, who worked in the White House during the Ford and Reagan administrations, is expected to fly in from Washington, D.C., for the vigil, as are relatives and friends of the sailors. The political leaders whom the families called on for help are all invited — including Representatives James Langevin and Patrick Kennedy, Sen. Jack Reed and Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.
“If my son knows this is happening, he’s definitely coming home,” said Franks’ mother, Carol Dale, of North Kingstown. “He never misses a party.”
The families are exhausted, sleeping little, but hopeful. They praised the Coast Guard for its extensive search and understand why the search was suspended. They said they are grateful for the support they’ve had from the highest levels of the military and the government. But they’re not giving up.
If anything, the families are taking comfort in the personalities of the missing sailors — the resourceful, free spirits as in love with travel and adventure as they are with the ocean. Dale believes that her son, who has a captain’s license and has sailed on much larger boats, found a way to weather the storm. Grinavic, who calls her daughter an adventurer, sees the young woman doing a dance with her hands in the air when she’s finally rescued.
“It’s this quiet confidence — we just have to be patient,” Grinavic said. “I have a real strong feeling it’s going to be good.”
The search for the Flying Colours began last Monday when the Coast Guard watch in Portsmouth, Va., picked up the boat’s emergency radio beacon at 3:30 a.m. The signal ended nearly four hours later. The boat was about 160 miles southeast of Cape Lookout, N.C.
Three other sailboats were also caught by the rough 40-foot seas and 45- to 60-knot winds, kicked up by tropical storm Andrea. The Coast Guard rescued nine people from the other sailboats, but couldn’t find the Flying Colours. The searchers dropped marker buoys into the water where the boat’s beacon had last sounded, to determine where the wind and current direction may have taken the boat, said Petty Officer Kip Wadlow, spokesman for the Coast Guard’s Fifth District.
They found no trace of the boat or its crew.
There’s a lot of ocean out there, and a lot of theories about what could have happened to the sailboat and its four young sailors, Grinavic said.
“Until there’s some tangible evidence that something really terrible happened to that boat, why would I give up?” she said.
“Until there’s some tangible evidence that something really terrible happened to that boat,
why would I give up?”
Mary Grinavic
Mother of one of the missing sailors
amilkovi@projo.com
