SUMMERVILLE — Two bodies were recovered aboard a 30-foot fishing boat June 11 that went missing and sunk off the coast of Massachusetts, but it was a South Carolina resident who helped kick off the search to find them.
Sam Miller, owner of Aquatic Analytics in Summerville, was vacationing near Cape Cod two days earlier when she took a carefree walk along the beach with her dad.
“I saw something floating in the water and thought it was a game cam because of its shape and size,” she said. “I went to pick it up and realized it was actually a GPS from a boat.”
Finding it odd that such an important navigation piece would wash ashore, Miller took the instrument back to her parent’s cabin and did some sleuthing.
The GPS Sam Miller found had a work order taped to the device with the fishing vessel’s name, Seahorse.
The Furuno-model GPS, which provides boaters a number of offshore navigational tools, had a slip of tape with an old work order on it labeled “F|V Sea Horse.”
That meant she had a starting point.
But after hours of futile searching, Miller and her dad, Tim Brown, drove back to Rock Harbor and asked one of the captains if they knew of a fishing vessel named Seahorse.
The owner — later identified by the Coast Guard as 64-year-old Shawn Arsenault — hadn’t returned, the captain told Miller, but his truck was still parked at the landing. He had gone to sea that day with his girlfriend Felicity Daley.
After finding a boat’s GPS in the water, Sam Miller left a note for the owner on his windshield. The boat owner never saw it, having been found in his sunken ship two days later.
“We left a note under his windshield wipers,” Miller said. “But as we we walked away that same guy we asked came back and said, ‘You know, I was just talking to somebody and we actually think that boat’s overdue.’ “
The father-daughter pair at first simply thought the device had just fallen overboard by accident, especially since there was no other debris.
“That’s when we were like, ‘Oh, holy cow. We hadn’t thought that,’ ” she said.
Miller exchanged numbers with the captain, who notified the Coast Guard, and agreed to hold onto the GPS.
“We were hoping he was OK, but we couldn’t make all of the facts work,” Miller said. “A GPS unit like that had to be plugged in to be working. If there was a shipwreck it didn’t seem like something that would fall off.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
