Search for missing Microsoft sailor suspended -- still no trace

The Coast Guard suspended its search late Thursday for San Francisco computer scientist and sailor Jim Gray, who has been missing since Sunday when he failed to return from a solo trip to the Farallon Islands to scatter his mother's ashes.

Gray, 63, is a nationally recognized researcher and founder of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center.

Gray's family and friends, however, continued to search the Pacific Ocean in the hopes that they might still find some clue to his whereabouts, or find out what happened to him.

Since Sunday night, when Gray's wife, Donna, reported him missing, aircraft and patrol boats had used sophisticated technology to scour tens of thousands of square miles of ocean, and found nothing.

That's what troubles Capt. David Swatland, the Coast Guard's deputy sector commander for the Northern California area. Under normal circumstances, even under the worst of circumstances, he said, the search teams should have found something -- a bit of debris, a piece of the sail, an oil slick. Gray was aboard his 40-foot sailboat -- named Tenacious -- which is no small vessel.

"I personally don't remember this ever happening before," Swatland said at a news conference Thursday on Yerba Buena Island. That piqued searchers' interest, Swatland said.

After planning Wednesday to end the search at 1 a.m. Thursday, the Coast Guard decided to extend it one more day. But again, nothing was found, and at 5:30 p.m., the search was called off indefinitely.

All week, the Coast Guard had sent helicopters and C-130 aircraft to fly over a grid, using computer models that would indicate where Gray's 40-foot sailboat might be, based on weather and ocean currents.

Gray's colleagues plan to use satellite imagery and also deploy four or five planes as well as volunteer "spotters" in hopes of finding the missing vessel. They have hired a plane to fly the coastline from north of Bodega Bay to Monterey Bay -- to search every cove, inlet and rock cropping. Another private pilot has been lined up to fly the coast to the south. Additional pilots with the Coast Guard Auxiliary are planning to fly two larger, twin-engine planes heading out over deeper water once the coastal fog clears.

Gray's colleagues also indicated that NASA's Ames Research Center may temporarily join the search Friday if the weather clears. One of NASA's Lockheed ER-2 Earth Resources aircraft, Gray's colleagues said, has a previously scheduled "pilot proficiency" mission Friday to rack up flying hours, and if there's a hole in the clouds, NASA will fly it over the search area with an infrared camera turned on. The ER-2, a civilian version of the Air Force's U-2S reconnaissance plane, flies at high altitude on scientific research projects for government agencies, universities and private companies.

Jim Frew, an associate of Gray and an assistant professor of environmental science at UC Santa Barbara, is coordinating attempts by scientists and several private firms to provide additional satellite imagery of the search area.

Earlier Thursday, the Coast Guard had expanded its search to an area that stretched to about 200 miles offshore, 40 miles north of the Oregon border and 200 miles south of Farallon Islands. The Coast Guard had also focused on a new "drift pattern," based on information that Gray had an inflatable life raft on board that he could have manually deployed if he needed to abandon the sailboat.

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