The Coast Guard tried to raise Dad by text, but he didn’t reply. Tim wrote: “Please respond to John Mom or Ali ASAP.… Want to know you’re safe and unhurt. Maybe you’re sleeping?”
Four hours of silence passed before Dad emerged at around 12 p.m. his time. “It’s part of being put in my pjace Southern style,” he wrote. “More later.”
But nothing followed that provided any clarity. Instead, roughly an hour later, he wrote: “I’m fine now. One of those nearby fishing boats was in empjoy of a southerq boss. Who, unbeknost to me, wanted to put me in my place. Long story.”
Why was he being so murky? Had he been kidnapped by pirates and someone else was sending these messages? Was he trying to communicate in code? Mom asked for his radio frequency so she could relay it to the Coast Guard in Honolulu. “You need to reply … NOW. What you are saying makes no sense. Anything stolen?” The Coast Guard messaged boats in the area via satellite, asking them to keep a look out for Celebration.
An hour went by before Dad said he’d try the Coast Guard over the SSB, a long-range radio favored by open-ocean sailors. He apologized for not responding, then said: “Nothing stolen No one hurt, No info on boat. Was inside deciding best action.”
We were relieved but confused. Would pirates allow him to stay inside to review his options while they were aboard?
At 2:55 p.m. Dad’s time on the 28th, after he reported that the radio channels were occupied, Mom sent him the Coast Guard’s e-mail address and wrote, “I have been hysterical today. Tim with me all day. What did the fisherman do exactly? Also, what language?”
At 3 p.m., the Coast Guard texted him again. He sent his coordinates—N 6 35.9712’ W 127 17.7952’—and then messaged them: “This is vessel. Celebration WDJ4510 needing to confirm cancellation of epirb 2DCC7B512CFFBFF this morning 5/28/17 around 6:30AM. Cannot reachUSCG on SSB.”
Tim let Dad know that no emergency signal had been sent or received, adding that we were glad he was OK but this was scary for everyone. He signed off: “Love you!!! Be safe.”
Sailing in the Bahamas in 1981. (Courtesy The Carr Family)We were still baffled. Dad’s abrupt shift—from giving us vague information about pirates to providing lucid housekeeping details to the Coast Guard—made no sense. Why couldn’t he be clear about what had happened to him?
An hour later, he wrote Mom: “Still may be in trouble if myinfo gotinto public record.” She responded that nothing had been made public. At 5:08, he told the Coast Guard: “I’m sea beigwatched.”
“We don’t understand your message,” they replied. “Are you in distress? Did anyone come aboard your vessel? What is deep south black cult?”
Tim’s wife, Jen, wanted to confirm that someone else wasn’t pretending to be him. “Tell me something only you would know about me. What do I do for a living?” she wrote.
“Physical sports therapy,” he said. Correct.
Mom pressed for details about the pirates, with minutes passing between responses. “We spoke about Phyllis’ disability She’s retarded or speech disabled,” he wrote, referring to someone we’d never heard of. “She thought Iwas afriendwho should stay. I refused.”
“Who spoke with you about Phyllis?” Mom asked. “Was she related to one of the fishermen? I have no context. This sounds bizarre. Did they board your boat? Threaten you?”
“I luv u always,” he said. “Marni ashes buried at sea Al’s too.”
That was a gut punch. Marni and Al were Mom’s mother and stepfather. They’d both died in the two-year period before Dad sailed. One of his goals was to spread their ashes in the ocean.
“When I saw that message, I thought, Uh-oh. He’s going to do something,” Mom said later. “It was like he was taking care of business.”
A year earlier, Dad was sitting bedside with my mom’s mother as she lay dying of cancer, her body withering into a feather. “I don’t know how to die,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to. Your body knows what to do,” he said into her ear. “You can choose to go anywhere else in your mind. Think of a childhood memory, think of something that you love.” She thought of a camping trip with her sisters. A few hours later she was gone.
Now it was Mom’s turn to talk to him. “Thank you sweetheart,” she wrote at 6:06 p.m. “I am feeling alarmed you aren’t responding to my other questions. It’s safe to send message. Do u want to go to Hawaii instead?”
Three minutes later he responded:
“Killers. Watch yourback sorry…”
A few minutes after that:
“Hawaiisoundsqood barbeque at sea.… Sorry about insuance.”
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Mom wrote. “You are scaring me. What is happening? Sounds like you are going to hurt yourself! Do you need help? Say yes or no.”
“Thesepeopler killers it’s nott beautiful mind,” he said.
With Martha in 2016. (Courtesy The Carr Family)All that day, Dad had moved, slow but steady, on his southwesterly route toward Hiva Oa. But now the map, which updated his position with each message, showed him heading due west. He was drifting off course.
At 6:59, he wrote: “Hekilled hisdaughter well not himhis aid. Poison crack. She’s dying These r old south. People will say I sucided. Better thanwhat he intends,I’ll wait. Miss u.”
“Is your ship disabled?” Mom wrote. “Company?”
“No not in significantway. Listen talk speakers with remote personne.”
“Listening on radio? Who is talking to you?”
“Listeningtome&hisdaughtr talk& re-porting back.”
My sister-in-law broke in, saying she was worried. “So am i notlookingto die,” he wrote. “Don’t want to be killed or enslaved.”
At this point, the Coast Guard requested that he type a simple Y or N to this question: “Is your life in danger?”
“I believe so,” Dad responded. A few minutes later, he wrote to our family: “Goodby.”
“You come home! NO!!!” Mom begged. Ten minutes later, he said, “I’D loveto-buthearboats&Needtoact fast.”
Over the next hour, his responses slowed. At 8:48, Tim wrote: “Satellite shows nearest boat is many many miles away. This isn’t just a lack of sleep right?” At 9:08, with no new message from Dad, Tim begged: “Hit SOS please.”
Family members kept messaging late into the night, but no one heard from Dad after 8:30 his time. The final e-mail from him read: “Not able stop Patjustgot news she’s toberescued&instijtutionalized byher- boy friend.”
All this was happening in the late afternoon and evening where Dad was. In New York State, I was four hours ahead. The last I’d heard, from the message relayed by Tim and Mom (“I’m fine now”), he seemed OK. By the time the situation started deteriorating, I was asleep for the night with our new baby. Mom didn’t know which messages were getting to me, and she didn’t call because she knew it was late on the East Coast.
At 2:30 a.m. my time on the 29th, I woke up to feed the baby and decided to check my phone—something I usually don’t do, but I felt an overwhelming need to message Dad, to let him know I was sending love.
The next morning, I found this e-mail from Mom. “I know you will be getting up before us and will see some scary e-mails from dad last night,” she wrote. “Coast guard says there are no boats near him. He sent us a few more e-mails after the one that says goodbye. But we don’t know what this means yet. We will loop you in as soon as we are up. Just hope he didn’t do something stupid out of paranoia. We messaged him to go to sleep. Hope he read.”
I called Mom and Tim and asked them to forward the messages. What I read looked schizophrenic. I studied them over and over; the fear in his words was tangible.
The Coast Guard hadn’t been able to find any instances of piracy in the area where Dad was. Later research, using records from the International Maritime Organization, showed that of the 204 reports of piracy and armed robbery worldwide in 2017, only three occurred in the region where Dad was sailing. All involved large container-style ships and had happened in Peruvian and Ecuadorean ports.
By the end of the day on May 29, we hadn’t heard from Dad for 24 hours. During a conference call with the Honolulu Coast Guard, I asked about the possibility that he had run into hostile fishermen in the early-morning hours of the 28th.
“Maybe he crossed their nets and they had to come on board to detangle his boat in the middle of the night,” I said. “That would be terrifying—it would be dark, he hadn’t seen people in weeks, and most likely they spoke another language and were angry.”
The Coast Guard didn’t rule it out.
Another question loomed: Had anything at all happened to him? Dad said he’d sent EPIRB and SOS signals, but he hadn’t. And what had he meant by “barbeque at sea”? The message “sorry about insuance” showed up immediately after that. Was he telling Mom that she wouldn’t be able to collect insurance money because there would be no body to recover?
This was so far from how I envisioned Dad leaving this world. I yearned to know what his face looked like, what his heart felt like in those rawest of moments. His words didn’t tell us. As darkness fell around me on the 29th, my mind looped the same haunting questions: Dad, where are you? What did you do?
At noon on May 28 in California, as Mom and Tim were waiting for a sign of life from Dad, the Coast Guard had asked about his mental-health history. Mom told them that he’d never had any problems. But judging by his reaction to sleep deprivation during the Baja Ha-Ha, she said, he may have been delusional from exhaustion.
The Coast Guard began scouring for resources—boats, planes, anything—to get eyes on him. The nearest boats were 200 nautical miles away, more than a day’s journey. A cargo plane could have reached him, but he was so far out that the crew would have only ten minutes to search before they’d need to turn back.
At 11 p.m., a staffer at DeLorme, the maker of Dad’s texting and tracking device, confirmed that it had stopped accepting messages at the exact moment he’d sent his final one. The device had either been turned off, malfunctioned, or been destroyed.
At 1 p.m. on Monday the 29th, the Coast Guard reached the U.S. fishing vessel -American Enterprise, which was 140 nautical miles southeast of Dad’s last known location. The skipper agreed to head to that position immediately.
To construct a search grid, the Coast Guard uses a program called the Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. It gathers information such as a boat’s size and -location, plots 5,000 corresponding points on a map, and creates simulations of likely drift patterns. The Coast Guard usually sends a boat or plane to cover these drift points -immediately. If it can, it drops a self-locating data-marker buoy, which uses the current to validate the system’s predictions. In Dad’s case, he was too far away for either of those options.
Through all this, my family tried to figure out what else we could do. Mom e-mailed the Tahitian authorities. I called the most experienced sailor I knew. He suggested I try to contact fishing and commercial vessels in the area. Uncle John scoured real-time ship traffic online. Mom asked if there were any satellites taking pictures that might show us the boat or, worse, its debris. (There weren’t.) Tim e-mailed the IMB Piracy Reporting Center. But everything we were doing had already been tried by the Coast Guard.
On the evening of Tuesday, May 30, American Enterprise, along with its onboard helicopter, began a grid search southwest of Dad’s last known location. By the evening of May 31, three days since we’d heard from him, they had searched an area the size of Connecticut, with no sign of either the Celebration or any debris.
Meanwhile, a 688-foot Panamanian boat joined the search 240 nautical miles to the southeast—an area where the Coast Guard hypothesized that Dad might be. No sightings were reported.
By June 2, we were becoming desperate. We knew that Dad, even if he was still alive, probably couldn’t survive much longer. On June 4, a week since we’d heard from him, two more boats searched but saw nothing.
A day later, there was a glimmer of hope: the Coast Guard’s satellite data showed what looked like a sailboat headed south, which aligned with initial hypotheses about the boat’s course. Its length and color matched Celebration. The Coast Guard speculated that the boat was harnessing the trade winds south and would make a hard right at Hiva Oa’s latitude.
Unfortunately, by the time satellite data hits the Coast Guard’s desk, it’s 24 hours old, making a moving target nearly impossible to find, especially among scattered clouds and whitecaps.
American Enterprise, which was now the closest ship to the unidentified boat, sent up its helicopter again. The crew saw nothing.
On the 6th, the Coast Guard queried Tahitian hospitals to see if Dad had been brought in. Negative.
On June 8, Dad’s 72nd birthday, the Coast Guard again spotted an unidentified boat along the southern course—about 30 degrees off a Marquesas route. It was getting closer to Hiva Oa, traveling at four knots. Assuming it might be the same boat as before, the Coast Guard used the new data to create a third potential position.
Carr (far left) with boyhood friends in New York, early 1950s. (Courtesy Rodney Dunworth)Finally, on June 13, two weeks after my dad’s last communication, the unidentified boat was close enough that the Coast Guard deployed a plane from Hawaii.
After staging in Tahiti for a day, the C-130 Hercules would fly out, loaded with a communicator, a life raft, and other droppable supplies. The eight-hour round-trip flight would leave only two hours to search at the site, but at least it was something. The Tahiti coast guard’s Falcon surveillance plane would also search.
On the 15th, the planes took off from Tahiti. They scoured the boat’s path. Three vessels were spotted, and one remained unidentified, because it had no electronic signature. However, it didn’t match the description of Celebration, and radio contact confirmed that it had two people aboard.
Subsequent searches found nothing, and on June 21 the Hercules was sent back to Hawaii. On June 22, the Coast Guard suspended the search. All told, it had covered 59,598 square miles over 24 days.
In the 17 months since Dad vanished, no trace of his boat has been found. I doubt it ever will be—although one drift-analysis expert suggested that, if Celebration is still floating, it could hit New Guinea in two years. But I believe that the boat—or what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Pacific, with Dad’s last coordinates serving as his only headstone.
I’ve spent hours trying to imagine what happened in the end. I’ve pictured Dad in an altered state: eyes glazed over, stoically moving about the boat as he completed necessary tasks, like dealing properly with my grandparents’ ashes. Or maybe he was sobbing—heartbroken to know he would never see his family again. Then he either set the teak deck on fire or cut an intake hose, filling the boat with water and sinking it.
If he did any of these things, it was because sleep deprivation had driven him mad, making him believe that suicide was the only way to escape the pirates he’d conjured, the only way to prevent them from killing him.
He didn’t have a gun on board, as far as we know, so he would have died either by fire or in the sea. Did he stay on deck as flames rose around him? Tim doubts it. He thinks Dad started a blaze, dove off the side, and swam straight down. I picture mottled moonlight reflecting on his pale skin as he descends into darkness.
The idea that sleep deprivation made Dad take drastic action may sound fantastical, but there are countless precedents. It’s known that exhaustion, fatigue, and isolation at sea can create extreme levels of delusion. Experienced sailors told me stories of mates who were rendered incapacitated just a few hundred miles offshore, with no obvious cause.
One of the most famous sailing mysteries is the case of Donald Crowhurst, a Briton who single-handed in the 1968 Golden Globe around-the-world race and never came home. He set sail on October 31—the same date Dad set off from San Diego—and was out for 243 days before he succumbed to mental collapse, writing a 25,000-word manifesto on the subject of the cosmic mind and why he had to leave this world. His boat—and log—were found floating in the Atlantic Ocean.
John Leach, a professor with the Extreme Environmental Medicine and Science Group at the University of Portsmouth, England—and an avid sailor and former military psychologist who specializes in prisoners, hostages, and others who’ve experienced isolation—described the perils of survival in the book 438 Days: “It’s okay living inside your own head, provided it doesn’t slip into psychosis.”
When I speak to Leach about my dad’s case, he describes to me how a mind can become unmoored. “Psychosis in simple terms is a breakdown in reality,” he told me. “When you are in isolation, and sleep deprived and water deprived, which I suspect he would’ve been, you take in the information around you and interpret it to fit the model in your head. If he thinks he’s being chased, he’ll hear waves and the wind as engines.”
The cluster effect of sleep deprivation, dehydration, fatigue, duress, and perceptual and sensory deprivation could have resulted in cognitive disorganization that was reflected in his language, Leach explains. In other words, Dad’s signals may have been misfiring, skewing his perceptions. And the timing didn’t help.
“There is something around about the three-week period in isolation that I’ve recorded too many times to dismiss,” Leach says. “Even people without psychiatric problems get a sudden crash psychologically, and for the first time they start thinking about suicide.”
My mother, sure that Dad was suicidal, had tried to reply to him in ways that would bring him off the ledge.
“Your dad used to tell me that the brain is the only organ in the body that doesn’t tell you when it’s malfunctioning,” she says. “I was afraid to say to him that’s what I thought was happening—that it was a hallucination—but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I didn’t want him to feel abandoned and stop talking. Hearing each other through a sat phone would have helped, but he didn’t have one.”
When I ask if she has regrets, she laments not being more involved. “I felt so angry about him wanting to do this and spending so much money and he was going to leave me. I had to say, This is just his,” she says. “I didn’t want to go but I didn’t want to be alone, either. And he would’ve resented me if I had said, ‘You are not going.’ ”
Distancing herself mentally from the boat, the trip, and the departure date was a coping mechanism—the less she had to do with it, the less fearful she was. But she still wanted to be a brave, supportive wife, so she helped by packing and provisioning the boat in San Diego. Now she wonders if that was enough: “If I had educated myself about what he would face out there, I might have been more persuasive about him not going alone.”
Then Mom tells me something I didn’t know. “He always felt like we got the life I wanted, not the life he wanted, filled with adventure—diving and sailing,” she says. “He didn’t care about living in a nice house. He cared more about living in other places and exploring.”
“When he talked about buying the boat, I tried to offer him alternatives to make life more exciting,” Mom says. “But he couldn’t be swayed.”
Eventually, they were too far along to turn back. “It felt like the boat was in charge of him,” she says. “I know it wasn’t personal but still, the fact that he went off on this trip felt like I wasn’t enough. Ultimately, the boat won.”
Dad loved us—that’s why he compromised on how he wanted to live. His obsession with the boat and the trip suddenly made sense to me. He wanted to reclaim his life.
In the end, my family can go around and around on what happened and why. We’ll never really know. We can feel guilt, regret, and anger. But we’ll always return to this: maybe Dad wasn’t experienced enough to chase his goal, but he had to try or he’d die wondering, resenting his own life. It’s hard to say that anyone should die this way. But the question remains: If you have a lifelong dream, and time is running out, what would you do?
I’m standing in a single-wide trailer that serves as the office of the Nuevo Vallarta marina. It’s the checkout point for boats departing Mexico in the Nayarit region, 30 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta by car, and the last place Dad docked before setting out to sea.
Carr and Martha in 1975. (Courtesy The Carr Family)Under fluorescent lights, I see “Richard Irwin Carr” scribbled across a photocopy of his departure papers and recognize his compact, jaunty handwriting. I know it intimately from birthday cards and school notes and phone messages on our brick-colored kitchen counter.
On May 2, 2017, in the early evening, Dad filled out the line labeled Voyage Plan: “Sail to South Pacific and around world.” It reads like a fantasy, like a little boy trying to catch smoke with his fingers.
I can picture his face, flushed from a combination of pride and embarrassment as he handed the papers back to the clerk. Then he would have stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets.
Ian and I walk down to the spot where he had his boat—A-23, the only unmarked stall in the marina and the one most often used for short-term, transient vessels. I touch the cleat where his rope was last unfurled. I’m sure that the sounds around us are no different than they were on the day he left: children playing at a nearby preschool, a boat being sanded, birds chirping, and the occasional large yacht motoring past the marina to sea.
Being here makes it hard to imagine the drama of Dad’s last hours. I think back to the text he sent for Mother’s Day, nearly two weeks into his crossing. I told him I’d thought of him during Wyatt’s birth, and he said: “Think of me often. I’m an interesting person who loves you as a person as well as my daughter. And I find that gratifying!”
A few days later, Ian and I charter a sailboat from the dock in La Cruz where Dad parked for a month and a half before he headed to Nuevo Vallarta. Palm trees and bougainvillea stand out against the white stucco of the thatch-roofed buildings surrounding the marina. The Sunday craft fair is a fiesta of coconut popsicles, fish tacos, and fresh juices.
The deckhand is a young, thin Mexican man in his twenties named Eddie. He looks like many of the skater boys I went to high school with in L.A., wearing Vans and a chain wallet. He puts on Def Leppard and Weezer as we sail into Banderas Bay. His English is excellent. I explain why I’m in town, and when I mention Celebration he grows quiet.
“I remember your dad,” he says. “Short, with gray hair.” Eddie had helped him rig his sails. Then he says, “I offered to go with him.” Eddie had been looking for work as a paid deckhand.
Dad had hoped to find mates to sail with during parts of his circumnavigation—he once wrote on his blog that the experience would feel incomplete without sharing it—but he was anxious about the laws in the South Pacific. He told my mom that he didn’t want to be financially responsible for his crew, potentially made up of strangers, and any medical needs they might have once they hit the ocean. Being beholden felt too risky to him.
As we sail out toward Cabo Corrientes, I take in the horizon, cupping my hands at my eyes like blinders. I want to imagine what it’s like to see only the edge for days on end. I shake my head at the knowledge that Dad turned down Eddie’s offer. He would probably still be alive.
Back home, people ask if going to Mexico was hard. Maybe I was in denial or just numb, but it wasn’t. Being there made me feel close to Dad. The hardest part was leaving, like I wouldn’t feel his presence again unless I returned for a visit.
The other hardest part is that he’ll never know Wyatt. She’s a risk-taker. My first daughter would sit quietly on the bed or changing table, while my second wants to swan-dive off it. I can see her natural inclination to push things out of the way and investigate everything around her.
A writer I know who has interviewed some of the most daring athletes in the world—people who have both flourished and perished in their edge-of-peril pursuits—told me that, at some point, if we feel the itch in our soul to explore, we have to go. Some will consider Dad’s behavior reckless, arguing that he was underprepared (I can’t argue) and irresponsible (maybe, though he waited until his children were grown before setting off). But to assert that he was wrong to go, my writer friend said, is “to deny a potent ingredient that made him who he was—the joy in him, perhaps.” I agree. Maybe I’m like Dad and I would have gone, too.
At the memorial we held five months after he vanished, a family friend talked about the grudge she felt when he first explained his plan to sail around the world.
“How dare he do what he feels like doing,” she said with a chuckle. She told me that she realized her anger was a manifestation of envy and admiration. She respected his doggedness and willingness to do what most are too frightened to.
Patients from his practice—some who had seen him for more than 30 years—-introduced themselves and told stories about times when their lives would’ve gone south if Dad hadn’t been there. I was meeting them for the first time, but they felt like relatives. Their gratitude for him, and for his unrelenting determination, matched what I felt.
Just like his granddaughter, Dad kept pushing things out of his way to get to the horizon. He had a burning thing inside that inspired him to look over the edge. And for a few days at least, he sailed with abandon, the wind at his back.
Like any adventurer, Dad didn’t know how it would end. He had to sail away to find out.
Ali Carr Troxell