The parents of 19-year-old Danielle Wright have paused their private search for their daughter and six other crewmembers who went missing from the 84-year-old wooden schooner Niña after a severe storm in the Tasman Sea nine months ago. While Ricky and Robin Wright are stepping back from active search operations, family members, friends and supporters are continuing to press the U.S. State Department and other agencies to support renewed efforts to locate the seven missing people.
Ricky and Robin Wright of Lafayette, Louisiana, spent roughly three months in Australia coordinating an airborne search and local efforts for their daughter. On Feb. 18 they announced they would suspend those direct search activities and return to the United States, though they say they have not given up hope that Danielle and the rest of Niña’s crew might still be found alive.
“Ricky and I are wrapping up our visit to Australia and New Zealand in the next two weeks,” Robin Wright wrote on a page devoted to the search, adding that it is difficult to contemplate returning home without Danielle but emphasizing the family’s faith and persistence. The Facebook page for the search is listed as www.facebook.com/ninarescue.
The Wrights financed much of their search personally, spending about $600,000 from their savings, fundraising, Danielle’s college fund and loans from friends and family. Ricky Wright even trained and earned a pilot’s license to support aerial reconnaissance over the areas where Niña might have drifted.
Supporters of the missing crewmembers say the U.S. government has effectively treated the group as if they had perished. Tim Paynter, a Denver sailor, lawyer and advocate for further investigative effort, helped organize public pressure and described frustration with what he calls a lack of full engagement by U.S. agencies. A petition on change.org addressed to then-Secretary of State John Kerry gathered roughly 3,600 signatures calling for increased federal action.
The petition asks the State Department to advocate actively for the missing people, to direct the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to obtain and analyze high-resolution satellite imagery where a small boat or life raft might be found, and to authorize the U.S. Coast Guard to provide Texas EquuSearch access to its search-and-rescue drift-modeling software, as it has in previous searches conducted by that volunteer group.
Paynter and family members contend that the State Department misinterpreted the situation: they say New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Center suspended its large air search without formally declaring the case closed, and that suspension has been mistaken for a definitive end to search operations. The New Zealand search was at the time described as its largest airborne effort for a wooden vessel, covering an extensive area without recovering any trace of Niña — no rafts, debris, sails, cushions, life jackets or other wreckage.
Families have continued to fund periodic aerial reconnaissance based on the theory that Niña was disabled during successive, violent storms while sailing from Opua in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands toward Newcastle, Australia, a passage of about 1,500 miles. Their working hypothesis is that the schooner may have become trapped in reverse-circulating currents, vortexes that can form off the East Australian Current, causing a disabled vessel to loop repeatedly before eventually being carried ashore somewhere along southeastern Australia’s coastline.
The Coast Guard reportedly expressed willingness to share its drift-modeling software to assist search planning, but said such cooperation required clearance from the State Department. Advocates say that clearance was not provided. Meanwhile, DigitalGlobe supplied satellite imagery for crowdsourced review by thousands of volunteers, but U.S. law prevented release of the highest-resolution images for that public effort. The families requested that the NGA obtain and examine higher-resolution satellite imagery to search for evidence of Niña or a life raft, but campaigners say they have received no decisive response.
Niña, a historic racing yacht and former flagship of the New York Yacht Club, was last in contact on June 4 when it was reported about 370 miles west-northwest of Cape Reinga, the northwestern tip of New Zealand’s North Island. The missing include owner and professional mariner David A. Dyche III, 58, his wife Rosemary, 60, their 17-year-old son David, and crewmembers Americans Kyle Jackson, 27; Evi Nemeth, 73; Danielle Wright, 19; and British citizen Matthew Wootton, 35.
At the time of disappearance the yacht carried a manually activated EPIRB, a Spot tracking beacon that also required manual activation to send regular position signals, a satellite phone, parachute flares and a VHF radio. New Zealand authorities reported they received no mayday calls by satellite phone or VHF and no EPIRB or Spot alerts, which led them to conclude the vessel may have foundered suddenly, leaving the crew little or no time to transmit a distress signal.
Family members, volunteers and online supporters remain determined to keep pressure on relevant agencies and to explore any viable options that could produce new leads. They continue to urge use of advanced drift modeling, higher-resolution satellite imagery and cooperative international resources to rule out possibilities and, if possible, provide closure for the relatives of those lost aboard Niña.
April 2014 issue