Hope wanes for missing boater

PROVO — As time passes, hopes of finding a missing boater on Utah Lake are waning.

"It has slowly been evolving to a recovery," Utah County Sheriff's Lt. Dennis Harris as authorities shut down the search for Lon Thongthipvoravong at dark Wednesday. Searchers made one last sweep with a helicopter over the middle of the lake and the shoreline just after the sun went down. They plan to resume the effort Thursday morning.

Utah County Sheriff's Sgt. Tom Hodgson has been running search and rescue operations since the initial 911 call Monday night reporting that the boat had sunk. As time goes by, he said, the situation has obviously changed. "It's a lot graver than it was," he said.

Six men were aboard the tri-hull boat when it was hit by two swells that overtook it and spilled its passengers into the water. Search and rescue crews were able to find all but Thongthipvoravong within approximately five hours.

Hodgson said that there were nine official rescue boats, five personal boats and several people on the shore Wednesday assisting in the search. He said family members and friends had also organized their own search group in the Sleepy Ridge Golf Course area, with the help of search and rescue workers.

"We're hoping for good news, but we're realistic, too," Harris said.

John Valentine of the Utah County Search and Rescue team was the incident commander the night the boat went under and said it was "extremely difficult that first night." He detailed the order in which the men were found, stating that three of the five were found in the reeded area near a golf course. Searchers focused on that same area Wednesday.

"We found the second individual in a tree," Valentine said. "He climbed into the tree to get out of the reeds, because they're so thick and marshy, it's hard to find your footing. The third individual in the reeds, we heard him hollering, and the fourth was in that general area as well.

"The debris fields are clearly going into that area, and the flow is going that way, so we are still concentrating in that area," he said.

Harris said searchers Wednesday did find more debris near the Geneva Steel cooling pots, including a fishing pack that belonged to Thongthipvoravong. Later in the evening, they found a flip-flop sandal belonging to the missing man. Harris said, however, that the pack was not on Thongthipvoravong when the boat capsized. Although that discovery expanded the search area toward the cooling pots, it also magnified the problem created by recreational boaters.

"We've got the sonar going and divers in the water now, but now we're having a hard time with the skiers," Harris said. "The waves create distortions that makes the sonar extremely hard to read."

Searchers have been keeping track of their progress and changing their operations as needed.

"We constantly shift tactics," Valentine said. "When one thing's not working, you try something else. And we're logging everything on GPS, so as we're finding things, everything is covered, and we're not covering the same things twice."

Contributing: Cimaron Neugebauer

E-mail: emorgan@desnews.com