Five Fishermen Vanished Off Maui. Nine Years Later, Their Boat Washed Up 2,000 Miles Away Beside a Grave.

In September 1988, a marine biologist working on a remote, uninhabited atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific, found a small boat wrecked on the shore.

He recognized it.

Nine years earlier, he had been part of the search for that boat. It had disappeared off the coast of Maui, Hawaii, more than two thousand miles away, with five young men on board.

Nearby, on the island, there was a grave. Shallow, covered with rocks, and marked with a cross made of driftwood.

Inside were the remains of one of the five men.

Nobody lives on that island. And nobody has ever been able to explain who dug that grave.

Hāna

Hāna is a small, remote town on the far eastern coast of Maui. It sits at the end of the famous Road to Hāna, a winding highway of waterfalls and bridges and hairpin turns.

It is a close community. People fish. They know the ocean. Many families have lived there for generations.

On February 11, 1979, five friends from the Hāna area decided to go fishing.

The Sarah Joe

The boat was called the Sarah Joe. It was a seventeen-foot Boston Whaler, a small, sturdy, open fiberglass boat with an outboard motor. A common fishing boat in Hawaii.

The five men on board were Benjamin Kalama, Scott Moorman, Patrick Woessner, Peter Hanchett and Ralph Malaiakini.

They headed out on what started as a calm morning.

The storm

Later that day, the weather changed. Fast.

A severe storm swept across the area. High winds. Heavy rain. Big seas.

About four hours after they left, the crew of the Sarah Joe radioed. Their engine had died.

After that, they were never heard from again.

The search

The search that followed was enormous.

The U.S. Coast Guard sent aircraft and ships. Military planes joined. Private boats went out. Friends and family members searched from the air and the water.

Altogether, they covered roughly fifty-six thousand square miles of ocean.

They found nothing. No boat. No debris. No life jackets. No sign of the five men.

Eventually the search was called off. For the families in Hāna, there were no answers. Only the ocean.

Nine years later

Nine years passed.

Then, in September 1988, a marine biologist named John Naughton was doing field work on Taongi Atoll, also known as Bokak, in the northern Marshall Islands.

Taongi is one of the most isolated places in the Pacific. It is a ring of tiny coral islands around a lagoon, more than two thousand miles southwest of Maui. Nobody lives there.

On one of its islands, called Sibylla Island, Naughton found a wrecked boat.

He had worked on the original search for the Sarah Joe. He recognized it.

Investigators confirmed it using the boat's registration and engine numbers. It was the Sarah Joe.

The grave

Near the boat, on the island, there was a grave.

It was shallow. It had been dug into the sand and coral. Rocks had been piled on top. And at one end, there was a cross made of driftwood.

It looked like it had been made deliberately, and with care.

Investigators examined the remains in the grave. Using dental records, they identified them.

It was Scott Moorman, one of the five men from the Sarah Joe.

No remains of the other four men were found. Not on that island, and not anywhere else.

How did the boat get there?

The first question, how the boat got from Maui to the Marshall Islands, actually has a reasonable answer.

Ocean currents and winds in that part of the Pacific generally flow from east to west. A small boat with a dead engine, drifting from Hawaii, could plausibly be carried thousands of miles westward over time, and eventually end up on a reef or island in the Marshall Islands.

So it is possible that the Sarah Joe drifted for a long time and finally washed up on that remote atoll.

But that explains the boat. It does not explain the grave.

Who dug the grave?

This is the heart of the mystery.

Scott Moorman did not bury himself. Someone dug that grave, laid him in it, piled rocks on top, and made a cross out of driftwood.

But nobody lives on Taongi Atoll. And no one has ever come forward to say they found him and buried him.

There are a few possibilities.

One is that another member of the crew survived the long drift, reached the island alive with Moorman's body, or with Moorman dying, and buried him. Then that survivor died somewhere else on the atoll, or was swept away, and was never found. But no other remains have ever been found on the island.

Another is that passing fishermen found the body and buried it. A private investigator named Steve Goodenow suggested that crews from foreign fishing boats, working illegally in those waters, might have come ashore, found Moorman, given him a burial, and then left without reporting it, to avoid drawing attention to their own presence. That would explain why no one ever came forward. But it is speculation. There is no evidence that it happened.

And then there are the questions no one can answer at all. How long did any of the men survive at sea? Did the boat reach the island with anyone alive on it? What happened to the other four?

What we still don't know

The Sarah Joe's story is one of the strangest in the history of the Pacific.

Five friends went fishing on a calm morning. A storm came. Their engine failed. They vanished. And nine years later, their boat was found on the other side of the ocean, next to one of them, buried with care by someone who has never been identified.

Benjamin Kalama. Patrick Woessner. Peter Hanchett. Ralph Malaiakini. They have never been found.

Who do you think buried him? Someone from the boat? A passing crew who never told anyone? Or someone else entirely?