Sonar may have found boater’s body

Searchers may have located the body of Spokane real estate broker Gary Fox, who fell off his boat into Lake Coeur d’Alene on Friday. But after about three hours of sweeping the lake bed on Wednesday, divers were unable to make a recovery.

Windy weather on the surface and poor visibility deep in the water made the search difficult, said Sgt. Matt Street of the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Marine Division.

“The chances are pretty good as far as recovery,” Street said. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Fox, 57, who recently joined Century 21 Beutler and Associates, was on his 54-foot boat with his wife Friday when the accident happened. It was their maiden voyage of the season.

Gene Ralston, an environmental consultant from Kuna, Idaho, near Boise, has volunteered his time, expertise and side-scan sonar equipment to search for Fox’s body.

The sonar, which looks like a 4-foot torpedo towed on a cable, sends sound waves sideways to get a clear horizontal picture of the lakebed. Shortly after the device was deployed Wednesday afternoon, the search team reported a possible location of the body.

Five divers, Ralston and his wife were on the scene, in boats roughly 500 feet from shore in Carlin Bay, which is about four miles directly south of Coeur d’Alene on the lake’s east side. Two divers went into the water; one stayed by the anchor while the other searched in a circular pattern, Street said.

The water depth in the area is about 100 feet. By the time divers reached bottom, they had about 20 minutes before they had to surface for more air, Street added.

A diving team was to go out again this morning, and the Ralstons will review the coordinates of the possible location. If weather and water conditions are right, the Ralstons might also send down a small, remote-controlled unit with robotic arms, Street said.

North Idaho officials have called on Ralston several times in past years for recovery missions in Hayden Lake, the Coeur d’Alene River and Lake Pend Oreille. The state Department of Parks and Recreation pays for his transportation and fuel costs.

County Sheriff Rocky Watson has tried to acquire sideways-looking sonar equipment for the region by splitting the $100,000 cost with neighboring counties, but not enough people have been interested to raise the money, sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger said. Part of the reluctance, Wolfinger said, is that the equipment is used for recovery, not rescue work.

Side-scan sonar, developed in the 1960s, has been used to map ship and submarine wrecks at sea. But it also is widely used to search for drowning victims, especially in colder waters where bodies tend to sink and stay down rather than rise.

Ralston has used the technology extensively, including in some high-profile cases. A few years ago, he aided the Tuolumne County, Calif., Sheriff’s Office and the FBI in finding four bodies of suspected Russian mafia killings near Yosemite. In 2003, the Modesto Police Department hired Ralston to search part of San Francisco Bay for the body of Laci Peterson, the pregnant woman whose husband, Scott Peterson, was convicted of killing her and their unborn child and who was sentenced to death for the murders.

In 2004, Ralston helped locate the body of a man in water 175 feet deep at Lake Pend Oreille.