An Empty Boat and an Eleven Day Search at Strawberry Reservoir
On July 18, 2019, a state employee patrolling the Ladders Day Use Area at Strawberry Reservoir spotted a boat adrift with no one aboard and the motor still running. He alerted authorities at about 2:30 that afternoon. The two anglers who had gone out that morning were not located for another eleven days.
An idling boat with an empty deck is one of the hardest starting points a search team can be handed. It says something went wrong fast. It does not say where.
The Drift Problem
A vessel under power with nobody at the helm does not stay where the accident happened. It keeps moving, sometimes for hours, under whatever combination of throttle, rudder position, and wind is acting on it. By the time anyone notices it, the boat can be a long way from the point where the people left it.
So the first job is not searching. It is reconstructing. Teams work backward from where the boat was found, using its heading, engine setting, fuel burn, and the day’s wind and current, to estimate a probable origin. The result is never a point. It is an area, and at Strawberry that area covers a lot of water.
Why Strawberry Is Slow to Search
Strawberry Reservoir covers roughly 17,000 surface acres and reaches depths of more than 60 feet, at an elevation above 7,500 feet. Every one of those numbers costs time.
Sonar carries the primary load. Side scan systems map the bottom in overlapping lanes, and the coverage has to be methodical or it is worth nothing. A search area measured in square miles, run in lanes narrow enough to resolve a target the size of a person, takes days of boat time before it produces anything.
Then every contact has to be checked. Sonar returns shapes, not identifications, and a reservoir bottom is full of shapes. Stumps. Rock. Sunken vessels. Decades of accumulated debris. Divers or an ROV verify them one at a time. In cold, silt heavy water with limited visibility that verification is slow, and altitude shortens the no decompression limits divers have to work inside, which shortens every dive they make.
Investigators never determined exactly what happened beyond some kind of accident, and said the two men had been working to help each other. That is often where these operations end. The water gives back the people and keeps the explanation.
What the Sonar Also Finds
There is a detail in long searches that rarely makes the coverage. When crews spend eleven days mapping a reservoir floor at high resolution, they do not only find what they came for. They build a picture of everything else down there.
Sunken boats from earlier incidents. Motors. Anchors and chain. Batteries. Fuel and oil containers. Fishing gear by the ton, including lead sinkers that break down into the sediment where fish feed. Strawberry is one of the most heavily used fisheries in Utah, and the bottom reflects that use.
None of it is visible from the surface. It shows up only when someone runs sonar over it, which almost never happens outside an emergency. And when the search ends, the sonar goes home. No agency in Utah is funded or tasked to go back and remove what it found.
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Source: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2019/07/29/bodies-brothers-found/
