October 9, 2024 • 10 mins
In another chapter of our continuing mysteries of the sea theme, we deliver a truly baffling mystery involving a ship that was lost and found, which brought more questions than answers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. Josh here, Chuck here,
let's get going with short stuff because I love this one.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right, yet another maritime disaster our most popular sub field,
it seems like.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Yeah, I want to give a huge shout out to
Strange Company, a great website. They have a Friday link
dump every week. It's really great. But they also just
write on strange mysteries and weird stuff and that's where
I first heard of this. But also hat tip to
the Maui Times and the La Times for some help
with getting our facts straight on this.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, I think we could maybe even do maritime disasters.
You should know as its own separate little short podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
People love maritime disasters, can't get enough of it. They're
all sickos, all right.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
So this is the story of the Sarah Joe.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It takes place in nineteen seventy nine when a guy
from California, a twenty seven year old named Scott Mormon
who is living in Hawaii, went with four construction worker buddies.
Went to them and said, hey, guys, let's not do
our work today. Let's go let's go fishing. It's a
great day.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
One of the guys, Ralph mala Yacchini. He had a
access to a boat from his brother Robert, who did
not go on this trip, but a seventeen foot Boston
whaler named.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
The Sarah Joe. And the five of these guys.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Who were you know, they weren't super experienced fishermen, but
they knew their way around a boat and ocean set
out for you know, probably not a three hour tour,
but maybe a six hour tour.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah, from Hannah, Hawaii, I believe, on the island of Maui.
And because this was not supposed to be more than
a few hour tour, they didn't pack a ton of supplies.
They were just going fishing. It was a beautiful day
and like you said, they skipped work to take advantage
of it. Robert, Ralph mala Yacchini's brother, later said that
the sea looked like a lake that day. But within
(02:02):
two hours of them setting out on the Sarah Joe,
it just completely turned. And within a couple hours of that,
there was a gale that had whipped up and it
was just not a good scene for somebody to be
out in an open boat on.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
No and it disappeared that boat was gone, the Coastguard
went looking. Obviously, they spent about a week searching. They
eventually called off their search, and then friends and family
kept looking for about another month and never found anything
at all, no trace anywhere of any of these guys,
anything on that boat, any part of that boat. And
(02:41):
I guess it seemed like that was probably the end
of the story at the time, until a decade later,
in September eighty eight, when marine biologist named John Naughton
was doing some research on an uninhabited island, actually a
string of islands, the Tamgi Atoll, the Marshall Islands, and
(03:02):
he saw a boat and he was like, wait a minute,
it's got a Hawaiian registry. I think that's the Sarah Joe.
And the reason I know that is because I was
one of the guys ten years earlier.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
That was looking for it. Yeah, in that nuts, it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
I mean, what was just a crazy twist of fate,
because if he hadn't been in the search, he said,
he immediately thought of the Sarah Joe. If he hadn't
have been, you know, primed already ten years before to
be thinking about that boat, who knows if anybody would
have ever done anything about it. But John Naughton. He
started looking around and found near the boat there was
(03:38):
a pile of rocks and it turned out to be
a burial mound. On top of it, kind of a
dead giveaway is was a driftwood cross and a part
of a jawbone. And when the rocks were removed, he
found more parts of his skeleton. And then there was
one other thing, a little pad or a little stack
(04:00):
of paper that had been partially burned. And that was it.
John Naughton looked around the rest of the beach. He
didn't find anything else. He didn't find any other remains.
He didn't find anything but this weird assemblage of clues
and human remains.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Which raises some very big questions which will answer after
the break, namely, how did this boat get twenty three
hundred miles away, how did this guy die, when did
he die? Who buried this guy? And where are the
other four guys.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
It's a lot of questions. We'll be right back, So, Chuck,
(05:03):
you just rattled off a lot of questions. And first
thing we should say is that after Naughton got the
remains back into the hands of the US Army Central
Identification Lab in Hawaii. They couldn't determine how this person
died or when they died, but they did determine that
(05:23):
it was Scott Mormon, the Native Californian who was one
of the guys who shipped out on that boat with
the other four dudes. It definitely was somebody from that
Sarah Joe Expedition fishing trip, and it definitely was the
Sarah Joe boat. But that was about all of the
questions that you just said that they could answer.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Yeah, they you know, of course, his family was like
coming up with ideas how he could have made it
that far, whether or not he was alive when he
got there. His family thinks that he may have gotten
there alive, but then you know, died of from the
elements and not having water. Other people say, well, maybe
(06:04):
he strapped himself to the boat and actually died out there,
but that's how he finally reached land because he was
strapped to that boat.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
And we just don't know, and we also.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Don't know who would have buried him, but that stack
of papers is a pretty good clue.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I think, Yeah, there's a theory that he was buried
by Chinese fishermen, and the reason why is because that
stack of papers, they were like little three by three
sheets of paper. Altogether the stack was less than an
inch thick, but one of the major characteristics of the
stack of paper was that there was a sheet of
foil in between each sheet of paper. And the reason
(06:44):
that some people think that this is a Chinese fishing
expedition that found and buried him is because there in
Chinese funeral customs something called joss paper, which is burned
and it's considered spirit money, so it's a gift to
the deceased to use in the afterlife. And the defining
characteristic of joss paper is that it has a foil
(07:04):
lining on at least one side. The big suggestion for
why they would have put across is that they may
have recognized this guy as Caucasian, which would suggest that
they found him while he was still relatively intact. But
that also still leaves the question, Chuck of when this
burial took place, and they think they got it within
(07:26):
like a six year window of when when he would
have washed up onto the shore.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, they found out that there was a survey of
that atoll conducted in nineteen eighty two. The incident took
place in seventy nine. The report didn't say anything about
a boat. You would think it would be included. I
also saw that it's possible, you know, when you're at
these tiny remote islands, that they could have missed something
(07:55):
like that. It's those surveys aren't the most like detailed surveys.
But if they didn't miss it, then that would mean
that something happened over the course of three years.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, in that eerie So imagine that if he had
strapped himself to the boat and died in the storm
or shortly after, that would suggest that he was adrift
in the Pacific for three years, dead and strapped to
the Mary Sarah Joe. That freaky.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah. I don't know enough about how big the ocean
is to know if three years is if you could
drift around for three years without anybody seeing you ever,
that seems lovely to me in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Yeah, yeah, but I don't know, man, this is a
pretty remote part of the world. I think this is
where that Point Nemo area is, you know, the most
remote part of the world that's furthest away from any land. Masks.
I'm pretty sure it's in that area, that region.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I guess it's possible, but it also had to get
from Hawaii to there over three years.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah, I don't know. I don't speculating.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I don't know. And if it wasn't just a drift
for three years, who knows what happened then, Like, I
have no clue and it will probably never be answered.
But the reason that they think the Chinese fishing expedition
didn't tell anybody is because it was probably an illegal
fishing expedition, which is, you know, they didn't tell anybody
that they found these remains, but at least they took
(09:22):
the time to bury them and give them like some
sort of funeral service, which is pretty top notch for
illegal fishermen if you think about it.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, I think that's the kind of coolest part of
the story, is that they've had enough respect for this
human that they didn't even know to take care of
it in that way.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
For sure. I think that's it for short Stuff, right,
I got nothing else. Short Stuff is.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. Josh here, Chuck here,
let's get going with short stuff because I love this one.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right, yet another maritime disaster our most popular sub field,
it seems like.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Yeah, I want to give a huge shout out to
Strange Company, a great website. They have a Friday link
dump every week. It's really great. But they also just
write on strange mysteries and weird stuff and that's where
I first heard of this. But also hat tip to
the Maui Times and the La Times for some help
with getting our facts straight on this.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, I think we could maybe even do maritime disasters.
You should know as its own separate little short podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
People love maritime disasters, can't get enough of it. They're
all sickos, all right.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
So this is the story of the Sarah Joe.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It takes place in nineteen seventy nine when a guy
from California, a twenty seven year old named Scott Mormon
who is living in Hawaii, went with four construction worker buddies.
Went to them and said, hey, guys, let's not do
our work today. Let's go let's go fishing. It's a
great day.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Let's do it.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
One of the guys, Ralph mala Yacchini. He had a
access to a boat from his brother Robert, who did
not go on this trip, but a seventeen foot Boston
whaler named.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
The Sarah Joe. And the five of these guys.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Who were you know, they weren't super experienced fishermen, but
they knew their way around a boat and ocean set
out for you know, probably not a three hour tour,
but maybe a six hour tour.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Yeah, from Hannah, Hawaii, I believe, on the island of Maui.
And because this was not supposed to be more than
a few hour tour, they didn't pack a ton of supplies.
They were just going fishing. It was a beautiful day
and like you said, they skipped work to take advantage
of it. Robert, Ralph mala Yacchini's brother, later said that
the sea looked like a lake that day. But within
(02:02):
two hours of them setting out on the Sarah Joe,
it just completely turned. And within a couple hours of that,
there was a gale that had whipped up and it
was just not a good scene for somebody to be
out in an open boat on.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
No and it disappeared that boat was gone, the Coastguard
went looking. Obviously, they spent about a week searching. They
eventually called off their search, and then friends and family
kept looking for about another month and never found anything
at all, no trace anywhere of any of these guys,
anything on that boat, any part of that boat. And
(02:41):
I guess it seemed like that was probably the end
of the story at the time, until a decade later,
in September eighty eight, when marine biologist named John Naughton
was doing some research on an uninhabited island, actually a
string of islands, the Tamgi Atoll, the Marshall Islands, and
(03:02):
he saw a boat and he was like, wait a minute,
it's got a Hawaiian registry. I think that's the Sarah Joe.
And the reason I know that is because I was
one of the guys ten years earlier.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
That was looking for it. Yeah, in that nuts, it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
I mean, what was just a crazy twist of fate,
because if he hadn't been in the search, he said,
he immediately thought of the Sarah Joe. If he hadn't
have been, you know, primed already ten years before to
be thinking about that boat, who knows if anybody would
have ever done anything about it. But John Naughton. He
started looking around and found near the boat there was
(03:38):
a pile of rocks and it turned out to be
a burial mound. On top of it, kind of a
dead giveaway is was a driftwood cross and a part
of a jawbone. And when the rocks were removed, he
found more parts of his skeleton. And then there was
one other thing, a little pad or a little stack
(04:00):
of paper that had been partially burned. And that was it.
John Naughton looked around the rest of the beach. He
didn't find anything else. He didn't find any other remains.
He didn't find anything but this weird assemblage of clues
and human remains.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Which raises some very big questions which will answer after
the break, namely, how did this boat get twenty three
hundred miles away, how did this guy die, when did
he die? Who buried this guy? And where are the
other four guys.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
It's a lot of questions. We'll be right back, So, Chuck,
(05:03):
you just rattled off a lot of questions. And first
thing we should say is that after Naughton got the
remains back into the hands of the US Army Central
Identification Lab in Hawaii. They couldn't determine how this person
died or when they died, but they did determine that
(05:23):
it was Scott Mormon, the Native Californian who was one
of the guys who shipped out on that boat with
the other four dudes. It definitely was somebody from that
Sarah Joe Expedition fishing trip, and it definitely was the
Sarah Joe boat. But that was about all of the
questions that you just said that they could answer.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Yeah, they you know, of course, his family was like
coming up with ideas how he could have made it
that far, whether or not he was alive when he
got there. His family thinks that he may have gotten
there alive, but then you know, died of from the
elements and not having water. Other people say, well, maybe
(06:04):
he strapped himself to the boat and actually died out there,
but that's how he finally reached land because he was
strapped to that boat.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
And we just don't know, and we also.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Don't know who would have buried him, but that stack
of papers is a pretty good clue.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I think, Yeah, there's a theory that he was buried
by Chinese fishermen, and the reason why is because that
stack of papers, they were like little three by three
sheets of paper. Altogether the stack was less than an
inch thick, but one of the major characteristics of the
stack of paper was that there was a sheet of
foil in between each sheet of paper. And the reason
(06:44):
that some people think that this is a Chinese fishing
expedition that found and buried him is because there in
Chinese funeral customs something called joss paper, which is burned
and it's considered spirit money, so it's a gift to
the deceased to use in the afterlife. And the defining
characteristic of joss paper is that it has a foil
(07:04):
lining on at least one side. The big suggestion for
why they would have put across is that they may
have recognized this guy as Caucasian, which would suggest that
they found him while he was still relatively intact. But
that also still leaves the question, Chuck of when this
burial took place, and they think they got it within
(07:26):
like a six year window of when when he would
have washed up onto the shore.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, they found out that there was a survey of
that atoll conducted in nineteen eighty two. The incident took
place in seventy nine. The report didn't say anything about
a boat. You would think it would be included. I
also saw that it's possible, you know, when you're at
these tiny remote islands, that they could have missed something
(07:55):
like that. It's those surveys aren't the most like detailed surveys.
But if they didn't miss it, then that would mean
that something happened over the course of three years.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, in that eerie So imagine that if he had
strapped himself to the boat and died in the storm
or shortly after, that would suggest that he was adrift
in the Pacific for three years, dead and strapped to
the Mary Sarah Joe. That freaky.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah. I don't know enough about how big the ocean
is to know if three years is if you could
drift around for three years without anybody seeing you ever,
that seems lovely to me in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
Yeah, yeah, but I don't know, man, this is a
pretty remote part of the world. I think this is
where that Point Nemo area is, you know, the most
remote part of the world that's furthest away from any land. Masks.
I'm pretty sure it's in that area, that region.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I guess it's possible, but it also had to get
from Hawaii to there over three years.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah, I don't know. I don't speculating.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I don't know. And if it wasn't just a drift
for three years, who knows what happened then, Like, I
have no clue and it will probably never be answered.
But the reason that they think the Chinese fishing expedition
didn't tell anybody is because it was probably an illegal
fishing expedition, which is, you know, they didn't tell anybody
that they found these remains, but at least they took
(09:22):
the time to bury them and give them like some
sort of funeral service, which is pretty top notch for
illegal fishermen if you think about it.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, I think that's the kind of coolest part of
the story, is that they've had enough respect for this
human that they didn't even know to take care of
it in that way.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
For sure. I think that's it for short Stuff, right,
I got nothing else. Short Stuff is.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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