Two Lives Lost on Cheasapeake Bay, Four Resuced

[Pilot11]

AP Wire is reporting this:

2 dead, 4 rescued in Va. bay after boat capsizes :: WRAL.com

[Boasun]

18 foot boat, six people on board, Then add small craft advisory on top of it.
A disaster waiting to happen.

Wait!! the disaster did happen... What was the boat owner thinking of?? A good day to get killed or what?

[AjariBonten]

In this weather......

What the heck were they doing?

[WouldaShoulda]

Originally Posted by AjariBonten

In this weather......

What the heck were they doing?

Fishing!!

[T37SOLARE]

In a John Boat to boot....

Two dead, four hurt when boat capsizes off Virginia Beach | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com

[travler37]

Thinks about alot of things from mommey switch to cull the heard,
Settles on lights a candle for them......
Mark

[painkiller]

I see this quite a lot on the Bay. On any SCA day in the summer, you'll hear a lot of Maydays. A lot of these guys go out in these open boats not realizing the chop that can build. Oftentimes, you hear that they can't even swim.

I was coming up the Bay on my buddies trawler one time. USCG broadcast a weather alert calling for 60kt winds, hail, and a possible tornado. We saw some people out in a Jon boat fishing. 2 adults and 1 or two kids. We told them of the alert, pointed to the black/purple cloud building over land, and offered to take them aboard. They said "no thanks, we're fine". I don't know if anything ever happened to them, but I would not want to be in a flat-bottomed aluminum lake boat in a Bay storm.

[sailingdog]

Going out in a boat that size, probably overloaded, with water temps in the mid 40s, and during an SCA... basically is asking to get a Darwin. Surviving a dunk in 46˚ water is a good way to get a heart attack or at the least a good case of hypothermia.

[lapworth]

That's Insane but the water looks pretty calm for a SCA in the lower bay.

[josrulz]

I checked with my contacts in the Norfolk area about what the weather was at the time. They confirmed winds 20 - 25 knots, waves about 3 - 5 feet. So it wasn't nice for a boat like that. According to the Norfolk local news, the men on the boat were vacationing from Arizona (if I recall correctly)--they visit every year for a week or two of fishing.

It's possible (and this is me hypothesizing) that they were feeling a certain amount of self-imposed pressure to head out to "make the most of it". Not an excuse, just a contributing factor to a bad decision. Either way, it's unfortunate.