re: Missing Florida boys' boat found capsized

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I think they probably had trouble with the motor and took the cowling off and a wave hit them turning the boat over.

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The Gulf Stream is more jet than stream, a fluid train snaking along the Florida coast, sustaining sea life on its warm western edge and whisking away anything in its path, including a 19-foot boat and maybe two 14-year-old boys.

To find Austin Stephanos and Perry Cohen, who went missing Friday after a fateful fishing trip off Jupiter, the Gulf Stream is the yellow brick road leading searchers further north day-by-day as they look for breadcrumbs — a cooler, an engine cover, a life vest. By Tuesday, the 3- to 5-mph current could have carried the teens hundreds of miles into South Carolina.

The boat ended its journey upside down more than 60 miles east of Daytona Beach. But it’s more than just the swiftness of the current that ocean experts say must be considered. If the boys are floating on a makeshift raft, they would have a higher profile on the water, and be more subject to the whims of the winds blowing from the south and southwest.

“It’s very difficult to predict where they would be,” said Xiaobiao Xu, a research scientist for Florida State University’s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies. “It the teenagers were very close to the coast, the current would be significantly slower.”

That’s one reason why Mitch Roffer, who has a Ph.D. in biological oceanography and owns the Melbourne-based Roff’s Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service, put out his own map Tuesday of where the teens may be. He said the western edge of the Gulf Stream was about a mile off the coast of Jupiter on Friday. His hope is that the boys got caught in an eddy that formed off Jacksonville, a counterclockwise swirl of water that would slow their movement north. “In theory, they would be moving 2 knots instead of 4,” said Roffer, who did his analysis after numerous requests from civilians who wanted to help in the search.

The Gulf Stream, part of the Great North Atlantic Gyre, is technically called the Florida Current before it hits Palm Beach County. The watery highway redistributes heat from the equatorial areas, shooting warm waters north as it follows the continental break. By Cape Hatteras, it starts off into the Atlantic.

“As it moves north, they could be getting carried much farther out to sea,” said Brian LaPointe, a researcher with Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. “The search area would greatly expand.” As of Tuesday, the Coast Guard said it had covered more than 31,000 square nautical miles of ocean.

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