On Oct. 14th I received a call from a friend of the Hilty family, who asked if Bruce’s Legacy would travel to Seattle, Washington? After hearing of their unfortunate situation, I agreed to investigate the case and he then put me in contact with the Hilty family.
A float plane crashed on Labor Day weekend in the Puget Sound. Involved in the crash were Lauren Hilty, who was 8 months pregnant, along with her two-year-old son Remy, and husband Ross. Lauren and Remy are still missing. Ross was one of seven passengers recovered out of the ten onboard. A total of three are still missing.
Dave Smith and I, arrived in the Seattle area on Tuesday afternoon, October 25th, after a 32-hour drive pulling our boat and equipment. We initially met with Lauren and Remy’s family, and they accompanied us to Whidbey Island. They helped arrange accommodations for us to stay overlooking the Puget Sound. The Lagoon Point Community allowed us to use their boat landing and one of the residents let us tie up to their dock. This allowed us to leave the boat in the water throughout our stay. Bill Brown and Bob Rogers helped with a lot of additional arrangements and gave us some valuable insights to navigate the local tidal waters.
We can’t thank them all enough.
We also got hooked up with Ben and his crew from Coastal Sensing and Survey, a local company that was hired by another group for the search. Ben was also instrumental in helping us with the tide conditions.
The plane wreckage was found prior to our arrival. So we had a localized search area to focus on which aids our efforts. The water depth in our primary search area was 180’ to 225’. Wind, waves, tidal currents and proximity to the busy shipping lanes in Puget Sound made our working conditions precarious. The hazards increase when we have over 500’ of sonar cable towed behind the boat while navigating next to the much larger ships.
After searching over one week we were able to clear a very large area and felt confident enough to determine that no victims were in the zone we searched.
We discussed the odds in finding Lauren and Remy with the Hilty family. Two critical factors being time and expansive water movement were not in our favor. Two months have passed since the plane crash and the Puget Sound tide varies about 13’ every 6 hours.
We sympathize deeply with the Hilty’s situation. Whilst speaking with the family about the outcome of our search efforts, they said it gives them a sense of peace knowing they have done everything possible to locate Lauren and Remy.
In closing, I want to point out that I’m lucky to have volunteers like Dave Smith, who is willing to join me and dedicate the time and effort it takes to pull off these searches.