Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Mystery of the Sarah Jo

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. Josh here, Chuck here. Let's get going with Short Stuff because I love this one. That's right. Yet another maritime disaster. Our most popular subfield it seems like. 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.

Yeah. I think we could maybe even do Maritime Disasters You Should Know as its own separate little short podcast. Yeah. People love Maritime Disasters. Can't as its own separate little short podcast. Yeah, people love Maritime Disasters. Can't get enough of it. They're all sickos. All right. So, this is the story of the Sarah Jo. It takes place in 1979 when a guy from California, a 27-year-old named Scott Moorman who was

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 fishing. It's a great day, let's do it. One of the guys, Ralph Mala-Iakini, he had access to a boat from his brother Robert, who did not go on this trip, but a 17-foot Boston whaler named Sarah Jo and the five of these guys 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.

Yeah, from Hana, 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 Malaikini's brother, later said that the sea looked like a lake that day.

But within 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. No. And it disappeared. That boat was gone. The Coast Guard 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 I guess it seemed like that was probably the end of the story at the time until a decade later in September 88 when a marine biologist named John Naughton was doing some research on an uninhabited island, actually a string of islands, the Taungi Atoll

near the Marshall Islands. And 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 10 years earlier that was looking for it. Yeah, isn't that nuts? It's amazing. I mean, what is just a crazy twist of fate because if he hadn't have been in the search and 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 a pile of rocks and it turned out to be a burial mound. On top of it, kind of a dead giveaway, was a driftwood cross and a part of a jawbone. And when the rocks were removed, he found more parts of a skeleton. And then there was one other thing, a little pad or a little stack 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. That's right, which raises some very big questions, which we'll answer after the break.

Namely, how did this boat get 2300 miles away? How did this guy die? When did he die? Uh, who buried this guy and where are the other four guys? It's a lot of questions. We'll be right back. So Chuck, you just rattattle off a lot of questions. 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 it was Scott Moorman, 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. 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 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. And we just don't know. And we also don't know who would have buried him, but that stack of papers is a pretty good clue, I think. Yeah, there's a theory that he was buried by Chinese fishermen, and the reason why is because of that stack of papers,

they were like little three by three sheets of paper, all together 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 that some people think that this is a Chinese fishing expedition that found and buried him is because there's,

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 lining on at least one side. The big suggestion for why they would have put a cross 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 like a six-year window of when he would have washed up onto the shore. Yeah, they found out that there was a survey of that atoll conducted in 1982. The incident took place in 79.

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, you know, tiny remote islands, that they could have missed something like that, that 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. Yeah. Isn't 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 Sarah Joe. Isn't that freaky? 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 unlikely to me in the 80s.

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. 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 landmass. I'm pretty sure it's in that area, that region. I guess it's possible, but it also had to get from Hawaii to there over three years.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just speculating. I don't know. And if it wasn't just a drift for three years, who knows what happened then? Like I have't know. I'm just speculating. 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 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. 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. For sure. I think that's it for short stuff, right? I got nothing else.

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