Missing Garden Grove Man Linked With Drifting Yacht

A yacht believed to be registered to a Garden Grove attorney who disappeared in February on the last leg of a three-year sailing trip in the Pacific Ocean has been found drifting 1,500 miles south of Honolulu.

Acting on a tip from a foreign fishing boat, Coast Guard search planes Sunday spotted what is believed to be Manning Eldridge’s 41-foot sloop drifting in open waters. A Coast Guard cutter has been dispatched and is expected to reach the boat Saturday.

In Seal Beach, close friends of Eldridge, 43, said Tuesday that they originally thought he had decided to swap his law practice for a life of leisure in the tropics. They vividly recalled the period when he first was reported missing.

“As the days passed I kept thinking that he couldn’t be lost, he was simply on some island deciding whether to come back to this crazy place,” said Harold Rothman, 33, of Seal Beach. “But now, it does not look good.”

Rothman and his wife, Wendi, said Eldridge’s long-held dream had been to sail alone through the tropics, far from the grind of urban life.

He left Long Beach in August, 1984, and sailed to Hawaii and then south across the equator into the warm waters of the South Pacific, skirting atolls and small islands before docking in Tahiti last fall. He left Tahiti on Jan. 8 and was to have arrived in Honolulu Feb. 15 after sailing 2,200 miles. When his sloop, the Marara, did not arrive, friends contacted authorities Feb. 18.

Efforts to find the boat were unsuccessful. A $40,000 reward offered by the Rothmans and others for information leading to Eldridge’s rescue produced false leads and crank calls.

Sunday night, just before dusk, a C-130 Coast Guard search plane spotted the boat north of Palmyra in the Christmas Islands, above the equator. Its mast was broken and sails were torn. Attempts to contact the boat by radio were met with silence.

Although Coast Guard officials would not confirm it, the Rothmans said Tuesday that Coast Guard officials in Hawaii had told them that the registration numbers from the drifting boat match those on Eldridge’s Marara.

A Coast Guard spokesman said a 190-foot cutter was sent to intercept the sloop because it is out of Coast Guard helicopter range.

So the Rothmans and others must wait, hoping the news will be good but admitting that optimism is in short supply.

“This has been a nightmare for us,” said Wendi Rothman, who has known Eldridge since she worked for him as a secretary in the mid-1970s. She described herself as a “sister” to him.

Called from Tahiti

“We were beginning to think the story would never end. Now, it looks like we will have an ending after all,” she said.

The last time the Rothmans talked with Eldridge was New Year’s Day, when he called them collect from Tahiti. The phone bill, $104.63, was on the couple’s living room coffee table Tuesday, underlined in yellow. Scattered nearby were snapshots of his bon voyage party, showing a smiling Eldridge surrounded by friends offering toasts.

“He was really, really ready to come home,” Wendi Rothman said about the call from Tahiti.

“He talked of resuming his law practice. He talked about how he would never be afraid to walk into a courtroom again. He said nothing can test your nerves and confidence like sailing alone.”

Eldridge, 6-feet-2 and 190 pounds, had sailed since his youth, she said. He bought his first sailboat at age 12 with money from a paper route. He bought Marara in 1979, several years after opening his law practice. He kept the sloop moored in Long Beach and spent weekends exploring the Southern California coast and offshore islands.

“He loved the sea,” she said. “It was the tranquility and peacefulness that attracted him.”

Discussed Dangers

Despite attempts by the Rothmans and others to make him reconsider his planned three-year sailing adventure, Eldridge remained determined. The couple said they spent long hours with him discussing the dangers of the trip.

“He seemed to have all the answers--he seemed ready for anything,” Rothman remembered, his eyes welling with tears. “We really thought he was just talking--you know how people do. It was not until the day he sailed off that it finally hit home that it was for real.”

A year before he left, Eldridge leased out a house he owned in Cypress and moved aboard the ship.

“He worked seven years without a vacation, saving for the trip,” Wendi Rothman said.

When the Coast Guard called off its initial search for Eldridge in mid-March, she and another friend flew to Hawaii and began circulating copies of a flyer offering the reward. It had a picture of Eldridge and his boat, and Wendi Rothman has had it printed in 22 languages and circulated throughout the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand.

Described as Resourceful

Eldridge had returned to Southern California just once since leaving in 1984, a year ago for the Rothmans’ daughter’s bat mitzvah. He was in good spirits, the couple said, although he said he had sailed nearly a week once with a broken arm before reaching a port with a doctor. But for the most part, the trip had gone smoothly.

Rothman described Eldridge as an experienced sailor who had been a meteorologist in the military.

“He was resourceful. He always said he would never abandon that boat, that in an emergency he would shut off the engines, go below and wait for help. He said it would float like a cork. I just hope he’s alive--somewhere.”