San Francisco police outlined efforts Thursday to recover the 49-foot vessel that sank this week near Alcatraz, killing a 79-year-old Northern California man and leaving three others missing.
The department said it was working with other agencies to find the sunken vessel, a cabin cruiser out of Stockton called the Volare. While the exact location of the ship was not known as of Thursday afternoon, it is in one of the deepest parts of the San Francisco Bay in an area commonly used as a shipping channel, officials said.
The vessel is believed to have sunk to a depth of at least 120 feet on a rocky seabed, police said, which is too deep for divers to reach. Once they get a better sense of the Volare’s location on the seabed, divers will use an underwater drone to confirm the vessel’s identity and then develop a plan — with the aid of a third-party salvage company — to potentially raise the vessel, a department spokesperson said. It’s not yet clear how much the salvage operation will cost or who would fund the operation…