On Feb. 11, 1979, 27-year-old Scott Moorman and four friends set out from Hana, Maui, for a daylong fishing expedition aboard the Sarah Joe, a 16.5-foot fiberglass motorboat. They did not return. The Coast Guard searched for five days, and private searches continued much longer, but no trace of them was found.

Nine and a half years later, in 1988, marine biologist John Naughton discovered a wrecked boat with Hawaiian registry on Taongi, the northernmost coral atoll in the Marshall Islands, 2,300 miles west of Hawaii. It was the Sarah Joe, and nearby, under a pile of stones and a driftwood cross, were the bones of Scott Moorman. How he came there, who buried him, and what became of the others remain unknown.