Update: Missing Connecticut Boater Found Dead

Francis Closter III of Haddam, Conn., in the early hours of Friday morning off the coast of Northville, was found dead by members of the Connecticut State Police Marine Unit in the Connecticut waters of Long Island Sound at approximately 2:30 p.m., according to a release from Lt. J. Paul Vance of Connecticut’s Department of Public Safety. The exact location of the body was not disclosed.

He was pronounced dead and transported to the Office of the Chief States Medical Examiner’s Office for a post-mortem examination.

The U.S. Coast Guard, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, along with rescue crews from the Madison and Clinton, Conn. fire departments, searched the 60-degree waters off Hammonasset Beach State Park in Madison on Friday afternoon for Closter. Riverhead Police notified the Coast Guard and other authorities after they responded to a report of an abandoned 35-foot sailboat found floating at the docks of ConocoPhillips in Northville around 5:30 Friday morning.

Members of the volunteer fire department of Clinton, Conn. searched around the breakwalls of the Sound on Friday afternoon. Colonel Kyle Overturf, the head of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection's Conservation Police, said the search was hampered by the foggy weather, which decreased visibility and prevented rescuers from launching a rescue helicopter.

Members of the Riverhead Police Department and the Coast Guard determined from the course plotter on the sailboat that Closter sailed south on the Connecticut River and made it somewhere between Hammonasset State Park and Kelsey Point in Clinton, where he had a mooring — and there the boat began to circle.

Closter's wife called Connecticut police at 8:30 a.m. Friday morning to report that she had not heard from her husband since he left at noon Thursday on his sailboat from Haddam, bound for Clinton. He was due to arrive at the marina at 5 p.m.

Closter kept his boat at Midway Marina in Haddam.

"I don't know him personally, but I did see him and his sailboat just the other day," said Roy Guile, as he worked on his sailboat's mast at Midway Marina in Haddam Friday afternoon. "If he was heading to Clinton, he shouldn't have ended up east of the Connecticut River. But if you have mechanical problems or lose control with winds and the tides, you could end up almost anywhere."

Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection continues to investigate the incident.