The personal locator beacon was still with one of the survivors when rescuers began searching. Its signal led an aircraft crew to two people beside a partially submerged vessel, eighteen miles off Pass-a-Grille Beach.
Their twenty-six-foot boat had capsized on September 6, 2024. Both adults were wearing life jackets.
The Pass-a-Grille boat rescue involved a Coast Guard helicopter crew and Pinellas County sheriff’s deputies. The distance from shore meant that locating the people and recovering them were distinct parts of the emergency.
Pass-a-Grille: The position in the signal
At 12:08 p.m., the sheriff’s dispatch contacted Coast Guard watchstanders in St. Petersburg about two mariners in distress.
The Coast Guard’s account identifies the personal locator beacon as the means that guided the aircrew to them. It does not attribute the discovery to a chance sighting from the beach or another passing boat.
The aircraft crew found both boaters. One was hoisted from the partially submerged vessel. Deputies recovered the other survivor.
They were transported to Bay Pines Boat Ramp, with no injuries reported.
Equipment that stayed part of the story
The release does not describe the cause of the capsize or reproduce either person’s account of the moments before it. Its clearest details concern what remained available afterward: flotation, a beacon and coordinated rescue crews.
Those details make the story more specific than a general account of a boat overturning. The people were already equipped to remain afloat and to send a location after the vessel could no longer provide a normal ride home.
The owner later arranged recovery of the boat with commercial salvors. Human recovery had been the immediate task; the vessel could be dealt with separately.
Eighteen miles is an ordinary distance for a functioning boat. Once it overturns, the same distance describes the gap other people must cross to reach its occupants.
In this case, a signal survived the transition between those two situations. It gave the search a position, the helicopter and deputies a place to go, and the boaters an ending at a ramp rather than an unresolved search offshore.
Sources and reporting
Researched reporting: an original narrative based on the published records linked below.
