‘Methodical’ weekend search for missing Lake Oconee boater yields few clues

LAKE OCONEE — Each day for the past month, save for a couple of Sundays and a handful of weekdays, Putnam County Sheriff’s Deputy J.D. Turk has climbed aboard a 19-foot Sailfish patrol boat and cruised the southern reaches of this 19,000-acre reservoir in search of a missing boater.

Ordinarily, Turk, 62, who for much of the past half decade worked as a police officer in Alaska, is a drug-crimes investigator. But ever since an Atlanta-area couple’s tiny fishing boat was found empty and adrift here Feb. 8, Turk has been pressed into duty on the water.

He was out on the lake again Saturday, the one-month mark since boater Gary Jones vanished.

Turk was joined by a handful of largely volunteer recovery crews and divers who have teamed up in what has been an unrelenting four-week quest to find Jones’ body — or any clues of what happened to him and his 49-year-old fiancee Joycelyn Wilson.

On Feb. 9, Wilson’s body was found floating about half a mile from where their empty boat was recovered.

“When you’re looking for something, your mind plays tricks on you,” Turk said as he piloted his boat in an 80-foot-deep channel a few miles above the Wallace Dam. “You’ll think you see something, and you’ll get over to it, and it’ll be a pine cone or something.”

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

After 28 days of fruitless looking, the deputy said he’s not above seeking divine intervention.

“Sometimes,” he said, “it seems like I’m talking to Jesus, saying, ‘Help us find this fellow.’”

Turk, a former forklift driver who became a cop at age 42, lives down toward Macon in neighboring Jones County. On Thursdays, he cooks dinner for his family. His adult children are often there. The other night, his oldest son, who just turned 40, asked Turk why after so many weeks, the authorities were still searching for Jones. Turk motioned to his youngest son, who is in his late 20s.

“If your little brother was missing,” Turk said, “wouldn’t you want me out there looking?”

“Yeah,” his oldest boy replied, “I didn’t think about it that way.”

Some of Jones’ relatives have encountered Turk often enough at the lake that they call him by name.

Three of Jones’ kin were at the lake Saturday — two brothers and a cousin. One of the brothers, who didn’t want his name published, acknowledged Turk after Turk stepped off his patrol boat at the Long Shoals boat ramp not far from the search site at Riley Shoals.

“We’re just very thankful for all the support that everybody’s given us,” one of Jones’ relatives said. “Very thankful for prayers, support, everything.”

Jones and Wilson, who were engaged to be married March 14, had traveled to the lake early last month for an apparent weekend getaway.

They were staying at a waterfront hotel. Sometime around 4 p.m. Feb. 8, they are believed to have boarded Jones’ 11-foot, two-seater fishing boat and ventured some 8 miles down the lake. Their cellphones last “pinged” at about 5 p.m., and their empty craft was spotted by passing boaters less than half an hour later.

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the weeks since, volunteer searchers from across the region have crisscrossed the area where the boat was found, which is centered in one of Oconee’s widest stretches, about 3 miles northwest of the Wallace Dam.

Jones’ family in recent days enlisted the help of a water-recovery expert from Wisconsin.

Saturday, the expert, Keith Cormican, in a boat towing an $85,000 sonar device that looks like a miniature Tomahawk missile, traversed the lake. Back and forth he trawled, three-quarters of a mile at a time, his electronic gear examining the depths in 80-yard-wide swaths with each pass.

“It’s what they call mowing the grass,” Cormican said. “You just methodically drive up and back.”

Still-standing, submerged timber lines parts of the main channel there. The sunken trees, along with underwater boulders, some the size of automobiles, have made scoping out the underwater landscape difficult.

Credit: Ben Gray for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Those are all obstacles that we’ve got to worry about not hitting,” Cormican said. “It’s a challenging body of water.”

With Turk, the sheriff’s deputy, in his own boat and Sheriff’s Lt. Harry Luke in another patrol vessel, the pair of lawmen did their best to on Saturday to shield Cormican’s boat from wave-making lake traffic.

Cormican’s aim was to continue making sweeps of the clearer main channel in hopes that Jones’ body is there.

If it is instead tangled in the underwater forest of snags and branches, there is no telling when or if anyone will find it.

“If he’s not in there, it only gets worse,” Cormican said. “It only gets tougher.”