The weekend seemed perfect for a summer excursion on the azure waters of Lake Tahoe. Josh Pickles, a DoorDash executive, took several family members and friends on his boat to celebrate his mother’s 71st birthday. His wife, Jordan Sugar-Carlsgaard, stayed home to care for their infant daughter.
But sunshine suddenly gave way to a ferocious storm on Saturday afternoon that caught even longtime Tahoe residents by surprise. Thunder and lightning roared from the sky, dumping rain and snow. Waves as tall as eight feet ripped across the lake, according to some accounts.
The day ended in a nightmare. Mr. Pickles’s 27-foot-long boat capsized, tossing passengers into the frigid water toward the south end of the lake. He and his parents died, along with five of their guests.
And Ms. Sugar-Carlsgaard, 38, suddenly found herself a widow with a seven-month-old baby.
“We are devastated by this tragedy,” she said in a statement. “No words can express the pain and anguish we feel knowing their lives were lost during what was meant to be a joyful time on the lake.”
Mr. Pickles was an experienced sailor but the gold Chris-Craft boat was still new to him, said Sam Singer, a family representative. He had operated it twice last year, and Saturday’s outing was the first time he had taken it out this season.
Like many who work in the tech industry, the couple split time between their homes in the Tahoe region and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Ms. Sugar-Carlsgaard is an executive assistant at Airbnb, according Mr. Singer.
Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America, is nestled within the mountains along the California-Nevada border. In the winter, the region becomes a snowy playground; in the summer, visitors fish, hike and swim. Ski resorts and multimillion-dollar vacation homes ring the lake, and casinos on the Nevada side draw gamblers.
‘It was time to get off the water.’
The day before the boating accident, winds belted the Tahoe basin as a mass of cold air from the Gulf of Alaska approached Nevada. The National Weather Service had a wind advisory in effect for the area and warned of “choppy lake waters” as gusts of 80 to 100 miles per hour whipped the ridgelines.
After sunrise on Saturday, the winds eased, but the day felt more springlike as cold air pushed into the area. Afternoon temperatures were in the 60s, about 20 to 25 degrees below normal for this time of year. The cold air funneling into the region made the atmosphere unstable.
Thunderstorms are notoriously difficult to forecast with precision.
By the afternoon, storms emerged north of Lake Tahoe near Truckee, Calif., and Palisades Tahoe ski resort as well as near Incline Village, Nev., delivering an unseasonable mix of rain and snow, as well as graupel, a hail-like pellet.
“I look at the weather every day, it caught me off guard that day,” said Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist and professor at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Eric Mein, who owns the Topside Boat Training school, was on the water before the storm. He said he felt a “sixth sense” that the calm would soon give way to calamitous conditions.
“The lake was laying down, the clouds were building up. You could see the wind was ready to start blowing,” he said. “It was time to get off the water.”
Just after 2 p.m., high winds blew through and persisted for at least 90 minutes. Wind data collected from an anemometer in D.L. Bliss State Park, on the west shore near where Mr. Pickles’s boat capsized, showed that wind speeds spiked upward at 2:10 p.m. and continued to strengthen.
One of the worst locations might have been where Mr. Pickles’s Chris-Craft was situated that afternoon. Winds usually come out of the south, but they came from the north that day, intensifying as they raced across nearly the length of Lake Tahoe.
“You have a longer distance for those waves to travel across the lake,” said Kyle Floyd, officer in charge at the U.S. Coast Guard station in Tahoe City, Calif. “That greater distance can build the waves dramatically.”
Boaters were caught unaware. The abrupt, unpredictable storm did not meet the National Weather Service’s criteria for severe weather on Saturday, said Dawn Johnson, the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in nearby Reno, Nev.
“We would issue a severe thunderstorm warning if we were seeing a strong thunderstorm capable of reaching near 60 m.p.h. winds,” Ms. Johnson said. “Nothing we saw on radar showed us that an event like that was capable of occurring.”
Boaters in distress
Lindsay Chandler, a service manager at a local marina, said she felt the air temperature drop quickly and saw waves churning the lake.
“It looked like the ocean. We couldn’t see across the lake, it was snowing heavily,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my 15 years living in Lake Tahoe.”
Several boaters were in distress. Dan Johnston was out on his 26-foot MasterCraft with his wife, their son and several friends when the winds kicked up. Water surged over the back of the boat, and everyone grabbed coolers and trash cans to start bailing it out. Even so, water crept into the engine compartment, and Mr. Johnston said his boat began to stall.
“As I was losing power, my wife was like, ‘We should call 911,’” he recalled.
A marine rescue team arrived and started towing his boat toward shore. But as their momentum slowed, Mr. Johnston said, his watercraft rolled over. He and his wife swam to shore, he said, and rescuers pulled other passengers from the water, who were loaded into an ambulance.
On the ride to the hospital, Mr. Johnston said he could hear calls over the radio about a desperate rescue effort underway on the west side of the lake.
Shortly before 3 p.m., the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office received several calls about Mr. Pickles’s capsized boat. Of the 10 people on board, two were rescued by emergency responders and taken to a hospital.
Six bodies were recovered from the water. Two more were located over the next two days.
The victims were Mr. Pickles; his parents, Terry Pickles, 73, and Paula Bozinovich, 71, of Redwood City, Calif.; his uncle, Peter Bayes, 72, of Lincoln, Calif.; Timothy O’Leary, 71, of Auburn, Calif.; Stephen Lindsay, 63, of Springwater, N.Y.; and Theresa Giullari, 66, and James Guck, 69, of Honeoye, N.Y.
Mr. Pickles, 37, was a senior director at DoorDash, and had worked for the food delivery app for nearly seven years, following stints at other major tech companies in the Bay Area.
“Josh loved his team and was an inspiration to everyone who had the privilege of knowing him,” Ravi Inukonda, chief financial officer at DoorDash, said in a statement. “We miss him deeply and will carry his memory with us always.”
Laurel Rosenhall is a Sacramento-based reporter covering California politics and government for The Times.
Amy Graff is a Times reporter covering weather, wildfires and earthquakes.
The post How a Birthday Boat Ride on Lake Tahoe Turned Tragic appeared first on New York Times.
