Long-Missing Fishing Trawler Found Beside a Wind Turbine and the Rescue Chopper Logs Reveal a Dark Story
Captain Oscar Diaz's trawler sent out a Mayday off Block Island on New Year's night in 2019.
Seven years later, divers found his sunken boat resting beside one of America's first offshore wind turbines.
But the darkest detail is buried in the 2019 rescue records, and the Coast Guard still hasn't reopened its case.
Divers Found the Mistress 50 Feet From Turbine No. 1
The Mistress was a 52-foot wooden trawler out of Point Judith, Rhode Island, and she went down in heavy seas that night.
Diaz was aboard with his son Tim and his nephew John Ansay.
Another fishing boat pulled Tim out of a life raft.
Oscar Diaz and John Ansay were never found.
The Coast Guard never located the hull, recorded the Mistress as lost, and closed its investigation.
That's where the story sat until July 2026, when the Rhode Island nonprofit Green Oceans picked up a target on side-scan sonar.
Divers went down on August 30 and found a wreck in about 92 feet of water – roughly 50 feet from the base of Block Island Wind Farm turbine No. 1.
They photographed the propeller, the fuel tanks, the deck hatch, and a net drum that survivor Tim Diaz had built himself and confirmed as his father's.
Green Oceans president Michael Lombardi told Fox News Digital he is 100 percent certain the wreck is the Mistress.
Divers also reported what appear to be human remains at the site.
The Rescue Helicopter Turned Back After 37 Minutes
A Coast Guard helicopter answered the Mayday calls that night.
According to Coast Guard records, the crew "was unable to conduct sector or parallel searches and returned after approximately 37 minutes."
Those records blame strong winds, poor visibility and low cloud cover – and name the nearby wind turbines as a hazard too.
Two men were still missing in that frigid January water, and the turbines made the list of reasons the chopper couldn't stay.
Green Oceans leader Ben Riggs put it in plain terms – "you don't want to get hit by a blade that's going 200 miles an hour."
Lombardi says investigators should look at whether Diaz turned to starboard in "an attempt to avoid a collision with the turbine."
Lombardi said that kind of turn, made with water already flooding the hull, could have flipped the boat over.
Divers found the net drum upside down, consistent with the survivor's account to the Coast Guard that the boat rolled before going under.
Nobody has proven the turbine caused the sinking, and that is exactly why this case belongs back on an investigator's desk.
Green Oceans has asked the Coast Guard to reopen its probe and the Interior Department to run an interagency review.
The group wants investigators to lock down the wreck site and examine it forensically, and it wants the wind farm's maintenance and monitoring records released.
It also finds it hard to believe that Ørsted, the Danish energy giant behind the wind farm, never knew a boat was lying at the foot of its turbine – especially with maintenance crews working that turbine as early as April 2019.
Rhode Island's All-Democrat Delegation Has Not Backed a New Probe
Democrat Rep. Seth Magaziner said he would not call on the Coast Guard to reopen its investigation, according to the Rhode Island Substack Thy Back Door, which cited his comments to Independent Rhode Island.
The same outlet found no similar public call from Sens. Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse or Rep. Gabe Amo as of early October.
That's the entire Rhode Island delegation in Congress.
Whitehouse has built his Senate career on climate speeches and green energy cheerleading.
When the green energy story comes with a dead captain attached, the silence gets loud.
Nantucket Already Saw What Happens When a Turbine Fails
In July 2024, a 351-foot blade on the Vineyard Wind farm broke apart off Nantucket.
Six beaches closed, and the harbormaster warned beachgoers about "sharp, fiberglass shards and debris" washing ashore.
Block Island Wind Farm opened in 2016 as the first offshore wind farm in the United States, and federal regulators signed off on it as a minimal navigation risk.
In 2022, the National Academies warned that turbines "could obfuscate smaller vessels and stationary objects such as buoys on radar" and could hamper rescue crews.
Lombardi argues that a full 2019 investigation with the wreck in hand would have reshaped the safety rules for offshore wind permitting.
He's right, and every turbine planted off the East Coast since then went up without those answers.
President Trump has said "the only people that want them are the people getting rich off windmills."
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum paused five East Coast offshore wind leases in December 2025, calling the projects "expensive, unreliable, heavily subsidized."
The Mistress adds one more word to that list – dangerous, starting with the rescue crews who had to turn back.
Two fishermen went out to make a living and never came home.
Their families deserve a real investigation, not a closed file and a delegation that won't even ask.
Sources:
- Andrea Margolis, "Haunting Clues Emerge in 7-Year Fishing Boat Mystery After Wreckage Found off Island," Fox News, October 12, 2026.
- Hayley Vawter, "7-Year Mystery Ends as Long-Lost Fishing Vessel Is Discovered on Ocean Floor Near Block Island," FOX Weather, September 23, 2026.
- National Fisherman Staff, "Seven Years Later, Wreck Believed to Be F/V Mistress Found," National Fisherman, September 22, 2026.
- Beege Welborn, "The Wreck of The Mistress, Two Lost Fishermen and an Offshore Wind Farm Has Some 'Splainin' to Do," Hot Air, October 1, 2026.
- Thy Back Door, "Magaziner Declines to Seek New F/V Mistress Investigation," Thy Back Door, October 5, 2026.
- David Zimmermann, "Nantucket Beaches Closed After Wind Turbine Breaks Apart, Sending Fiberglass Shards Into Ocean," National Review, July 18, 2024.
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, "Offshore Wind Farms Can Interfere With Ship Radar and Navigation, Says New Report," National Academies, February 22, 2022.
- Aubrie Spady, "Trump Eyes an End to New Windmill Production Under Second Term," Fox News, January 8, 2025.
- Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, "Trump Administration Announces Change to Offshore Wind Construction," The Daily Signal, December 22, 2025.
