← Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield
Drop Dead Serious With Ashleigh Banfield
Brian Hooker’s Alarming Past: GPS Tampering Claim Blows Open New Questions | Lynette Hooker
01:23:00
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- [00:00]
Blaine Stevenson
Neighbor game. Oo.
- [00:02]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [00:12]
Blaine Stevenson
Hey everyone.
- [00:12]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [00:15]
Ashley Banfield
Oh, no.
- [00:16]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [00:22]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [00:24]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a'@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [00:27]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [00:31]
Kiana (Shopify Testimonial)
I drive my bus in a busy city. That's why road safety is so important to me. I know that I must slow down and be extra careful when I make a wide turn. Buses need more room than cars. Everyone can help keep our roads safe. Next time you're driving, remember to give buses plenty of time and space to finish turning before driving ahead. Let's all plan to share the road safely. Learn how at www.sharetherodesafely.gov.
- [01:06]
Ashley Banfield
Hey everyone, I'm Ashley Banfield and this is Drop dead Serious. Welcome to the Southern Depot. I'm at my mom's place in Florida. I'm recording this on Monday, April 27th. I've got a lot to tell you. Like so much. I am still following the Lynette Hooker story. I like to call it Lynette's story because Lynette is still missing. Brian Hooker has amscrade from the Bahamas where he said he would never leave her until he found her. He swears she bounced off the back of his dinghy in terrible seas. Bullshit. But you know, one by one we're able to tear his story apart. If you are just coming into this story. Welcome. Hi. Please subscribe. It's nice to have you here and then go back through my other episodes because we have discovered a lot of stuff that does add up. Every single day we find something new that basically flies in the face of Brian Hooker's story about how his wife disappeared in the Sea of Abaco off of Elbow Key in the Bahamas. I mean, I couldn't even in an hour list all of the things that don't make sense. But in this coming hour, you are about to hear some things about Brian Hooker. We're going to go back over some of the things in his story and some ways that we believe it would be possible, could be possible to turn his live aboard yacht called Soulmate into a ghost ship which can't be seen, can't be tracked. We're going to talk about that in all in just about a minute. There's also a couple things I need to tell you about. If you've been following the story up till now, you might have heard the story of the blue dry bag. Basically, the rescuers who picked Brian up off of his marooned location on the shores of Marsh harbor the morning after he drifted nine hours after losing the wife off the back. You know, the weird thing is, is that witnesses on the shore said he had a yellow dry bag that morning. But the rescuers who got him on board, like, welcome to monitor the rescue boat to say, let's go look for your wife. One of them remembers an aqua colored dry bag. And one other rescuer remembers a royal blue, slightly bluish colored dry bag. Kind of tracks with the aqua. Another one can't remember the color of the dry bag at all. And another one remembers a yellow one. So there is a big mystery when it comes to the dry bag. But we wondered if maybe a couple of dry bags might have been inside one another. Maybe one in another or two in another one. And we found a blue dry bag on board the dinghy that we showed you a picture of in a prior episode and thought, I wonder if this is the dry bag in question. I went back to the rescuer and I asked that very question. And he said to me, that's not it, absolutely not. And he remembers the texture. It was like a more plasticky, textured dry bag, not a loose sort of ski jacket material dry bag. So he has a good memory of that royal bluish dry bag. Still trying to piece together the story of the dry bag and how this fits in. And I think we'll get there at some point, but for now, it's just another piece of the puzzle floating out here till we find a spot where it fits. Also, you are about to learn a couple of things about technology. The amount of technology on board Brian Hooker's boat with Lynette on board as well, and the kinds of things he was capable of doing with such technology. Because he swore up and down to his friend, who he could not stop talking to after Lynette bounced off the back of the dinghy. Swore up and down. He didn't even know how to load WhatsApp onto his phone. Guess what? Brian Hooker was a telephone repairman and installer at AT&T. Yeah, that's just the least of the information that I found out about Brian Hooker's technical savvy. Wait for it. Because Brian knew a whole lot about how to mask your position electronically. I'm going to get to that in just a moment, but it's going to fry your loaf. When I learned the things that Brian has done in his past to mask his location and mask his position, I nearly lost the top of my head. But you're gonna find out in just a moment. I'm getting there. Also got some information about his oar pins. You know, he said, I was trying to row and one snapped off and I lost it. Yeah. I've been saying to you, I have not been able to find a receptacle anywhere in the pontoons of that little dinghy because they. I just couldn't see them in any of the social media. So I don't think he ever used as. Used the oars as oars. I think he used them as maybe paddles at some point. But we have found them finally. The reason we couldn't see them is because they were covered up by those seat floaties. The same seat floaties, the green of which he threw to Lynette. He says, trying to rescue her, but I don't know if she ever got it. It's not even a rescue thing. It's just a swimmy thing. You can flutterboard with it, but it's probably not going to keep you up. It's got some weight and girth and heft to it. So maybe he thought in his story, this won't fly out in the A life jacket would. Nevertheless, there were two life jackets in the bottom of the dinghy, and I've got news about those, too. More possibilities that show you are full of shit, because there might have been something on those life jackets that instantly could have attracted attention. Get into that in a moment. Before I go any further, I just want to mention that you guys have been amazing at bringing us tips and leads. And if you know anything about this case, about the lay of the land, if you have video or photos from April 4 at any point, looking off into the sunset off of Elbow Key towards Lubbers, you may have caught all the boats that are in Anchorage in front of you. And there may be an incredible clue right there on your photographs, Drop dead serious infomail.com Drop dead serious info gmail.com we will keep you anonymous, but if you think you may have a lead or if you know of anybody who's in the Bahamas in Elbow Key area at that time, on that date, sometime around 7pm to 8pm the night before Easter, Saturday night, April 4, you or your friends might be sitting on a gold mine of forensic information. You may have caught a crime on camera. You may have caught a crime on video. You may have seen something that you didn't realize. Maybe it's a flare. Maybe there was no flare. You Any information you may have again, drop dead serious infomail.com you have been incredible sending us in your information so far and we are so thankful. Also, if you want to be anonymous CGIS tips, that's an app you can download for anonymous tips to the Coast Guard. I know they will be extremely thankful as well. One thing is they cannot share with us. So if you want to send to us, you have to send to both of us. You can't send it to them and expect that I will get it. So you do have to send drop deadseriousinfomail.com or you can go to CGISTips as well and make sure you send it to me too. You got a QR code on your screen too, so that should help. Also, there's something to the social media pictures of Brian and Lynette's dinghy that we didn't catch before, but my guest tonight pointed out to me and he's going to tell you why it's so important. You've probably seen the little tiny electric engine that they use. Well, there are two different ones. We have discovered two different engines. By the way, my mom is wandering or you'll hear her, and she might be wandering in the background at some point, so never mind. Anyway, so there are two different engines on the back of the dinghy. One from several years ago that is sort of a lighter gray color, and then one that's more recent that's a black color. There's something important about that that you're going to find out shortly. And I think it's really significant that you learn about the way sailors behave and the things that sailors keep and why you can't be a hoarder as a sailor because you don't have enough space. But there are things that you definitely will hoard and you will learn about that in just a moment. Then I also learned something more about the sail speed and capacity of that electric engine. Up until now, I've been telling you it's about 2 to 4 horsepower, right? Yes. But it can go 2 to 3 miles an hour. And you'll have a lot of run time. Way more than I said, around four hours. Oh, no, no, no, no. More like 30 hours if you're only going two to four miles an hour. If you're going four to five miles an hour, you can go up to four hours. There's that four hours that I thought about. But there's another speed. You're going to hear how fast you can go and how many hours of run time you're going to have at that. It all matters because he says he floated for nine hours. And I keep wondering, what the hell were you doing in the nine hours? Because you didn't float to Marsh harbor in nine hours. It's impossible. The wind, the waves, the current, the tides, none of that would have been. You would have probably hit lubbers with the wind. And you sure as shit wouldn't have taken nine hours to hit Marsh harbor if in fact the wind was even blowing as hard as you said it was blowing. So wait until you hear about the specs on that engine. It's really important. By the way, remember that whole business about not knowing the tides that Fryan said in his phone call to his friend Blaine Stevenson? Remember, I don't know the tides and you know the currents around here. And I said, horseshit. You sure did know the ebb tide, et cetera. In another message to the rescuers. Well, we found something else that Brian once wrote, and this is about sailing under a bridge. It's always very scary when you got a high mast and you need to sail under a bridge. You need to know. You need to know how high you are. You need to know the tides or you're going to break your mast off going under a bridge. So here's Brian ready, let's read along. We had to follow the outgoing tide going under six bridges that are nominally 65ft above the high tide mark. Couple problems with this were a full moon the other night that made the tides very high, about an extra foot higher. Oh, boy, you sure know the tides because you know what the moon does to the tides, bro. And the bridges are not as high above high water as they say they are on the charts. And so some of these crossings under were within inches and then a emoji. That's a guy who knows tides and knows what the moon does to a tide and knows how important tide knowledge is when you have amassed the going under six bridges. So once again, Brian, you're adorable with your. I don't really know the tides or the, you know, currents, you know, around here. No, really, you've only been there nine weeks, so. Yeah, in the most shallow part of the Bahamas other than one other, you know, location south of of Nassau, the Sea of Abaco is one of the most shallow areas. And if you don't know the tides, you can't go in there. Not with a keel boat. Lynette even sent a picture looking up the mast saying, too close for comfort. But now to the piece de resistance. And that is that I am so incredibly thankful to an anonymous tipster who reached out to Lindsay and me with a story about Brian hooker's past at AT&T. And we have now spoken to two different sources who confirmed that Brian Hooker was released from his job at, AT and T. Not once, not twice. Three times. He fought like a tiger to get his job back. The first time. And the second time. The first time. This is a bit of a rumor among employees, but not fully confirmed. There might have been a bar fight and he got his job back. That he was released because of possibly a bar fight, got his job back. That's a possibility. Allegations can't prove it, don't know it, but that was something that some of the employees were talking about. And the second time, I don't know what caused the release. But the third time, and the final time, Y'. All, Y' all grow. Was released from AT&T for tampering with the GPS on his van, trying to mask his position, mask his location from management. Can we just all let that sink in for a hot effing minute? Brian Hooker is tech savvy enough to know how to f with the GPS on his van to make sure that management maybe didn't know exactly where he was at any given time. Well, now we're talking, aren't we? Here's a guy who can't load WhatsApp on his phone. That's what he was telling his friend. Horse shit. Not only could you load WhatsApp on your phone, you're a telephone repairman by trade and a telephone installer, so you know a thing or two about communications, and that isn't even half of it. Lynette even had a Facebook post about Brian geeking out right now because he's networking the boat. Brian knew a lot about technology. Brian got fired, got let go, got released from AT&T because of his ability to manipulate technology. Sources tell me there was a huge meeting among employees just three days after Lynette went missing, because Lynette worked there, too, and by all accounts, she was really, really well liked. Super nice. Everybody said the same thing. They really liked Lynette. Brian, not so much. Mostly what I heard about him was that he was manipulative and kind of a dick. In that as a union steward guy who kind of runs the union aspect of the complaints of any of the employees go through him. To management. Apparently he just could not want to fuck with management more. His whole mission was to make management like suffer, make it difficult for management. These are the reports that are coming from employees, right, that he just. Anything. He would do anything to screw the man, to screw management, even if it made it difficult for the guys and gals that he worked with. Manipulative, mean. That's what. That's what the reports come back at. There was one time he met Lynette there. He met Lynette at, at&t. And there was one time in a. In a room full of people where he just kind of blurted out a Marion the kid, referring to Lynette as the kid. She's only like three years younger than him, I think. Like, so you can see kind of the. I don't know. Maybe he meant it cute and fun. Maybe it was more like the kid because, you know, she's less than. Or she's less than me. Anyway, she's less than most of us. She's the kid. But that's the report that came back to me. There's more. One source who was very close to Lynette said to me that Lynette, in one of the episodes when she was leaving Brian Hooker, because this happened many times, friends, family have all said the same thing. She would leave him and allege abuse and had photographs of bruises and say, I'm never going back. And then went back. One of these episodes when she left Brian, she confided in one of my sources at AT&T who said she was in tears and she said that Brian had blown through his 401k and she just didn't know what to do. So now we've got the potential, at least in that moment in time. And this is about four years ago where one report from a source says he's blown through his 401k. Lynette's got a sizable 401k. Her mom said 650 or more thousand dollars. So I always follow the money. I always look at the money. I don't say it's always the bend, all be all. But it's another piece to the puzzle, right? Lynette's got a sizable 401k. Sources who were close to Lynette who said in tears, I've left him again. He's blown through his 401K.
- [17:41]
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- [18:13]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
and Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [18:23]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [18:27]
Ashley Banfield
Oh, no.
- [18:27]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [18:33]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [18:35]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [18:38]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [18:42]
Kiana (Shopify Testimonial)
At Amica Insurance, we know it's not
- [18:44]
Ashley Banfield
just about where you're going, but who you go with. That's why we work even harder to protect what matters most. And as a mutual insurance company, we're built for our customers and prioritize your needs. Ameca, empathy is our best policy. Visit amica.com and get a quote today.
- [19:14]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [19:23]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [19:27]
Ashley Banfield
Oh, no.
- [19:28]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [19:34]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [19:35]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [19:39]
Liberty Mutual Partner
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [19:43]
Ashley Banfield
That's not good. It's not a good fact. In the business, we call them bad facts. But Brian's not charged with anything yet. He was released because he didn't have enough evidence at the time in the Bahamas to hold him any longer. That doesn't mean you don't get more as you keep looking into things. Tick tock, Tick tock, Brian. Anyway, so this is the significance of the background of Brian Hooker. Super smart with technology, super manipulative with technology. So I guess the question is, when you're telling your friends you don't know how to load WhatsApp on your phone, are you. Are you masking your actual abilities to mask your yacht? I'm going through a million different scenarios in my mind. Right. I'm going through something that Blaine Stevenson, a very Good friend of Lynette and Brian's, who is no longer much of a friend of Brian because of all the kaka that he's been fed in this long, long voicemail that Brian, well, long long conversation that he recorded with Brian that doesn't add up. There is a period of time where Brian Hooker and Lynette Hooker's soulmate yacht went offline. Okay? It, it stopped its connectivity with satellites. Now yacht folk will tell you that can happen. Sometimes it's cloud covered, it's temporary. Sometimes there's a problem with the satellites and everybody's affected. That didn't seem to be the case here. But the times that Brian's and Lynette's satellite disconnected. I'm going to show you the actual ship tracking chart and my guest Blaine is going to explain this in a moment. Is right around 9:30 at night on Saturday night. 9:30 at night, Saturday night. If you believe Brian Hooker, he's already been floating for an hour and a half. He's already on the way to Marsh Harbor. Never made it back to the yacht because ah, my wife bounced out, took the key and the oar broke and floated away and what do you know, couldn't find her. It was too dark and waves. The sea was angry, my friend. I'm floating off to Marsh Harbor. Somehow an hour and a half after that boat lost connectivity with satellites. How? Why? Sometimes boats run out of power and they just shut down. Okay, got it. But you're about to hear from my guest who says that was never the case with their but their yacht. It's never happened in the past. So why suddenly that night went offline at 9:30 at night and it came back online. Want to take a guess? 8:30 in the morning. You know what was happening at 8:30 in the morning? Brian Hooker had been welcomed onto the rescue vessel from his marooned location way over on Marsh Harbor. And they came back to his yacht. They brought him back to his yacht for the first time since catastrophic events the night before. He boarded that yacht with one police member from the Royal Bahamian police force and the two of them went down below for an hour. He's picked up at Marsh harbor at 7:30, takes about 20 minutes or so to cross over to the boat. So now it's 7:50, they board till 8:50, they're down below for an hour. Well that would encompass the 8:30 switched back on. If that police officer is asking them questions and he says, oh hold on a second, I just got to look over here and maybe get Some lights and switch on the power. It's back on. Just another piece of the puzzle, my friends. Just another piece of the puzzle. But a more skilled yachtsman than I, mariner than I, is about to explain all of this for you and make more sense of it than I can. But I am telling you, that is weird. Af, is it possible? And if so, how can you turn your yacht into a ghost ship but keep your location for all eyes to see in one spot? If you game this out, it is possible. And that's about to happen. Blaine Stevenson is about to explain to me. Using a dinghy, could you scrape the electronic guts up out of the yacht, place them in the dinghy, anchor the dinghy, put some power in there, and go ship your way to do what you need to do, maybe in deeper water or just maybe with some power. You're going to hear all of that in just a moment. There's something else I want to show you. TMZ obtains video of a fellow sailor or motorboat operator. I don't know what kind of vessel this person was on, but he was wearing like glasses with cameras, and I don't know if they're Google or they're met or whatever they are. He was recording from his glasses and he's calling over to Brian on Soulmate from his yacht. Okay, and what stood out to me about this is this was recorded on Monday, April 6th. So it's only been, you know, a day since all this happened. Right. And so you would think you'd be a bit apoplectic that your wife is still maybe floating out there or marooned on a shore somewhere. And so this neighbor boat is speaking to Brian, and Brian is having a conversation about trying to bring up his anchor and move his boat on his own. It's usually a two man job. Someone's got to be out at the windlass getting the anchor up while the captain is at the helm, kind of backing up and getting off anchor. And it's super hard to do it on your own unless you've got your own electronic windlass switch at the helm, which they didn't have. And that's what Brian is kind of explaining to this other boater. But what I noticed was that the boater seemed more empathetic and upset about the loss of Lynette. Then Brian even mentioned it was almost like business as usual. I got to move this boat. Take a look.
- [26:10]
Brian Hooker
When we lost Lynette over the side, I paddled over to Marsh island and I landed not so crazy shore there. We Couldn't get yesterday Fire department Sprady was digging to me. This afternoon in high tide or this morning later in high tide, then I'm gonna go to Marsh Harbor.
- [26:28]
Blaine Stevenson
Okay.
- [26:29]
Brian Hooker
You guys gonna be around at all?
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Blaine Stevenson
Yeah, we'll be around. If you need anything. I might.
- [26:33]
Brian Hooker
I'm gonna ask the guys, but I might need one person to help me. Unanor. I've never done it by himself. I don't have any switches.
- [26:40]
Blaine Stevenson
Okay. Yeah. What time. What time do you think you're gonna do that?
- [26:47]
Brian Hooker
You said they'd be here around 11, around high tide. I'm going to have to get into Martin harbor because what was. You know. And then I'm just going to come back and keep looking. I don't know how long.
- [27:01]
Blaine Stevenson
Wow.
- [27:02]
Brian Hooker
So sorry.
- [27:03]
Blaine Stevenson
But we'll. We'll come help you here around noon
- [27:06]
Brian Hooker
time, if that's okay. You're here and just keep an eye on me. I think maybe step on if they're not here. Sure. But if I'm not here, my apologies. I just had to go. I gotta get out and I can't leave here without. Without a putting water under me. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay.
- [27:22]
Blaine Stevenson
All right.
- [27:27]
Ashley Banfield
Oh, my thanks to TMZ for that. That's just. I don't know. To me it's really telling that the guy with the camera glasses is like, sorry, man. And Brian's just like, yeah, the wife fell overboard and I gotta. I need to move this boat. And I, you know, I'm only a one man show here. It's like it's only the next. This is Monday. Lynette went out Saturday night and Brian floated all day Saturday, Sunday morning, all night and was marooned. And then they're looking all day Sunday and this is just Monday. So I don't know, everybody grieves differently, but you're not even grieving at that point. You're still in panic mode trying to find your wife. There's so many things that should have happened. So many things. Because the amount of equipment that Brian Hooker has on board and the knowledge that Brian has of the equipment that he had in his hand, his own phone, it don't add up. So with all of that in mind, I had such an insightful conversation with Blaine Stevenson. Blaine, as you may know if you've been following the story up till now, Blaine and his wife Marnie are also cruisers, live aboards. They have been on their boat for years. They haven't even tied up to a dock in two years. Currently they're sailing down in St. Martin and they Are struggling with this because they are friends with Lynette and Brian. Brian actually called Blaine and just sort of dumped out 40 minutes of information which they were recording because they couldn't keep keep up writing it down fast enough. But then ultimately during this long verbal logaria, they started to realize what the actual F is going on right now. Nothing sounds right. So Blaine's recording has been the source of so much information for us and for police as well. And he's also a skilled mariner, being a liveaboard. And so I have bounced off so many possibilities, questions, theories, ideas, everything off Blaine. And so with a bunch of the information that I had amassed up until now, I called Blaine, I said, you need to help me sort through some of these things, specifically the ghost ship possibilities, because talking it out with Blaine, it is entirely possible. Here's my conversation with Blaine Stevenson from aboard his yacht as he's at anchor off St. Martin. Blaine, how long do you know Lynette and Brian had planned to be in the Bahamas and when did they get there?
- [29:59]
Blaine Stevenson
I know they got there about nine weeks ago. I remember the, the Facebook post of them crossing. They did a immigration check in and I made fun of Brian for cutting his hair and looking good for immigration. So I know it's been about nine weeks.
- [30:17]
Ashley Banfield
Any idea what their plan was? Was it a short stop, a long stop, what they want to do there?
- [30:22]
Blaine Stevenson
They're like most of us voters where the plans are written in tide, you know, written in the sand at low tide. They talked about heading down to Bequia and down to the southern islands where we are. And I feel like that was kind of most of the conversation that I was that I followed on Facebook with them and I believe in our messages. There was the idea of hooking up down island and then I feel like in the last few weeks it kind of shifted more towards they were heading
- [30:56]
Ashley Banfield
back to Florida, but they had like a cruiser's permit. Right. Like explain what that is.
- [31:02]
Blaine Stevenson
So when you check into the Bahamas, and that's been a really big point of contention for like this last year, Bahamas changed the policies and rules and they had a one year cruiser permit for their boat, but they have a 90 day visa for the person. So like when we check into a country, we have to check our boat in separately than we do our ourselves. And at any time any one of these countries can say the boat's allowed or you're allowed, but you're. So it's a separate check in process. But their boat is. Was checked in on A one year cruiser visa into the Bahamas.
- [31:37]
Ashley Banfield
And, and they had indicated in Facebook, if I remember correctly, that they were thinking about 90 days and even sad that that was too short.
- [31:45]
Blaine Stevenson
Right. But they had, they had the cruiser permit for a year.
- [31:49]
Ashley Banfield
Okay. So there was a Facebook post that somebody else made and I only can assume that it's a friend of Lynette's because she was kind of commenting back and forth and it's her Facebook page, but it was disturbing. I mean it, it sort of. I'll just paraphrase it. It said, I thought you would have murdered each other off by now, but you both look happy.
- [32:11]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah. I mean, looking at the situation now, it's like, holy. You know, I'm expecting to see that person on a podcast or news at some point soon. Right. Like, because that was a pretty damning statement. But also, I mean, it's social media. We all make jokes, but I don't think anybody would make that joke about me and my wife. You know, I mean, everybody has their, their quirks. Right. People are going to assume I'm going to fall off the boat because I'm clumsy, but they're not going to assume me and my wife are going to get into a fight. So I think, I think that just shows a little bit more of the history that we were a little blind to.
- [32:49]
Ashley Banfield
There's also some talk on Facebook about the kind of technology that this couple had on board. I'll just list off a few things that I've been able to pick up from all of their social media posts. They talk about having a drone on board and that's going to matter when I ask you about what you can do with a drone in an emergency. In a moment. They had a 360 camera that Lynette regularly used. You hold it out and it, it sort of disappears the selfie pole that you're holding, so it just looks like the, the camera's above you. They had an underwater camera. I think it was the same 360 camera that might have actually gone underwater. They could, they could shoot themselves out of the water and then down under the water all in the same shot. And Lynette was very social media savvy and good at editing, great at posting. This was not a couple that didn't get tech right.
- [33:41]
Blaine Stevenson
So out here, I mean, we make a joke with me and my wife that we're right in the middle cusp. We're not part of the Young Cruisers association because we're late 40s, but we're not part of the paper chart boomer generation either, right? That is mad that everybody's out here on social media. They, they were more tech savvy than we are. They were on the socials before we were they Brian, I mean Brian wired up his own solar system himself. I think one of the pictures that you keep seeing in all the news reels is him putting two PVC pipes together. But that was the structure system for his side solar panels. He, you know, he had that. I, I think it's a Garmin smartwatch. Like you can look at their, you know, their navionics, their tablets. You know, they had all the equipment. They, they, they had more equipment than we have.
- [34:43]
Ashley Banfield
I, I'll tell you what, I've kind of knocked him a couple of times for the comment that I believe he made to you in the big long rambling, I think 40 minute message that he was thinking, you know, or at least phone call that he made to you where he said something along the lines of, and I'll paraphrase, I don't know the tides or the currents around here. I mean look, you are a live aboard sailor. You don't sail a keelboat in the Sea of abaco, which is 4, 5, 8ft deep when you're drawing somewhere around 4ft without knowing the tides and knowing the currents. Am I right?
- [35:20]
Blaine Stevenson
No, you're not going in there and not knowing it. You might be there for a few days and lose track of it. I'll say that right. Like if I've been here for two weeks, I know that I'm good at high and low tide regardless. So I'm not looking at the tide today. I'm not knowing what the tide is today.
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- [37:34]
Blaine Stevenson
Start your free trial@shopify.com but he was moving in and out of that area that same day. He moved from Tahiti beach to his anchorage, where he was that same day.
- [37:47]
Ashley Banfield
Or. Or I don't know if he actually went all the way down to Tahiti beach with the big boat. I know he said he went down with the small boat, but I do know he was further north at the Firefly Inn and picked up anchor at 11:30 in the morning and about 20 minutes later was setting anchor not even a quarter of a mile south down the beach outside this, the. The Abaco Inn, which at which point you can go even further south and go to Tahiti beach by the little dinghy and then come all the way back and go to the dinghy, go with the dinghy to the Abaco Inn. So, yeah, I mean, he was traversing, you know, the western shore, that little
- [38:23]
Blaine Stevenson
half miles to eight, one mile section. Yep. And the thing that, you know, caught me and we talked about is at roughly 9 or 10 that morning, the guy who recorded him for TMZ, he's telling that guy he needs help raising his anchor because he needs a foot of water underneath his boat. So he's waiting for high tide, that is 10 hours before he talks to me and doesn't know what tides are. And then an hour after talking to me, he messages search and rescue and suddenly knows about the ebb and the flow and Matlo's K and montage K and all that. So all in one day. He knew, didn't. Did know tides and currents in a 12 hour.
- [39:12]
Ashley Banfield
I love the part where he knows ebb tide, you know, and it already said, I don't get these tied things, you know, it just didn't make any sense.
- [39:21]
Blaine Stevenson
Cool. Again, like I said at the time, you know, when we were recording it, we were there to help a friend, like under. But you can't listen to that recording after three weeks of searching for Lynette and. And not understand that somebody was practicing their story on you. Right. Like, I feel like I was being used on that aspect, maybe not to report it and put it out, but I think he was definitely practicing his story and see what would fly.
- [39:46]
Ashley Banfield
Well, what seems strange to me, and I've been in this business a few times, so it's not my first rodeo with. With crime. And if there is a crime here, which that hasn't been established yet, however, there is a criminal investigation. That was verbal logaria if I ever heard it. Most people who are looking for their wife don't just talk for 40 minutes straight about all the things to do with them. They don't have time for that. And to that effect, I want to ask you about the drones. Brian has a drone.
- [40:19]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah.
- [40:19]
Ashley Banfield
Aren't drones about the best thing that you can tell searchers? I've got a drone. Let's get it up there and search the shores.
- [40:25]
Blaine Stevenson
Oh. Especially if you look at the timeline of events. Right. So he was out with search and rescue in the morning, and then Search and rescue took him back to his boat, but his d. He still didn't have his dinghy. So he's stuck on that boat for Sunday night and Monday morning until. Until they brought him back. His dinghy helped him lift his anchor and he went to Marsh Harbor. How many flights did he do? Right. I mean, I would have had that. If I'm stuck on the boat, I'm. Honestly, I would have got on the cruiser's net and gotten everybody. I can't say there's a single thing he's done since the incident that I would have done. But if he had a drone, he's a super tech savvy guy. I mean, you. You fly it, you're looking, you're looking. And I don't know that he didn't. But he doesn't tell anybody he did either. Right.
- [41:11]
Ashley Banfield
Well, I can tell you this, that that was not ever a part of the immediate search and rescue because I have spoken to both of the guys who spent time with Brian Hooker on the morning of his catastrophe, and never once did he bring the drone off of Soulmate onto the search and rescue boat and say, let's fly this. Let's go over to where this happened and start flying it. I'll take you guys. Let's fly my drone and look around. He never mentioned the drone. He didn't pick the drone up off the boat at 8:30 in the morning and bring it onto the rescue boat and say, let's launch this. It never came up.
- [41:48]
Blaine Stevenson
Well, and. And there was a part of me that, as you were saying that I'm like, well, you know, if there. If it's really windy, you don't want to fly a drone. But I'm also replaying that interview of the guy who came up and talked to him the next morning. You could hear each other clearly. There was no wind. His boat wasn't being drifted there. It was glass. So he could have been flying it then. But he also didn't need to spend an hour on the phone with me. I mean, yes, we're friends, yes, we voted together, but you can't. For me, when I found out, like, he left Carly a voicemail and then spent 45 minutes on the phone with
- [42:25]
Brian Hooker
me,
- [42:27]
Ashley Banfield
yeah, that was uncomfortable. And Carly was uncomfortable about the tone of the way she put it as well, your mom fell in the water. I'll talk to you later. There wasn't a lot of empathy or panic or fear or worry or concern or consoling. There was. In Carly's estimation, there was next to none of that.
- [42:45]
Blaine Stevenson
Right. And I don't understand the timing of it all. Like, he obviously had his phone. He says in his recording he has his phone with me. But I mean, I think we're at that point with Brian now where we just dismiss what he says. But we know he had his phone to call Carly, to call me, to be on Facebook, messenger to message Dan. Right. Like, he had this technology available to him. Why was he not using it to get voters together in the area? Right.
- [43:23]
Ashley Banfield
I was just going to say about the technology and his phone before we move on from that, he is a tech savvy guy. Okay. We've already established he worked for AT&T. He was a phone installer and a phone repairman. He wired his own boat. He was extremely, extremely savvy when it came to the boat. There's that message that you found from Lynette saying, hey, Brian's busy networking, geeking out and networking the boat. You know, like he knows, he knows the business of phones, right? And yet he's floating across to Marsh harbor for nine hours with a cell phone in his hand that says on the top, for emergency calls only when you don't have a sim, all you need to do is hit hello and maybe it'll cost you more because you've got the American plan. Or maybe you'll just get the emergency call you can make even if you don't have a SIM card. That's the kind of guy who would know that.
- [44:17]
Blaine Stevenson
Well, and I was talking to somebody from Cricket Mobile because I don't want to speak to things I don't know. But evidently you can still dial Cricket Mobile to spend money, right? If you want to upgrade your plan, that call is going to go through on roaming network to get a hold of Cricket Mobile to upgrade your plan to you. The idea of an eight hour shift. And again, if he did make these calls and he did try anything, he hasn't brought that up. And I think that that would be something that you could easily go to. It's not going to ruin an investigation to say, hey, here's my call log. Look, I tried to call emergency. I know that doesn't show up in your call log, but look, I tried making these phone calls. I tried calling Lynette, I tried. It's not.
- [44:59]
Ashley Banfield
Can you also show me a picture of your phone that has no SIM card and it says up top for emergency calls only?
- [45:05]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah, I did until I broke it. And now I'm using that phone and I immediately I called, I called my carrier and I'm like, hey, I have this phone that doesn't work from an other carrier. I just dumped my phone in the water. Can you turn my SIM into an ESIM and put it on this phone? And it was done in an hour. Now, did I lose all my apps and everything? And I have no clue of previous conversations and all of the stuff.
- [45:29]
Ashley Banfield
Too many connectivity.
- [45:31]
Blaine Stevenson
You had connectivity with them within an hour.
- [45:34]
Ashley Banfield
It's something that a man who works in the business of phones would know if I were a betting man.
- [45:42]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah, I mean, especially a guy who, I mean, it's public knowledge. If you look up at and T versus Brian Hooker, you will see that among other things, he was terminated for disabling GPS devices in his truck. I. I don't know how to do that. You know, he, he knows how to work his AIs. He knows how to work his radar. He knows, you know, he knows more about the electronic side to sailing than I do. I mean, he taught me about. About that part of it. You know, he taught me to trust my equipment. I. I do still got to credit him to this day for getting me through a hurricane with his knowledge. So, yeah, I would say he was very tech savvy.
- [46:33]
Ashley Banfield
Well, let's talk about that issue about being fired from AT T or released from AT T for manipulating the GPS unit on one of the fleet vans that he worked with. That's somebody who was trying to hide his position. That's someone who knew how to manipulate a GPS device to hide his position. If you adopt that into this story, this becomes very disconcerting about what happened between the last photo we've seen of him, which is 7pm Possibly heading down to the dock to leave in the dinghy with Lynette, and then suddenly, nine to 10 hours later, washing up on Marsh harbor with this preposterous story. Let's talk about how one might have perhaps made it to the yacht with his wife tied up, the dinghy gone aboard, something goes sideways. This is all supposition, okay? I don't know that this happened, but if it did, could you, Blaine, could you make your yacht go into a ghost ship and keep the AIs location at that, in that dinghy, anchored to that spot while you beat a path to do something nefarious with your big boat to deeper water?
- [47:58]
Blaine Stevenson
Your AIs data would require a 12. I would have to know his model number. Okay, but AIs data, And if he's. If his is connected through what's called nima, Right? If it's part of his whole network system on his boat, how it receives its power, if it's a. You know, I'd have to know if it's Raymarine or Garmin or whatnot. But basically, in a sense, our boats are just 12 volt systems. Some are 24 volt systems, but everything plugs in. I do believe that there would be a logged event of the starlink being unplugged to be plugged in on the boat, on the. On it. On a dinghy or whatnot. Or there'd be an event of it going offline, like your AIs. It would. It would show offline. As far as everything else that you have that's just systematically going through and turning off your electronics. I can make my boat go. Go smoke. Yes. To answer your question, I could. There would be logs of it. You know, my starlink will tell me if I had a millisecond outage five minutes ago, it'll tell me that on my phone. So if I disconnect it for five minutes to set it up somewhere, that's going to be a little blip. It, somebody's got to look for it. You know, when we look at his AIs data, it shows that he never moved. But if you actually go into the logs on my ship tracker, you can see that like his AIs was offline from 9:30. I think it was 11. I don't have it in front.
- [49:39]
Ashley Banfield
9:30 at night. So Saturday night, 9:30pm Suddenly his goes offline not to come back online until 8:30 the next morning, which is right around the time that the search and rescue boat sidled up next to Soulmate, tied up and he boarded his yacht for the first time since the catastrophe. So it's, it just something kind of stinks in Denmark there.
- [50:05]
Blaine Stevenson
So for me, yeah, that, that's obviously what I hooked up on is because then I went back through the logs because I don't know what his normal routine is. Do they turn their AIs off at night to save power? But then I went back through his logs of the previous month and it had never been offline for more than two to two and a half hours.
- [50:26]
Ashley Banfield
Lane, they're not supposed to be on board at 9:30 at night. At 9:30 at night, he's already an hour and a half drifting over to Marsh harbor, never having reached Soulmate. So what happened at 9:30 at night on board that boat when nobody was supposed to be on board for it to go offline, but suddenly come back online when he boards his boat with the search and rescue folks the next day?
- [50:50]
Blaine Stevenson
Well, that's what I was thinking about when I said that. Do they normally turn it off to save power? I'm not. So then I started looking at it's been on at nights. So it's not that his battery bank can't handle his AIs staying on all night. Right. So it's not. You don't see the routine pattern of it being turned off every night, which means they leave it on every night, which means that his battery system can handle that load overnight.
- [51:17]
Ashley Banfield
It's not going to go off on it.
- [51:18]
Blaine Stevenson
It's not going to go off on its own. Now, as far as how the satellite systems work to the AIs, the Coast Guard's gonna know way more about that than me. But looking at his log there is definitely on that night a clear distinct difference from any other night in his AIs history.
- [51:39]
Ashley Banfield
Well, I'm, I can't put two and two together because I don't have that kind of tech knowledge. I have some mariner skills, but not this many mariner skills. I can' how suddenly at 9:30 at night when any other night the boat can handle that power and it wouldn't just shut off on its own. How did that boat shut down at 9:30 at night when he's supposed to be, you know, floating past lubbers at that point, maybe setting off a flare at that point? It's all very curious and I think one by one the pieces are coming into focus of how preposterous his story is.
- [52:13]
Blaine Stevenson
Blaine, there's complete groups out there. I mean we ran into a group on Tick Tock that actually is the one that found some of this information. Right. Like there are people that are metadata diving way beyond my tech level skills. Somewhere up in Brian's level of tech, right? Because I mean this is a guy who has an electric dinghy motor. He's gone through a couple of them like so everything about him is wanting to be technology based. He's not your average 59 year old who's like, you know, give me a two stroke. They don't sell those in America anymore. You know, where's my sextant kind of guy? He is, you know, smart watch, control my boat with, you know, with my watch kind of person. And so it's really hard when you live that kind of life to not leave that exhaust I think is the word you use.
- [53:02]
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- [53:33]
Blaine Stevenson
I'm not a tech savvy person and I would screw it up if I tried to go ghost, but there's also a lot less on my boat and the battery logs for me if, if I was the investigator. We all have manage our battery systems out here down to the hour to know what we're, you know, what we're consuming. Can, can I make water? Can I do a load of dishes? Can I turn on hot water? We have to watch our power systems and what's draining and what's drawing and that's all logged and it would be very interesting to see and what scares me is it'd be interesting to see what his battery system did that night. Was it a slow trickle down? Like there was nobody on the boat until the sun came up and the solar started raising it back up again? Or are there power events? Did somebody come onto the boat, have a shower, turned on the water pump? You would see that spike in power. You know, did they come in, turn on the lights, stuff like that?
- [54:33]
Ashley Banfield
You can't turn on the water or have a shower, any of that. Right, right. If I ever got back up on a sailboat after being out all day, or even going into shore and back with the spray or whatever, I'd probably rinse off on the back of the sailboat because there's usually like a little, you know, shower nozzle on the back of the transom. Or I'd get up and maybe get into one of the little bathrooms and. And I would take one of the small showers, a quick one, because you really conserve the water. But quick one doesn't matter. It registers.
- [54:59]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah. And we set up our boats to where we don't have to do it like you do on charter. Right. So when we come back from a night out or being on the beach or whatnot, I mean, we literally walk through the boat, flip on the anchor light if we didn't turn it on before we left. Right. And then turn on the water heater for both sides because like, me and my wife both use separate sides of the boat for our bathrooms. So we turn on the water heater for both sides. So we have hot water, put the dinghy up. Right. There's a. For ours, it's a winch that would log it. I think his was hand, but he would plug in his dinghy motor that would suddenly start draining power. You would see an event on his power lot.
- [55:42]
Ashley Banfield
He'd plug in the dinghy motor. You're right. You're right. Again, this is all. If they made it back.
- [55:48]
Blaine Stevenson
If they made it back to soulmates,
- [55:49]
Ashley Banfield
none of that business, right? None of that business happened with her bouncing out in two to four foot seas. It's all. That didn't happen. The weather wasn't like that. So if he did make it back to soulmate with her, there would be power events in the normal course of boarding your boat and doing the things you normally do, right?
- [56:08]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah, totally. I mean, I could tell you when we boarded our boat last. It's just. It's so. It's so definitive because we have to. I mean, we run out of power. I mean, I have the same bragging. Bragging, right. Me and Brian. Do we have not been to a dock the same amount of time. Right. He has not been a doc since he's seen me out. We've only been to a dock once since we've seen him and that was to take a generator off her boat and throw it on a dock and then leave.
- [56:36]
Ashley Banfield
Dude, I don't know how you did that. All I keep thinking is where can I get to a dock to get another tank full of fresh water? And you're somehow not having to do that.
- [56:44]
Blaine Stevenson
Well, that's partially out of fear because you know the only thing that's going to hurt a boat is land. So the more you avoid it the better. But that also goes to show like if he was to have. I've seen a lot of speculation online that he moves Soulmate in the middle of the night and I'm following that theory to a degree in my head and working through it. But there's no way he's navigating those waterways without a breadcrumb trail on some digital device because he's going to need
- [57:13]
Ashley Banfield
to navigate unless he knows his way. I navigate at night every night that I'm on the water from memory. Never do I use electronics ever. Now that's a lake that I'm very familiar with. But they had been there for nine weeks and they had been there for Seattle was small and even the sort of the way out is not huge. And listen, I got to ask you though about moving to the, the yacht because it's a 46 foot catch. So what does it draw? 4 or 5ft?
- [57:44]
Blaine Stevenson
I think it's a sloop, but I, I just have to be a boater on that one. Single masted.
- [57:50]
Ashley Banfield
So I heard that it was a catch, but I'm only going on what I'd heard. Okay. And so, but what do you think draws about four or five feet?
- [57:58]
Blaine Stevenson
I think six.
- [58:00]
Ashley Banfield
Six is a lot in the Sea of Abaco.
- [58:04]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah, it's, it's a, It's a hunter 450 passage. So I could tell you what the draft is right now.
- [58:10]
Ashley Banfield
Okay. So he would have to be very knowledgeable about where to go because there's lots extremely five foot areas.
- [58:18]
Blaine Stevenson
Yes.
- [58:18]
Ashley Banfield
And you know, you can't, you know, you can't fight mother nature underneath you. If you're banging up against that, you're going to tip over. If you hit your keel on land, you're going to tip over and need rescue. Some people, you know, really struggle.
- [58:29]
Blaine Stevenson
Bahamas is the land of the bombies.
- [58:32]
Ashley Banfield
What's that?
- [58:33]
Blaine Stevenson
The little rocks underneath? They're marked on the charts, like even if the average depth somewhere is 6.7 or 4.5, there's a rock or a coral head that is marked on the shots. It's called. We call them bombies, but yeah, I call them reefs.
- [58:48]
Ashley Banfield
But okay, so listen, so the. If he had wanted to turn that boat into a ghost boat, my question for you is this because I don't know how this could happen, but I know it could in my gut. Is there a way to strip the electronic guts, the finder guts out of the yacht and say, put them in the dinghy and anchor the dinghy right down beside where you are and say, hook it up to a 12 volt battery so that those guts keep going, but in the dinghy and then pull your anchor up and turn into a ghost ship and go do your business in the dark of night for, I don't know, nine hours, then come back, pick the guts back up. All the electronic guts that send your pinging location out as though you have never lost, left that spot. Your, your location has been pinging from that spot, just from the bowels of the dinghy instead of the bowels of your boat. Is that doable?
- [59:46]
Blaine Stevenson
I can speak to Starlink. If he had a mini. Yes, completely easy. If he had his, his anchor alarm as a tablet, which I think they use a pink tablet for their anchor alarm, then yeah, you would just put that in the dinghy. It wouldn't go off. It would show that they were there the whole time. The AIs data would have to go offline, but it did. Okay, but you're asking me, in a hypothetical situation, can you make the boats go dark and I'm going through each system. If it's Starlink Mini that runs off 12 volt, or even if his starlink is the gen 2 and he has the adapter for it, he could easily plug that up to 12 volt. So his Starlink would show at the same spot, his anchor alarm would show at the same spot. Everything else on the boat would all be personal handheld electronics. So if he put all those in the dinghy, then yes. The only thing I can't speak to is the is. But the is during that period of time was offline, as far as I can see.
- [60:47]
Ashley Banfield
Yeah, as far as you and I can see, because we're mere mortals, but I always assume that the power of the United States government is much better than what we have. I think they've got technology that supersedes what we're able to dig out as Sleuthers at This point. I hope so anyway, because it just feels like that's something that could be done, especially by someone who was let go because he was manipulating his location and masking his location on his van with gps. That speaks to somebody who has the tendency and the know how to do such a thing in.
- [61:26]
Blaine Stevenson
In the speculation situation. I mean, he would know more than me, right? Like he would be the subject matter expert that we would be asking to this question to if he wasn't the subject of the investigation. And that's, that's the crux of it for me. He knows more about it than I do. But I could see from our systems on our boat how we would do it.
- [61:49]
Ashley Banfield
Let me move on to this other topic. And by the way, I keep looking behind you because I feel like. Is that Martinique behind you? Like, what's your stern looking out back? I can see some twinkly lights.
- [61:57]
Blaine Stevenson
Oh, it's St. Martin. That is sandy ground. St. Martin, yeah.
- [62:02]
Ashley Banfield
O to be you right now.
- [62:04]
Blaine Stevenson
I know we're going to be in Anguilla and St. Bart's and then Martinique in the next, next month.
- [62:10]
Ashley Banfield
So take me with you.
- [62:12]
Blaine Stevenson
Come on down.
- [62:13]
Ashley Banfield
Okay, well, don't tempt me. Okay. The next issue I want to get to with you. I have been trying to assess the. The OR situation. And you were kind enough to send me the manufacturer's look at the exact dinghy that they bought. And you were kind enough to point out to me that those oars and their pins are proprietary to that boat. Meaning you can't just grab any ore and use it in that boat. You've got to use those pins in those receivers. Right. Those receptacle holes. And I could not find anywhere where I saw the receivers for those oars because I was looking in the center of the boat because they're not in. Thank you. Explain the OR situation on their. On their dinghy.
- [62:56]
Blaine Stevenson
Okay, so the Boss 8.5 dinghy is designed to where the orlocks are backed by the engines. If you look at a picture, which I'm sure you'll throw up on a graphic here, there are two little metal silver pieces on each pontoon back about a foot from the end of the dinghy on the back, really far back,
- [63:17]
Ashley Banfield
by the way, for more pins, really far back.
- [63:21]
Blaine Stevenson
And then so you would put those pins in there and you would sit on the bench and you would row it backwards, right? So the front of the boat, the pointy part of the boat is behind you and you would row like that. And the problem I had and the reason why I started researching this is because Ryan Brian is a very good painter. He painted this picture for me of him trying to row the boat, but then the oar snapped. I can picture that in my head. Right. As sailors, we can all picture that until you look at his dinghy. And then I'm like, I don't see where the receptors are. Well, because they're covered up by the cushions that they're always sitting on. So then I went to the manufacturer, I found it. Then I went through some old pictures of their boat, and I can see that they do have the pinholes, but they don't have the bench anymore. They took that bench out right off the bat. So then I'm trying to figure out, it's still like, okay, he's telling me the story of how he tried to put oars into the pin locks and broke one. But how was he rowing it without. Without anywhere to sit? And then I started thinking about it too. Like, if you're looking for somebody in the water, man overboard drills, which are beat into all of us as boaters, you never take your eye off the person. Right. So at no point would you want to be rowing backwards towards the person you can't see in bat. Like, that whole concept then struck me as your boat's not designed for it. Your covered the holes that it would go into. The amount of time it would take for you to get set up to row to break that pin, you would have found your two life jackets and your anchor in that amount of time on accident, just moving everything out of the way so that you could do that setup of that picture you painted for me. Right. To break that pin in the hole as he described, he'd have to be sitting on the bench trying to row. But there is no bench, so.
- [65:18]
Ashley Banfield
So I've said you'd have to be on your knees, but that damn anchor is in the way. So that damn anchor that you're trying to move in order to row would be in your mind to throw overboard.
- [65:30]
Blaine Stevenson
Right? Right. Everything that all the other safety. And every time I see the bottom of their dinghy, there's just kind of. There's stuff. I mean, we all are that way. I think I got two bags of trash in the back of my dinghy right now. But you're not going to kneel down, turn your back to your wife, put oars in and try and kneel like that. When you could just kneel over the front and do a back and forth like you would a stand up paddleboard.
- [65:55]
Ashley Banfield
We Talk about also what's behind them. When you're driving, you hold on to a throttle of a little engine. We've seen a lot of social media, but you pointed out to me there are two different electric engines that the hookers have used on the back of their dinghy. And that would mean there's probably a spare on board because as you have aptly noted, sailors don't just throw that stuff out. That's critical stuff. It might be down in the engine room. There should be a second engine on board.
- [66:23]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah. So I don't know the history of the engine, and I actually found this by accident in arguing in your comment section back at the very beginning when everybody was trying to argue about the key. And, you know, you could pull a key out on an outboard and run. And I was trying to explain people. It was electric, so I was trying to pull up pictures to show people. And it. That's what it dawned on me, that, like, I'm looking at two separate motors and two separate social media posting groups here. And so he had one that was more of a torquedo gray and orange color scheme, which made me think it's a torpedo. And then this, the. The newest one I see is an NT300 looking thingy. I mean, I can't zoom in enough to get numbers, but as far as I could tell, yeah, they've gone through two different iterations of electric motors. And yeah, I. We don't throw things away out here. We just don't. Maybe he did. You know, that would be complete speculation on my part, but I don't know. I'd keep a backup.
- [67:28]
Ashley Banfield
When you're living aboard, having a spare of everything is pretty handy, especially, you know, something that propels you an engine.
- [67:34]
Brian Hooker
Right.
- [67:35]
Ashley Banfield
Really critical, like having extra, you know, extra treasures or luxuries. This is really. These are essential. You wouldn't get rid of that. And listen, I'm not saying you didn't. Maybe they did. But the chances that there might be one of those spare engines on board, there should be, perhaps. And if it's not, that could be a problem. And since you brought it up, you were also kind enough. Thank you. To give me the specs on that potential NT300 engine. And I have been saying all along that little tiny electric engine maybe goes two to four, you know, miles an hour. There's actually a couple of different variations on how fast you can go and how much power you burn. So the faster you go with that engine, the, the fewer hours you have to be out and about. And the slower you go with that engine, the longer you can be about. Do you have those? Offhand, I have them in front of me, but I'd love you to sort of talk the audience through that.
- [68:30]
Blaine Stevenson
So. Yeah. So you have a power curve much. A power curve of ideal optimum range of where an engine likes to operate at. And the NT300, I think it runs off a 36 volt battery system.
- [68:47]
Ashley Banfield
That's what it says.
- [68:47]
Blaine Stevenson
And then what, what would happen in that scenario, especially since it's lithium, is you're able to operate in full range, maximum amount of time of the battery and then it just cuts off. It's like your Ryobi drills, right. It, it's not like the old flashlights where you could bang them a couple of times and get the light out of it. It's like once that, once that drill battery is dead, it's dead.
- [69:09]
Ashley Banfield
When it's gone, it's gone.
- [69:10]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah. What's gone? It's gone. So the lithium battery pack for the NT300. If, if he has been driving that thing for a couple of years now, he's gonna know where his optimal range is. Right. And we don't know what size battery he had because his old torpedo, there was a, there was a battery pack that slid in. Right. So you could calculate how much battery. But the NT300 has a cable that comes out to it. You put in your own battery pack or their proprietary battery pack, but it's essentially 36 volts. You could have, you know, three car batteries. His dinghy isn't big enough for that, but you could have. You can't calculate his range and limit it based off of that, that dinghy motor because he could have had any craving.
- [69:59]
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- [70:30]
Ashley Banfield
interesting when I saw if you go slow, they call it low trolling speed. If you go two to three miles per hour, which is what I assumed is roughly what that engine could do, you got three 30 hours of runtime. I thought maybe only four hours, but they got 30, so that's interesting. If you go faster and if you're in a hurry and you're trying to do bad things, you're probably going to go faster. If you go cruise or mid power, you're going four to five miles an hour, still kind of slow, but quicker. And you've now you've only got four hours. That goes down to four hours. So that comes down real fast. If you want to go full power, six to six and a half miles an hour again, you know, you'll get over to. You'll get over to Marsh harbor in 40 minutes at that speed. Right. You only get. By that point, you only get one to one and a half hours, so not much. So it's just really interesting to note the speed that he might be using at any time and the length of time he knows he's got before that battery's dead at any time of day, whatever he might be doing.
- [71:36]
Blaine Stevenson
And the only thing I would add to that is they base that off of those numbers off of a standard thingy. And there's nothing standard about his dinghy, so I'm sure his speeds are a lot slower.
- [71:48]
Ashley Banfield
Explain that.
- [71:49]
Blaine Stevenson
Okay, so a rigid inflatable dinghy is as. That's what RIB stands for, rigid, inflatable. And that their rubber sides, the whole design on them, almost anything is more modern. There's a kind of a reason why boss went out of business. But his is just a bathtub floating through the water. It's hard fiberglass. It is only £120. But those. The. When you look at the front of the boat, it doesn't have a deep V in the front like a lot of the ribs do for getting up on planks. Right. So there's. He kind of beats the water into submission with his dinghy where the rest are on top of it. So, yeah, I don't think. Because when I saw those stats, I'm like, okay, maybe he was going fast enough in the dinghy at 5 knots to hit, like awake from another boat to cause somebody to bounce. But not. He's not moving that dinghy that fast with that amount of weight in it.
- [72:59]
Ashley Banfield
Yeah. And if something nefarious happened afterwards and none of Brian's story is. If none of Brian's story is true, he's got not a whole lot of time to ping around the Sea of Abaco in that dinghy in the dark. He's got. If he's mid power, he's got six to six and a half hours. But he's already been out. They've already been out down to Tahiti beach, and then all the way back another quarter mile, maybe half mile, into Abaco Inn and back out again, and maybe all the way back to Soulmate. So the. The battery use has already been at play during that day. So it's not going to be full battery power at the time. Anything nefarious might have happened on board Soulmate. So now that we've gotten sort of the battery issue out of the way, I want to talk a little bit about the life vests. Because when we spoke with Pete calling, who is one of the fire and rescue guys who was first to spend some time with Brian, he mentioned that he saw two life vests in the bottom of the dinghy. And I checked back with him, and I said, pete, did you see him in the bottom of the dinghy, or did you see them stowed in the front stowage area that's behind a little dinghy, you know, storage door? And he said, no, they were right there in the bottom of the dinghy. And then you brought something interesting to my attention about Coast Guard approved life jackets. They almost all, if not all, have one very specific feature right up here, close to something. What is it?
- [74:29]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah, the whistle.
- [74:30]
Ashley Banfield
The whistle.
- [74:34]
Blaine Stevenson
So I've been trying for a couple of nights now to get permission from everybody in the Anchorage to do a sound travel over water test. Right. Because where I am is pretty much the entire length behind me, which you can't see at night here, but to land over there is the entire length of that Abaco Sea area. And so I wanted to know. I do not know how far sound travels on water, but I know I can hear a dog barking on that beach in the right direction.
- [75:04]
Ashley Banfield
I can hear sound traveling on water a mile away where I'm from. And I'll tell you something. The higher pitched it is, the more you're gonna hear it. And he's already put himself on record with fire and rescue that where he was, where. He says, this is about the area where Lynette went overboard. He says it's a thousand meters to Soulmate. So we're talking about. Excuse me, a thousand yards. It's a thousand yards. So we're only talking about a thousand yards here. I'm pretty sure you can hear a whistle of a thousand yards over water.
- [75:37]
Blaine Stevenson
Yes, I'm. So the information that you just gave about the life vest being on the floor is. Does. It just doesn't add up to me. Like, at some point was he floating and then just taking inventory of what was in his boat? And second guessing what he should have done. Like, why would you pull the life vest out when you're about to land on shore and you're just drifting anyways? But, but the whistle is just one thing. I mean, it's also the flares. You know, you're getting people who are taking pictures of sunsets. There are people. There has been no picture of a flare. There's been no tourist who's like, oh, is that a SpaceX launch? You know, there's. There, there hasn't been. And that's why from my very first interview till now, what. Back when I was like, hey, find out who saw the flares so we can get. I was trying to use that to pinpoint a location of where she fell in. Right. Well, now it turns out he knows where she fell in and now I know the area better. But there's no, the, the flares and the whistles and everything he had available to him. There wasn't a logical explanation ever given on how you forgot everything you knew in the last three years.
- [76:55]
Ashley Banfield
Oh, and as a United States Marine. And you are not in a screaming wind and you are not in big seas at all. It was fairly calm. It was glass calm at exactly that time, just a quarter mile down the shore. You know, I've seen it. We've got video of it being glass calm. Yeah. So, you know, we already know that that's bullshit. That whole. The seas were angry, my friend. They were not. And so you could have just jumped out because it's about 4 or 5ft of water where that dinghy was scooting along the shoreline. You didn't have to go out the channel. You're not a deep drawing vessel. You're drawing about 6 inches. You can scoot along closer to shore and fly, you know, go closer like the crow flies. So you probably could have stood on the bottom where, where this whole thing was purported to have happened. So the whole thing is just none of it.
- [77:45]
Blaine Stevenson
But if you're, and also if you've been in an area for two months, you learn the depths to cut the channels in a dinghy.
- [77:54]
Ashley Banfield
Yes.
- [77:55]
Blaine Stevenson
So, you know, when we make this tea coming out the channel, you know, there are the boaters out there and I, I see them in the comment section. I understand, like, you know, oh, well, you follow all the rules and you go out to the end of the T, you know, out through the channel you go, that's fine. But those are also the people who are wearing their life vests and not drinking and driving and you know, Right. So the rest of us, in a dinghy. In a dinghy, we know to cut the corner right around the first post or whatever post it is. You know, you don't know when you first get there. I'm not gonna say you do. Right. But then you watch a dinghy do it, you're like, oh, okay, I know I can go that far now. And then the next time you watch another local going by in a john boat, that cuts the corner, even more
- [78:39]
Ashley Banfield
honesty. God, come on. I mean, look at when you draw six inches and you see that you've got three feet of water all the way off to a certain point, you're taking that route. You're not going all the way out, way out into the middle of the sea of abacus. The channels mark that way, you know, by the charts, where the water is safe. That's how most people navigate a dinghy going to shore. You know that. That's just kind of the boater's way.
- [79:05]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah. If you. If you. Especially if you've been there two months. I will admit, when I first get somewhere, I'm staying in the middle of the channel. I don't know, because I can't afford another propeller. I mean, once you've. Once you've run your propeller into the ground, once you. You learn that one. But that. Again, I guess if there's anything I want to say is every part of this investigation or these. Anybody who's trying to help or anybody who's trying to figure this out or they're just following the story, is just ignore everything Brian said and say we have a missing person seen at 634 here and work from there. Right. Because I can't find a single thing that he said to me, to be truthful, yet. It wasn't dark. It was. And he says it wasn't dark. That's the worst part about it. He says in his audio recording me, it was 10 minutes before sunset and then the sun went down. And then we just. I mean, the picture he paints, we're. We're going through this timeline, but we have to go through it at a warp speed. Because if I just sit here for 10 minutes, if I just put a camera on for 10 minutes to show people how long 10 minutes is, it's. It's remarkable. I mean, basically, when you cut out the commercials, it's an entire Big Bang Theory episode.
- [80:26]
Ashley Banfield
Well, let me tell you as well, I actually sat there and watched it personally in that spot. And it's getting dusky around 7:55. Oh, 7:55. Pretty dusky. But it's like three and a half minutes where it goes, I mean, in three and a half minutes you go from dusky. I could still see you to it's dark, but I mean, you still have a lot of time. And it was nowhere near 8 o' clock at night. To go all the way from the Little Abaco Inn through the white sound panel and around the corner would have taken all of 12 minutes. So it wouldn't have taken you till 8:00' clock at night. It wouldn't have taken you till 7:50 at night. It wouldn't HAVE taken you till 7:40 at night. If he says what he says, I left at 7:30. I was on my way. And out she went in the dark. It's not possible.
- [81:23]
Blaine Stevenson
And, and again, that's why I'm saying we really got to just throw away everything he's saying, because it doesn't work like that out here. And I understand, like I watched your podcast where you were sitting up at that one restaurant. You're like, and now it's dark. But living out here on the water, our eyes adjust as that light goes down. Right now my outside lights are on for probably the first time in a week to have this, this interview. But we can see across the water pretty well even when it's dark because it, we, our eyes adjusted as we came down too. So I, I just, yeah, I'm at
- [82:03]
Ashley Banfield
that point now where I'm almost done debating that because it's just not debatable, you know, I, I, Right. Just his story and his timeline is impossible with the sun. I mean, we can all screw up our own calendars and clocks, but you can't screw with the sun. The sun's going down when the sun's going down, and when you're on video and on, you know, snaps on iPhones heading out around 7pm you can't mess with the reality of when darkness really falls. And it doesn't fall into his, it doesn't fall into his timeline.
- [82:37]
Blaine Stevenson
Right. And that's. So what we do for our social media is my wife shows sunsets every night. So we're very familiar with sunset. I mean, if there's ever be somebody who's a professional on sunset, it's my wife who broadcasts them every night of the week for the last eight months. And then she does afterwards, we have underwater lights under our boat and she turns them on and lets the fish come. But from the time the sun sets till it's dark enough for her to turn on the underwater lights is the hour and a half we have dinner. That's her break in her programming. Right. There is still. There's a lot of time between when that somebody that's in Iowa arguing with me online, like, well, they said the sun set at 6:34. It doesn't matter. That's not when it gets dark.
- [83:25]
Ashley Banfield
That's right. Sunsets. But it's still light out until the sun is long gone deep under the horizon. And you're right, it's around an hour to an hour and a half. So anybody who's looking at sunset. That's not your metric.
- [83:39]
Blaine Stevenson
But it is amazing. What he did in his phone call to me and in his talks to everybody is the amount of breadcrumbs that he threw out there almost as a distraction. You know, he has an electric motor, and the world got hung up on that for a week. Right. They were hung up on how he couldn't start his engine. But he also throws in there, the wife had the spare key in the dryback, that Lynette had it in the dry bag. Right. But even if it was on Soulmate, it's just as unavailable to him as if it was in the dry bag. That was like an unnecessary detail that to add in there. Like, it's. It's still unattainable whether it's on the boat or in her bag. It had nothing to do with the story. It had nothing to do. There's these weird things in a story that's just like, why are you telling me where your spare key was?
- [84:39]
Ashley Banfield
Right.
- [84:40]
Blaine Stevenson
Why are you. Why are you telling me you're. Or broke when you don't have a bench? Why are you telling me you fired a flare, but you didn't use the whistle? You didn't use yourself? Why are you telling me use your cell phone for a flashlight, but you can't use it? Yeah.
- [85:02]
Ashley Banfield
I think we've. I think we've come to the determination that anybody who's got half a brain can see a lot of holes in his story. And then people like you who have a lot of Mariners brain see the whole thing is a sieve.
- [85:16]
Blaine Stevenson
Right. And I. I see a lot of Mariners out there, too, who are like, hey, the ocean could do things. You don't know what was going on in that very specific moment. And I want to agree with them. I do. Until you start to see everything that we saw now, right. On day one when that story came out. I'm agreeing with those Mariners. We don't know. I'm not saying his Story's right. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying we don't know. But now we're starting to know right now. When she fell over in the Abaco Sea, and you hear that word sea and you think a big body of water like the Caribbean Sea, and then you realize it's the Abaco Bathtub. Right. And so I. I do want to say. Yeah, it's. I. I wouldn't even call a lake that's a pond.
- [86:04]
Ashley Banfield
It's so shallow. Yeah, it's like a big swimming pool. It's like a big swimming pool. And the deepest end is around 8ft, but it could get to 15 at a high tide in one spot. But it's really shallow. You can see the bottom everywhere.
- [86:15]
Blaine Stevenson
Yeah. So, yeah. From a mariner's perspective now, knowing the lay of the land and all the work you've done to get us actual eyes on the place, there's. There's not one part of the story that, that that makes sense. I mean, we've tried recreating it. There's so many videos we haven't put out trying to recreate things that it just makes us look silly. Like me and my neighbor. Boats are invested in protecting the voter's lifestyle and making sure that the islands that we do get answers to this. Because eventually, as we travel to these islands and people keep doing stupid stuff in their islands, they're going to stop letting us in. Right. So there isn't a personal investment in this to get answers and to make sure that people aren't scared off from boating. Because this happened when you're not bouncing off a dinghy that goes 2 mph in 4ft of water on a night where we both have seen footage of standard waves, you know?
- [87:28]
Ashley Banfield
Well, that's why I keep saying, tick tock, Brian Hooker. Tick tock. Blaine, I can't thank you enough for just having eyes on this, every single detail and bringing them to my attention. It's gonna take a village. But I don't. I don't think things are gonna go well for Brian Hooker. It's my own personal opinion, but given everything that I've been able to dig up and what you've dug up, it doesn't look good.
- [87:51]
Blaine Stevenson
Just help keep. Take care of Carly. That's. That's what Lynette would want. Right. Lynette left a child behind in this world. And it's all of our job to step up for Lynette and help take care of Carlton.
- [88:01]
Ashley Banfield
Justice for Lynette. Blaine. Thank you so much.
- [88:03]
Blaine Stevenson
You have a great day.
- [88:05]
Ashley Banfield
My great thanks to Blaine Stevenson for helping me to sort of muddle through a lot of the questions that I'm not skilled enough to answer and then knock down some of the things that I think I might have figured out. He's been just invaluable and I really appreciate that long conversation. It was very, very informative. I also have some stuff coming up for you in the episodes to come, specifically some video I want to share with you. Somebody's surveillance camera was rolling right into the Sea of Abaco. I'm going to show you the things that we have found and the things that we think we see in that video coming up in the episodes to come. So I hope you'll continue to watch and listen and don't forget to subscribe. Subscribe so you don't miss that next episode as well. Thank you everyone for watching. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, truth isn't just serious, it's drop dead serious.