The sudden demise of the Volare, a 49-foot cabin cruiser that sank in the San Francisco Bay, killing two people and leaving two missing, began with a blast of smoke and a long trail that drifted across the water, according to videos reviewed by the Chronicle on Thursday and eyewitness accounts.

Within two minutes, the smoke was gone as the bottom of the boat submerged into the bay.

San Francisco Police Department officials took over the investigation into the cause of the sinking Thursday and potentially won’t know why the Volare sank until the boat is lifted out of the water, a complicated and expensive task. First, investigators must locate the vessel, analyze its structural soundness and find a company to retrieve it. 

U.S. Coast Guard officials have suggested that the boat was overtaken by a wave while motoring from Angel Island to San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon. Representatives of the U.S. Coast Guard and San Francisco Fire Department said eyewitness reports that they had seen a fire and smoke were unsubstantiated, saying rescuers had possibly been looking at steam coming off the hot engine as it came in contact with the water.

But livestream footage from a rooftop in Pacific Heights shows smoke billowing off the Volare  starting at 3:32 p.m. Tuesday, approximately the same time officials say they received the first distress calls. A video posted to Instagram, taken from the shore by a man who was fishing, showed a thin cloud of smoke stretching across the water. 

Two of the first rescuers to reach the Volare said Thursday they saw light-gray smoke trailing behind the three-story cabin cruiser as they raced toward it to help.

Mike Montoya, a commercial fisherman from Alameda, was about two miles away at Fort Mason in his 22-foot Boston Whaler when he spotted the vehicle in distress.

“I just saw smoke that was a half-mile long coming off the boat,” Montoya said. 

Another early rescuer, the captain of the Bass-Tub, Aaron Anfinson, told the Chronicle that he thought it looked like the Volare was on fire when he first spotted it.

“You could see the smoke, it went out across the bay,” he said. “I took out the binoculars and I saw smoke just billowing out the boat.”

After reviewing video Thursday, Lt. Mariano Elias, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Fire Department, told the Chronicle it’s possible it was smoke. White smoke, as seen in the video, typically indicates there is water on a fire, he said. 

“It’s too far to identify what it is,” Elias said of the video quality “It is smoke of some sort. I wouldn’t call it a fire though.”

When Montoya’s and Anfinson’s boats reached the Volare, neither man saw flames, they said. 

The smoke provides a critical clue in determining how a seemingly seaworthy vessel with an experienced captain had succumbed to what were otherwise typical conditions on the bay.

Owner and captain John Boisa was a formal naval officer, according to public records and interviews. He regularly took the Volare out on the bay and had even recently made a trip down the California coast to San Diego and back, friends and family said.

Earlier in the day, Boisa had piloted the Volare and its 19 passengers out past the Golden Gate Bridge, then to Angel Island, where they stopped for the afternoon. On the way back to San Francisco, about 1.5 miles off the west coast of Alcatraz, the boat encountered trouble.

At a Wednesday press conference, Coast Guard Capt. Jarod Toczko said it appeared that “the vessel took a wave and was listing heavily and lost a little bit of stability and then it quickly rolled over … All indications are that things happened very quickly.”

Experienced boaters, including Montoya, told the Chronicle the Volare should have been perfectly capable of navigating the bay’s choppy afternoon seas.

“Those boats go up and down the coast – that’s an ocean-going trawler,” said Peter Moorhead, an experienced marine surveyor who conducts safety inspections on boats. “You could take it down to L.A. and up to Seattle no problem. It’s a seaworthy boat, so the idea that a wave came and the boat tipped over – no, that’s not happening in the San Francisco Bay on a 50-foot trawler.”

Moorhead said that the boat was easily equipped to handle 20 people, and that their weight was an unlikely factor in the boat tipping. 

When Montoya reached the vessel, it was pitched on to its port side, he said. Survivors clung to the starboard guardrails and bimini. Others held fast to the board of a kite boarder who had stopped to help.

“If you’re on the water and somebody needs your help, you just help,” Montoya said.  

Anfinson and the other passengers aboard the Bass-Tub lowered a ladder into the water and passed out life jackets, he said. 

After they’d rescued the passengers who had been hanging onto the boat, the Volare tilted back upright in the water, Montoya said. Then rapidly, it sank.

Ralph Boisa, the older brother of captain John Boisa, told the Chronicle that a group of extended family and friends had gathered on the Volare to scatter the ashes of Maria Boisa, Ralph’s adopted daughter, who died in 2015. Ralph was not present on the boat, but was told about the events from a daughter who was.

“They didn’t see or hear anything,” Ralph said his daughter recounted. “They’re sitting, and all of a sudden, the boat went over.”

John and Ralph’s brother Clifford Boisa, 79, of Rio Oso, was pronounced dead Tuesday after being pulled out of the water. The San Francisco Police Department recovered the body of 58-year-old Tondra Miller Madruga on Thursday afternoon from the water off the coast of Treasure Island.

Ralph told the Chronicle the three missing passengers are Clifford’s wife Jackie Boisa, his sister Carol Boisa and a friend of Maria Boisa, who has since been identified as Madruga.

Tuesday’s incident took place in one of the deepest and windiest parts of the bay – between the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. The afternoon tide was pulling out toward the ocean while wind blew in under the bridge, subjecting mariners to choppy waves.

But fellow boaters said it was nothing the Volare shouldn’t have been able to handle.

“That boat shouldn’t have had any problems in conditions like that,” said Montoya, who said he’s helmed boats of similar size.

Montoya said he believes the Volare experienced mechanical failure based on what he saw and his experience doing mechanical work on boats and cars. He suspects that one of the engines overheated and melted the exhaust, a rubber tube that sits below the waterline, triggering the disaster. 

“A wave coming over and sinking that – absolutely not,” said Montoya. “I definitely saw smoke, not steam.” 

Staff writer Michael Barba contributed reporting.

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This article originally published at S.F. boat capsizing: Videos show smoke billowing from sinking ship.