Coast Guard to halt search for Microsoft researcher

The U.S. Coast Guard plans to end its search for Jim Gray on Thursday, but friends and family intend continue to look for the 63-year-old, award-winning Microsoft researcher.

Gray has been . He was expected back in the evening that same day. When he did not return, his wife reported him missing. A search effort has been underway since late Sunday, covering a large area of the Pacific Ocean off the Northern California coast.

"The U.S. Coast Guard will conduct one more massive search effort for Dr. Jim Gray before considering case suspension this evening," the agency said in a statement Thursday.

The expanded search area on Thursday will be out to 300 miles west of the California Coast and as far south as the Channel Islands, the Coast Guard said. While it is unlikely that Gray traveled that far, the areas are being searched based on the possibility that he could have sailed farther than originally planned, the Coast Guard said.

This final effort will include numerous search and rescue units including two planes, multiple helicopters and multiple boats, the Coast Guard said.

Gray, who works in Microsoft's Research Center in San Francisco, left alone on his 40-foot sailing yacht Tenacious sometime on Sunday morning. Local media have reported that he was headed for the Farallon Islands, a national wildlife refuge, to scatter his mother's ashes. The last likely sighting puts him near the islands on Sunday evening.

If the Coast Guard suspends its search, Gray's friends, admirers and colleagues plan to continue the effort, the San Jose Mercury News reported Thursday. Offers for help have come in from people including Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Amazon.com employees, the newspaper reported.

Well-known in Silicon Valley circles, Gray focuses his work on using computers to analyze scientific data and on the topics of databases and transaction processing. In 1998 he received the prestigious ACM Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel price for computing. More recently, he has been active in building online databases like the TerraService, which provides access to a vast data store of maps and aerial photographs of the U.S.

Gray, a San Francisco resident and University of California, Berkeley, graduate, is said to be an experienced sailor with over 10 years of experience. His 40-foot sailing yacht said to be equipped with communication, safety and emergency gear. Coast Guard and others are baffled about how it could simply disappear.