Fishing vessel found 7 years after sinking off Rhode Island with human remains

Seven years after the F/V Mistress went down in the cold Atlantic off Rhode Island, the wreck has been found—along with human remains that may finally answer what happened to one of the two men lost that night.

The 52-foot commercial fishing vessel sank on New Year's Day 2019, just after midnight. Captain Oscar Diaz was running the boat with his son Tim and his nephew John Ansay aboard when rough weather near Block Island forced the ship to take on water. A distress call went out. Another fishing boat in the area responded and pulled Tim Diaz from the sea, but Oscar Diaz and John Ansay vanished into the dark. The Coast Guard launched a search that covered more than 2,150 nautical miles. The ship itself disappeared without a trace.

For seven years, the wreck remained lost. The official investigation closed. The families had no answers. Then, in July of this year, a nonprofit called Green Oceans sponsored a sonar survey of the area and found what looked like a wreck site ninety-two feet down. On August 30, divers descended to the location and examined the structure. The features matched the F/V Mistress—the dimensions, the configuration, the details that would identify a specific vessel. Human remains were recovered from the site.

Green Oceans has now asked the U.S. Department of the Interior to launch a formal interagency investigation and to reopen the Coast Guard's original case. But the organization is also raising a question that has not been fully examined: whether the Block Island Wind Farm, which sits about fifty feet from the wreck site, played any role in the sinking or in the failure to rescue the two missing men.

The wind farm has been operational since 2016. Its turbines stand six hundred feet tall and generate enough power for roughly seventeen thousand homes. It is the first offshore wind installation in the United States. Dozens of studies have assessed its impact on wildlife and maritime traffic, and federal regulators have concluded that the facility poses minimal risk to navigation safety. But Coast Guard records cited by Green Oceans tell a different story about that particular night: high winds, severely limited visibility, and proximity to the wind turbines forced a rescue helicopter to turn back during the search for Oscar Diaz and John Ansay.

Michael Lombardi, president of Green Oceans, said in a statement that the discovery of the wreck offers the families a chance at closure and answers. The organization is asking federal authorities to secure the site for forensic analysis and to provide public transparency about all maintenance and monitoring at the turbine since the wreck occurred. What remains unclear is whether the wind farm's presence that night—the conditions it may have created, the obstacles it may have posed to rescue—changed the outcome. That investigation has not yet begun.