A 68-foot yacht once owned by actress Julie Andrews broke up off Dillon Beach this week after hitting a shoal in light fog Saturday afternoon.
Four adults, including skipper and owner Hal Hallikianen of Richmond, were rescued from the vessel by a Sonoma County Sheriff's helicopter and dropped off on Pierce Point.
From there, a Coast Guard lifeboat ferried the stranded crew across the mouth of Tomales Bay to Lawson's Landing.
Although nobody was injured in the wreck, the hull of the boat, which was named the Tempest, was punctured in the accident. By the time help arrived, "the boat was pretty much full of water," said Coast Guard boatswain's mate Bill Hantzmon Tuesday.
The Bodega Bay Coast Guard station received Hallikianen's radio call for help at 12:35 p.m. Saturday. The Tempest ran aground off the northwest side of Sand Point, where wave action is always turbulent.
As it happened, the boatwreck occurred only three hours after a young Tomales man was attacked by a great white shark three fourths of a mile further north.
Three lifeboats arrived at 1:20 p.m., and rescuers determined that the tide was too low to get close enough to pull the people off the boat.
Before 25 minutes had passed, the Sonoma County helicopter lowered a rescuer equipped with a harness, and three men and a woman were carried one by one over to a sandy beach just south of the tip of Tomales Point.
Since the yacht was Hallikianen's primary residence, he could not be reached this week by The Light.
However, the skipper's son David Hallikianen said he himself was sailing just southwest of Point Reyes when he heard the Coast Guard send it's boat-in-distress radio call.
He said it sounded like his father's boat, but he didn't respond because "we were dealing with our own fog and stuff."
The younger Hallikianen told The Light that his dad bought the luxury vessel from Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards in the early 1970s. He said the yacht appeared in several of the movies the couple made together, and it co-starred with Jerry Lewis in The Fisherman.