In this undated photo provided by Maritime New Zealand, the yacht Nina is tied at dock at a unidentified location. Searchers said Thursday, June 27, 2013, they have grave concerns for seven people aboard... (Associated Press) 
 
 A New Zealand meteorologist took the last known calls from the seven people aboard an American schooner, "The weather's turned nasty, how do we get away from it?" 
 
 The phone calls and texts ended June 4. More than three weeks later, searchers said Thursday they have grave concerns for the crew on the classic 85-year-old wooden vessel that went missing while sailing from New Zealand to Australia. Attempts to contact the crew by radio and an aerial search this week have proved fruitless. 
 
 Authorities say the skipper of the 70-foot (21-meter) vessel Nina is American David Dyche. They say there are two other American men and three American women aboard, aged between 17 and 73. Also aboard is a British man, aged 35. 
 
 Messages posted online by friends indicate the boat originally left from Panama City, Florida. 
 
 Meteorologist Bob McDavitt said he took a satellite phone call from the boat June 3. A woman named Evi asked how to get away from the weather. He said to call back in 30 minutes after he'd studied a forecast. She did. 
 
 "She was quite controlled in her voice, it sounded like everything was under control," McDavitt said, adding that the call itself indicated she was concerned about the conditions. 
 
 McDavitt said he spoke only briefly to Evi, advising her to head south and to brace for a storm with strong winds and high seas. The next day he got a text, the last known communication from the boat: "ANY UPDATE 4 NINA? ... EVI" 
 
 McDavitt said he advised the crew to stay put and ride out the storm another day. He continued sending messages the next few days but didn't hear back. Friends of the crew got in touch with McDavitt soon after that, and then alerted authorities June 14. 
 
 Kevin Banaghan, who is spearheading search efforts by Maritime New Zealand's Rescue Coordination Centre, said rescuers weren't worried at first because there had been no distress call from the boat and its emergency locator beacon had not been activated. He said rescuers on June 14 initiated a communications search, in which they tried contacting the boat over various radio frequencies as well as contacting other vessels in the area to see if they'd spotted the Nina. 
 
 This week, he said, rescuers escalated their efforts. An Air Force plane on Tuesday searched the area where the boat went missing. A second search by the plane on Wednesday went as far as the Australian coast but again turned up nothing. Banaghan said searchers are considering their next options. 
 
 The boat left the Bay of Islands in northern New Zealand on May 29 bound for the port of Newcastle, near Sydney. The last communication was from 370 nautical miles west of New Zealand. 
 
 Banaghan said the crew hoped to arrive in Australia mid-June but that, given the conditions, he considered a realistic arrival date to be about June 25. He said Dyche is a qualified captain and the crew has varying degrees of experience. 
 
 "We're very concerned for their safety and wellbeing," he said. 
 
 Authorities say the storm three weeks ago saw winds gusting up to 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour and waves of up to 8 meters (26 feet). 
 
 Banaghan said the Nina is a "lovely old craft" which won races when it was new and had been maintained in excellent condition. He added that it had a new engine installed in recent months which had apparently created some initial leaking problems. 
 
 He said there are several possible scenarios, including the boat losing communications, drifting off course, or the crew taking to lifeboats. He said there's also a possibility the boat suffered a catastrophic failure and sank before anybody had time to react. ||||| In this undated photo provided by Robin Wright, Ricky Wright and wife Robin Wright sit at a dock in the New Zealand port of Whangarei, where the wooden sailboat Nina was moored in 2013. The couple have... (Associated Press) 
 
 WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Here's how Robin Wright sees it: Her 19-year-old daughter Danielle is adrift on the Pacific Ocean but is keeping her spirits up with her six crewmates on their wooden sailboat, the Niña. They're collecting rainwater, rationing food, singing, telling travel stories and planning their next adventures. Heck, Wright figures, by now Danielle may even have gotten married to one of the three young men aboard. After all, the Niña's captain is a registered celebrant. 
 
 New Zealand authorities see it very differently: They believe the 70-foot (21-meter) schooner likely sank more than eight months ago after getting battered by a storm as the crew attempted to cross the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to Australia. That's when the boat's crew stopped using their satellite phone. A search turned up no sign of the vessel and they believe there's no real chance any of them are still alive. 
 
 But Robin and husband Ricky have found it hard to give up the search for their only child. The couple from Lafayette, Louisiana, has spent the last three months living in Australia and spearheading their own search, long after New Zealand authorities gave up. This month, Ricky Wright earned his pilot's license. His aim was to fly the Australian coastline in hopes of spotting something. Anything. 
 
 They've spent $600,000 to pay for private plane searches. The money has come not only from their own savings but also from fundraisers, friends, family, even their daughter's college fund. Deeply religious, the couple says God has kept them strong and determined. 
 
 "We cannot assume the boat sank without evidence, and we think it's highly likely that it did not," Robin Wright says. "We know there's a chance the boat sank. There is a chance. But do you assume the worst and stop searching?" 
 
 Still, the search has to end at some point. 
 
 On Tuesday the Wrights, speaking by phone from the Sydney Airport, said they were returning to the U.S after running out of money and were unsure if they would return to Australia. Still, they won't lose hope until the anniversary of the boat's disappearance. 
 
 "After a year, I think the chances are down pretty low," Ricky Wright says. "But we will not give up on them. We know other people have survived up to a year." 
 
 The Wrights remain unhappy with aspects of the official search. They believe it began too late, wasn't extensive enough, and failed to restart when they presented authorities with a grainy satellite image they believe depicts the Niña adrift. New Zealand searchers say they did everything by the book and cannot do anything more. They say the military reviewed the ghostly image and concluded it was nothing more than the foam from a wave. 
 
 The Wrights last month met New Zealand's Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee in Wellington to express their concerns. 
 
 "They have enormous faith that the boat is still out there, that they're catching fish and freshwater, and will sooner or later make landfall. Unfortunately, none of our very extensive and expert-led search efforts concurs with that view," Brownlee says. 
 
 Ricky, 49, who brokers the sale of businesses, and Robin, 54, met at Louisiana State University. They home-schooled Danielle on their small farm, where their daughter loved to ride bareback on her horse, Copper. When Danielle was 15, the family took a sabbatical to sail the Caribbean. 
 
 "We sold everything and we went, and we don't regret it," Robin says. 
 
 She says while she and Ricky loved the tranquility, their daughter missed her friends and Facebook, and the Internet. So they sent her home every few months to reconnect, and reduced a planned two-year voyage to 14 months. 
 
 The highlight for Danielle was a stop in Panama where she met David Dyche IV, one year her junior, who'd been raised aboard the Niña. The teens soon became inseparable and the parents also became close. 
 
 When captain David Dyche III and wife Rosemary last year called from New Zealand to ask the Wrights to help crew, Danielle asked if she could go alone, during a break from the University of Louisiana where she was majoring in psychology. Her parents weren't surprised — she'd grown to more appreciate her time sailing the Caribbean and also had become so independent. 
 
 They said goodbye to Danielle on Facebook the day before she set sail, and she told them how excited she was. 
 
 The Niña left from the tiny port of Opua in northern New Zealand on May 29 bound for Newcastle, near Sydney. 
 
 As well as Danielle and the Dyches, also aboard was Kyle Jackson, 27, who grew up on a Nebraska cattle ranch; Matthew Wootton, 35, a British musician and Green Party member; and Evi Nemeth, 73, a retired University of Colorado computer science professor who two years earlier had reroofed her own house. All loved the outdoors and adventure. 
 
 A few days out, Nemeth used the satellite phone to call a New Zealand meteorologist: The weather had turned nasty, she told him, and they were seeking advice to avoid the worst of the storm. The last known communication from the Niña was a text sent June 4: "Thanks storm sails shredded last night, now bare poles" followed by a course heading. 
 
 The text never reached its intended recipient and was only later recovered by satellite phone company Iridium. The Niña had an emergency beacon aboard but it was never activated. 
 
 New Zealand searchers say they were first told the boat was missing on June 14. They began trying to communicate with the crew but were unsuccessful. On June 25, the day authorities calculated the Niña should have reached Australia, they began a two-week aerial search. 
 
 Nigel Clifford, the general manager of safety and response services at Maritime New Zealand, says they didn't get a plane up right away in line with standard international practice — without a distress call, they wait until a boat is overdue before beginning an aerial search because there could be any number of reasons why a boat loses its communications. 
 
 "Given there was no debris, that would further suggest the boat sank. But it is a really big ocean. A really big ocean," Clifford says 
 
 Clifford says a relative of another missing Niña crew member was present when searchers had to tell him they were abandoning the aerial search. 
 
 "He said that in his heart he couldn't accept what had happened," Clifford says, "but in his head, he could." ||||| National 
 
 The schooner Niña disappeared during a storm in the Tasman Sea last June. Frank Robson meets the parents of one of the missing crew, who continue to search for their daughter. 
 
 It was almost three weeks after the old schooner went missing in a storm off New Zealand before Ricky Wright confessed his fears to his wife, Robin. Even after members of their Full Gospel Baptist Church in Louisiana began calling Robin to ask if the couple's 19-year-old daughter, Danielle - a crew member on the yacht - was okay, Ricky tried to bluff through. 
 
 "I was like, 'Ricky Wright! Am I supposed to be worried about Danielle?' " says Robin. "And he said, 'No, no.' " 
 
 Not forgotten: Missing American teen, Danielle Wright. 
 
 But despite what he'd been telling himself about the schooner being likely to turn up any day, and how its captain was resourceful and experienced, Ricky was so worried he'd already unburdened himself to their pastor, who in turn had "got people praying over the situation", which led to the anxious phone calls to Robin. By the time Ricky admitted this to his wife, NZ rescue authorities were about to begin what became the biggest maritime search in the nation's history. 
 
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 Yet no trace has ever been found of the Niña - a classic 21-metre racing schooner launched in 1928 - or her seven-person crew. Sailing from Opua in the Bay of Islands to Newcastle, Australia, the vessel struck a series of fierce storms in the Tasman Sea just north of NZ, and issued its last communication on June 4 last year. 
 
 The subsequent 12-day search covered 737,000 square nautical miles before being suspended on July 5. Officially, it's deemed likely that the Niña was "overwhelmed in a catastrophic event" in gale force winds and eight-metre swells soon after June 4, and sank suddenly with the loss of all hands. 
 
 While they breathe, they hope: Robin and Ricky Wright, who are still searching for their missing daughter Danielle. Photo: Danielle Smith 
 
 For the Wrights, and others related to the Niña's crew, that conclusion wasn't the end of the story but the start of a gruelling odyssey to find the loved ones they believe survived the storms and may still be alive - either on board the crippled but still-floating schooner, or marooned on some remote reef or island far to the north of their last known location. 
 
 Even now, eight months after Danielle Wright disappeared along with five other Americans and an Englishman, her deeply religious parents - sailors themselves - look you in the eye and say they know their beloved only child has somehow survived. "This trial that we're going through, we're able to get through it because of our built-up faith in Christ," Ricky tells me at the house in Port Macquarie, on the NSW mid-north coast, where they've been based since leaving their home in Louisiana in November 2013 to begin their own aerial searches for the Niña. 
 
 "Danielle and the others know exactly where they are," ventures Robin. "They'll be charting everywhere they're going. When they're found, we'll know exactly what happened to that boat." 
 
 In this undated photo provided by Maritime New Zealand, the yacht Nina is tied at dock at a unidentified location. 
 
 There are precedents for survival at sea long after official searches have been abandoned. But the odds against it after this long are astronomical, which makes the Wrights' unfailing use of the present tense in referring to Danielle difficult to cope with. Nor in all conscience could I bring myself to wear the printed wristband ("Bring home Danielle & Niña crew") Robin had dutifully handed over when we first met earlier in the day. 
 
 Yet as they sit on the verandah that night and tell their harrowing story it's impossible not to be moved by their bravery and determination, or not to recognise - like some tiny object glimpsed by chance on a vast and unforgiving sea - the possibility of a "miracle". 
 
 Robin, 54, and Ricky, 49, met at a Bible study group and have been together for 25 years. He was a Lafayette college athlete who narrowly missed selection as a pole vaulter for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. She grew up on a farm near Baton Rouge; later, when Danielle was young, the couple bought land adjoining Robin's childhood farm, raised animals and enjoyed the good life. 
 
 Missing: Danielle Wright. Photo: Danielle Smith 
 
 Keen sailors, the Wrights had chartered sail-yourself yachts for holidays, and in 2009 - when Danielle was 15 - they realised a long-held goal of buying their own live-aboard vessel and cruising the Caribbean. But before they set off in their 11.6-metre catamaran a "strange thing" happened that Robin and Ricky now see as a prophecy involving Danielle. 
 
 "Even as a little girl, there was something very special about her," Robin says over the screech of cicadas on the verandah in Port Macquarie. "She wrote beautiful songs, and was always very tender towards God." She tells how a friend unexpectedly brought an evangelist from Puerto Rico to their farm as they prepared to go sailing, and how, on meeting Danielle, the preacher raised his arms, declaring, "She will go all over the world, and when she speaks young people will listen." 
 
 Not sure how to react, I tell Robin that I don't share their faith. She shrugs. "It's just ... it was just such a strange thing. And now, I think it was God's way of giving me hope, like, just hang on, hang on, there's a purpose to everything." 
 
 A drop in the ocean: The Wrights have given themselves a year to find the missing schooner and its crew. Photo: Danielle Smith 
 
 Soon after they began their live-aboard cruise, the Wrights met members of the Dyche family, owners of the Niña (Spanish for "little girl"), at a marina in Florida and struck up a lasting friendship. Designed specifically for the 1928 Queen of Spain's Cup, a transatlantic race from New York to Santander in Spain (which it won, along with many subsequent races), the Niña was bought in 1988 by David Dyche III, a tugboat captain who overhauled the elegant schooner before setting out with his family on an open-ended world cruise. 
 
 To finance the voyage, Dyche worked two months out of three as a tug master at oilfields off Brazil, using his time off to move the Niña from one port to the next. He's wasn't on board when the Wrights met his wife, Rosemary, and their teenage son, "Little" David, on the schooner in Florida. "We only met David the once [in 2011] when we all went to dinner in New Orleans," explains Robin. "He was very friendly and outgoing, a jack of all trades who could fix anything. His son was the same." 
 
 When their cruise ended, the Wrights sold their catamaran and set up a business brokerage in Lafayette. Danielle and Little David stayed in touch via Facebook, and in February last year the Dyches (by then berthed in NZ) sent a message inviting the Wrights to join them on their upcoming voyage to Australia, which they estimated would take 14 days. 
 
 Matthew Wootton: one of the missing sailors. 
 
 "Ricky was like, 'Yeah! Let's go!' " says Robin. "But I said, 'The Tasman Sea? Are you crazy? No, I'll be sick! I'm not doing that.' Then Danielle told us, 'I really want to have this experience without y'all.' We did have to look after the business, so we let her go. We gave her the airline ticket as an early [19th] birthday present." 
 
 An honours student studying psychology at the University of Louisiana, Danielle finished her exams the day before leaving. As a car waited to take her to the airport on May 12, she ran back to the house calling, "I almost forgot my Bible!" 
 
 To fill a silence, I ask if Danielle and Little David, 18, had a romance going, then wish I hadn't. But the Wrights just laugh. "Not that we knew of," says Robin. "But they've been on that boat together for seven months now, so who knows!" 
 
 On board the Nina: Kyle Jackson. Photo: Supplied 
 
 The Dyches had spent more than a year at a marina in Whangarei, north of Auckland, then sailed further up the east coast to Opua a couple of months before leaving for Newcastle. 
 
 Their crew was an interesting and capable bunch: Danielle, a qualified scuba diver who'd been Ricky's "first mate" in the Caribbean; Kyle Jackson, 27, an adventure-loving rancher's son from Nebraska who'd worked for now-retired Democrat senator Ben Nelson; Matthew Wootton, 35, a musician and a member of the national executive of the Green Party in the UK who refused to fly and was on the final leg of a three-year "eco-friendly" world trip; and professor Evi Nemeth, 73, a veteran American sailor, mathematician and IT scientist famous as the "grandmother" of the Linux computer operating system. 
 
 Significantly, given what was to come, the Niña carried little of the high-tech equipment now common on offshore cruising yachts. It had a VHF radio (with a maximum range of about 50 kilometres) but no short-wave radio for long-distance communications. The Niña's emergency position indicating radio beacon (EPIRB) was an outmoded version that had to be manually activated (newer models send a distress signal automatically when they get wet). 
 
 The vessel carried a satellite phone, a spot tracker device (which stopped working soon after the Niña left NZ), and an eight-person life raft, but no radar and no generator, meaning it had no way of charging batteries or generating power if its diesel engine (replaced in Opua) failed. The sails on the two-masted schooner were second-hand but reconditioned. 
 
 David Dyche, 58, was a traditionalist sailor who could navigate by stars and sextant and apparently preferred his vessel's equipment to match its vintage. "There was no luxury accommodation," says Robin Wright. "It had fold-up bunks, one little main cabin, one little head [toilet], and no refrigeration. Rosemary had all their meat freeze-dried." 
 
 The Niña left Opua on May 29, a wet and blustery Wednesday, on a course that would take it north past the tip of Cape Reinga, then north-west towards Australia. "The Tasman Sea is shooting gales out like a machine gun, living up to its reputation," Dyche posted on Facebook three days before setting sail. "We are shooting at leaving after the first one this week. No doubt we will be dancing with one or two of them [en route]." 
 
 Back in Lafayette, Ricky was anxiously monitoring the low-pressure systems which came from below Australia, then crossed the Tasman and roared north off NZ's west coast. "They were coming through every seven days," he says. "[Dyche's] plan was to ride the clear winds in the wake of the low that had just passed out into the Tasman, and to be far enough west to miss the next low when it came through." 
 
 But it didn't pan out that way. On June 3, Evi Nemeth on the Niña contacted NZ meteorologist Bob McDavitt by satellite phone, saying, "The weather's turned nasty, how do we get away from it?" McDavitt asked her to call back in 30 minutes, and when she did - sounding "like everything was under control" - he told her they should steer south and prepare for a storm. McDavitt suggested they might want to heave to (reduce sail and put the boat into a holding pattern facing the oncoming storm) until it passed. 
 
 Later that day McDavitt received a text: "ANY UPDATE 4 NINA? ... EVI." He responded with a number of texts about the storm's progress, but got no reply. It was weeks later - after repeated pleas from family members of the missing crew - before the US State Department finally approved their requests for the satellite cell phone provider, Iridium, to provide confidential information about further calls from the Niña's phone. There was just one text, sent on June 4 but never received by McDavitt: "THANKS STORM SAILS SHREDDED LAST NIGHT, NOW BARE POLES GOINING [sic] 4KT 310 DEG WILL UPDATE COURSE INFO @ 6PM". 
 
 No update was sent, and the Niña's manual EPIRB was either never activated or failed to function. The schooner's last position was estimated to be about 370 nautical miles west-north-west of Cape Reinga. 
 
 In the weeks and months following the Niña's disappearance, Maritime New Zealand's Rescue Coordination Centre was criticised for searching in the wrong area, for not searching soon enough, or long enough, and for assuming - in the face of its own "errors" - that because it couldn't find the schooner it must have sunk. 
 
 Ricky Wright brought the volunteer-based search organisation Texas EquuSearch into the fray, and by late July it had a team of search-and-rescue experts, including fluid hydrologists, geophysicists and NASA scientists, involved in the hunt. A Colorado-based satellite services provider, DigitalGlobe, agreed to reposition its WorldView and QuickBird satellites to take images across huge swathes of the Tasman, and recruited thousands of online users of its Tomnod crowd-sourcing site to comb through the myriad images for anything resembling the Niña or its life raft. 
 
 "They've looked and looked ... and all they see is nothing," mourned David Dyche's mother, Caryl, from her home in Florida. Believing the Niña had gone down, Caryl Dyche revealed that her son had been carrying the ashes of his sailor father, David II, in an urn on the schooner: "If they went down, both of them went down. That's where they'd both love to be." 
 
 But others, especially the Wrights, were convinced their missing loved ones were still alive. "I had a lot of people praying with me," Ricky tells me, "and they came back to me with word from God that said Danielle was like Solomon's son when he went out to search for some missing donkeys. He was gone for many days and his dad ... sent him a message saying he was now more concerned about his son than the missing donkeys." Ricky interpreted this to mean that Danielle wanted him to stop fixating on her and concentrate on the search. 
 
 By July, NZ media outlets were running criticism of the Niña's seaworthiness. Russ Rimming-ton, a yachtsman and former mayor of Hamilton, claimed the old wooden schooner was "hogged" - meaning the fastenings of its hull planking had loosened - making it a "lead mine that would have gone straight down" because of the tonnes of metal in its keel. (Rimmington told me he'd never seen the Niña and had based his opinion on reports from an "expert" in Whangarei.) 
 
 Hopes for the missing sailors flared when a QuickBird satellite image taken on September 16 showed what appeared to be a boat of the same dimensions as the Niña floating (with no sign of a wake) in the Tasman near Norfolk Island. But the image was too fuzzy for positive identification. Texas EquuSearch sought help from the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in accessing better resolution satellite imagery unavailable to the public, but met a brick wall. 
 
 Ian and Sue Wootton, the parents of missing English crew member Matthew Wootton, spent months poring over satellite images. Ian Wootton suspects clearer versions of the September 16 image exist but are confined to military sources. "A contact high up in DigitalGlobe told me even they don't have access to this area of the company," Wootton, a retired industrial chemist, tells Good Weekend from their home in Kent. He believes NGA personnel are "probably the people behind the closed doors at DigitalGlobe". 
 
 Wootton says David Dyche's minimalist approach to technology "wouldn't have been the approach I would have taken", and that if he'd known more about "the Tasman and EPIRBs and communication devices, I would probably have had a lot more to say to Matthew at the time". 
 
 In an unsettling prelude to joining the Niña's crew, Matthew Wootton posted a piece called The Ocean on a creative writing site in 2012 in which he described a recurring nightmare about being "overwhelmed" by a tsunami: "I'm trying to work out, is my fear rational or irrational? Do I think the sea, the ocean, symbolises something, someone? Do I think something - like the tsunami - is coming to get me?" 
 
 Encouraged by the September 16 satellite image, but frustrated anew by the refusal of maritime authorities in NZ and Australia to begin searching the area, Robin and Ricky Wright flew to Australia on November 12 to conduct their own searches. So far, they've spent more than $500,000 on aerial charters. 
 
 Jack Hart, the owner of air charter company Macquarie Air, invited them to stay at his home in Port Macquarie (where Ricky is training to get his pilot's licence) and they've been there ever since. They initially spent a week searching in the vicinity of Norfolk Island, believing at first they would spot the Niña "at any minute". Their hopes faded as the scale of the immense emptiness below began to sink in. 
 
 "There's nothing out there," Robin says wonderingly on the verandah, as the cicadas build to a crescendo around us. "In seven days we saw just one sailboat and three freighters." Then they searched up and down the Great Barrier Reef, praying - as always - for the miracle they still believe may unfold. On New Year's Day, when Ricky had the flu and they were holed up in a poky apartment in Gladstone, Robin finally raised the question neither of them had wanted to face. 
 
 "I said, 'Okay, Ricky, if we don't find them, and they don't wash up, when do we quit searching?' And he said, 'After a year.' And that seemed right, because in my heart I'd already said it would be on Danielle's birthday, which is May 18th." 
 
 Robin cries a bit, then looks at Ricky, who is busy studying the table. "But first," he says defiantly, "there are some unpopulated islands around the Solomons, and we want to go there and search every one of them."
– Six Americans and a Brit have vanished without a trace on the high seas between New Zealand and Australia, aboard the 70-foot vessel the Nina, CNN reports.The crew was last heard from on June 4 while battling rough conditions—68mph gusts and waves as high as 26 feet—about a week after their historic schooner left New Zealand's Bay of Islands. Friends reported the vessel missing on June 14, and the fact that its emergency beacon was never activated gave rescuers hope. But the picture that's forming of the Nina's last known movements sounds less promising. A woman aboard the 85-year-old vessel called a New Zealand meteorologist via satellite phone on June 3, asking him, "The weather's turned nasty, how do we get away from it?" They spoke briefly, with Bob McDavitt advising the group to sail south. The following day he received the following text: "ANY UPDATE 4 NINA? ... EVI." After that, the boat vanished, with two aerial searches turning up nothing. More foreboding details, per the AP: The rescue coordinator says the boat realistically should have arrived in Australia two days ago, and the Nina dealt with some leaking issues earlier this year after a new engine was installed. He expressed "grave concerns" to the Age.