A Coast Guard helicopter search was triggered by the disappearance of two females and two paddle boards rented at Alki Kayak at Seacrest Park on Harbor Ave SW Friday evening.

Owner Greg Whittaker explained what happened.

"At 5:45 two women who appeared to be in their 20's came and rented two paddle boards. They signed the waiver and gave us a credit card which we didn't know at the time was expired. That evening we realized these girls are not back so at sunset we went to do a search. We did a drive on the beach, about 8:15. This is a typical operating procedure.

We did not see them. We realize at this point this could be a problem.
We had the card but two people and two boards were missing.

So we notified the Coast Guard which is our procedure and they did a search along the shoreline."

That search continued until past midnight when they notified Whittaker that they had found a personal flotation device. It wasn't part of what the two ladies took with them.

"They only travel one to two knots so they couldn't have gotten past the lighthouse. Besides if there was a problem somebody would have seen it, " Whittaker explained.

"At 1:30 the Coast Guard contacted me and said they had contacted the mother of the girl whose name was on the card. She contacted her daughter and asked if she had rented some paddle boards. She said she hadn't."

Typically credit cards are held as security and not submitted until the rental is completed.
At that point it made sense to run the card Whittaker said and he found that the card had expired.

But the story takes a strange turn.

It appears that the card was stolen, and the two boards, valued at $1299 each were stolen too. But the card owner has since not returned any calls and has rejected further contact.

A police report is being filed today.

Whittaker said,"We did everything right, according to our procedure."
But today he's lost $2600 worth of paddle boards and guessed that the search might have cost more than $25,000.