Jul 30, 2025by: Curtis Hoff No Comments

Kid Left at Helm Runs Charter Boat Onto Reef for a Total Loss – Peter Swanson

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Kid Left at Helm Runs Charter Boat Onto Reef for a Total Loss

Owner Sues Boy Scouts and Others After Pearson 424 Is Wrecked

Peter Swanson

Jul 26

*Amokura* is well stuck after having gone aground on Johnson’s Reef on July 17, 2023.

Libbie Oliver wants compensation. The British Virgin Island businesswoman was chartering her Pearson 424 to the Boy Scouts of America until July 2023 when a scout ran Amokura onto a prominent reef. The boat would become a total loss.

According to Oliver’s lawsuit, the boat’s captain was “performing other duties” when her boat crashed onto Johnson’s Reef in the Virgin Islands National Park with a scout at the helm.

Oliver filed suit last week in U.S. Virgin Islands Superior Court. Besides the Boy Scouts, defendants are the boat’s captain, Timothy Frances Sales of Pennsylvania; insurance broker Offshore Risk Management, and “John Does 1-10.”

Sales should not have left the kid at the wheel, or as Oliver’s lawyers wrote:

It was reasonably foreseeable that permitting an inexperienced minor to helm the vessel—particularly near shallow or reef-laden waters—without close supervision posed an undue risk of grounding, injury, or damage to the vessel. Sayles breached his duties by allowing a minor youth participant to helm the vessel near Johnson’s Reef while he was engaged in other tasks and not exercising proper vigilance or navigational control.

Amokura struck Johnson’s Reef, a dangerous patch of coral north of Trunk Bay on the northern side of St. John island, ringed with hazard bouys.

At top is the Aqua Maps depiction of the wreck site. Above is NASA’s depiction of Johnson’s Reef using LIDAR remote sensing technology. The reef is primarily composed of elkhorn coral.

The language of the lawsuit suggests that the boat could have been saved:

The grounding caused serious damage to the hull and rendered the vessel unseaworthy. Plaintiff was insured through a policy procured from Offshore Risk Management, who Boy Scouts of America had recommended plaintiff insure through. However, unbeknownst to plaintiff, the policy that ORM placed excluded coverage for reef damage and wreck removal. As a result of that exclusion, no salvage company was willing to attempt removal of the vessel, and the S/V Amokura remained stranded on the reef until she was ultimately destroyed in a storm in early September 2023.

Through her lawyers, Oliver argued that she had only learned that her policy excluded “two of the most foreseeable risks associated with the charter” after the wreck had happened. If she had known beforehand, she would have “procured alternative coverage that included such risks.”

Oliver, who operates an organic coffee company in Tortola, is asking the judge to make the defedants pay for the loss of the boat, salvage costs and lost income from her charter deal with the Scouts. Amokura was part of the Boy Scouts Sea Base program, carrying six to eight scouts at a time over 11 weeks of charters, each at a weekly rate of approximately $3,500.

Libbie Oliver’s Facebook page features this image with *Amokura* in the slings.

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