<p>Volunteers with a Georgia-based foundation are using sonar to look for the bodies of two boaters missing for a month and presumed drowned in Harding Lake, 45 miles south of Fairbanks.</p><p>Officials long ago gave up the search, but volunteers believe the bodies of Travis Alexander, 19, of Fort Yukon and Kathy Garrigan, 24, of the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, are somewhere in the deep, cold waters of the large lake, which reaches up to 200 feet deep in places.</p><p>The body of 20-year-old Liza Lomando of East Meadow, New York, was pulled from the lake shortly after the three AmeriCorps volunteers were reported missing.</p><p>They were on a camping trip during Memorial Day weekend when their canoe apparently tipped, authorities said.</p><p>Volunteers with the Seth Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sends teams across the country to help water search efforts, searched the lake Monday using sonar.</p><p>If volunteers spot anything of interest in the sonar images, they can mark them on the computer, recording the exact longitude and latitude so divers can later investigate the spot.</p><p>"We haven't seen anything to put a diver on. Period," Shelia Burleson said Monday afternoon, the team's second full day of searching.</p><p>As the boat traveled around the lake, storing images from the bottom, another computer program, using Global Positioning System data, kept track of precisely where the images were taken. That way Burleson, her partner on the boat, David Reed, and the other searches know exactly where they had already searched.</p><p>"This tells us where they're not," Burleson said of the missing boaters.</p><p>The sonar equipment is precise but slow in a full day of steady searching, the team can cover about 100 acres, less than 5 percent of the 2,500-acre lake.</p><p>The Seth Foundation team of seven volunteers has been putting in 16-hour days on the lake. The long days and slow pace are a small price to pay, Burleson said, when compared to the closure and peace of mind finding the bodies will bring to the families searching for their loved ones.</p><p>Burleson knows. In 2001, responders spent 19 days searching for her son Seth, who had drowned in a creek. Since then, she has worked to keep other families from enduring the same emotional trauma she went through.</p><p>"It's just a way of survival," she said of her volunteer work. "I'm missing my son and this is a way for Seth to survive."</p><p>Having the sonar experts help has been a morale boost to the local searchers, some of whom have spent every day and night out at the lake for the past four weeks.</p><p>"The sonar is giving us a lot of hope," said Kenneth Frank, from Arctic Village, one of the searchers who has been camping at the lake since the beginning of June. "It gives us a better vision of the bottom."</p><p>On Monday, around 20 Alaska searchers were on the scene, many from remote villages.</p><p>A veritable shantytown had been erected on the shores of the lake, with a number of tents, canopies and communal eating areas spread throughout the woods. For the past few weeks, the volunteers have been systematically dragging the lake, but they were staying off the water Monday, giving the Seth Foundation team a wide berth.</p><p>Many volunteers used the day off from searching to get supplies and ready equipment in case the sonar doesn't turn up anything.</p><p>"As soon as (the Seth Foundation) leaves we'll be back to heavy-duty dragging and we'll need all the boats we can get," said Mike Smith, with the Tanana Chiefs Conference, the body spearheading the volunteer effort.</p><p>Alexander, Garrigan and Lomando worked for the Nenana-based Tribal Civilian Community Corps, which is affiliated with AmeriCorps and the Tanana Chiefs Conference.</p><p>Still, the long search is starting to take its toll on some volunteers, and they are trying to stay positive, praying, singing and telling each other jokes.</p><p>"We've just been raking the whole lake from side to side," said Frank, sighing heavily, his eyes tired. "It's like looking for a needle on the bottom of the forest."</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x2dee8fc)</p>
