"SOUTHPORT, N. C, Feb. 23 [1931] ---The yacht Ingonare [sic, i.e. Ingomar], owned by Albert Hoffman, off New York, sank twenty-five miles south of Cape Fear bar yesterday. A Coast Guard cutter brought the crew of nine to Southport today. The yacht was en route to Charleston, S. C, under command of Captain Leis Sparre. It struck a ledge off Fryiing [sic] Pan shoals and sank almost immediately. The crew escaped in a motor launch. Mr. Hoffman was to have gone aboard at Charleston." (Source: Anon. "Yacht Sinks on Flying [sic] Pan Shoals." New York Times, February 24, 1931, p. 43.)
Short excerpt from a much longer article: "Last autumn Mr. Hoffman took Ingomar to the Chesapeake, and at Oxford, Md., much more work was done towards putting her in shape for a winter cruise to southern ports, which was to have been followed by a trip across the Atlantic and a cruise in European waters, following her old racing track. But it was not to be.
With nine men aboard, under Captain Leif Sparre, Ingomar sailed from Oxford on February 18th, bound for Charleston, S. C, to pick up Mr. Hoffman and a party. Fog delayed her inside the Capes, but she passed Cape Henry bell buoy at 4.00 p.m. on the nineteenth and headed down the coast under sail and power. On the evening of the twentieth, with a moderate N.N.W. breeze, she was logging nine or ten knots when the skipper went below, leaving the mate in charge. At 11:20 that night the mate picked up two lights which he believed to be the lightship and gas buoy on the Frying Pan, and the course was presently altered. As it turned out, the lightship had been moved offshore since Ingomar's charts were printed and one of the lights they saw was the lighthouse on Cape Fear.
At 12:10 a.m. Ingomar struck hard on the tail of the Frying Pan, slid over into deep water, and then, with a heavy sea driving her, went on again and began to pound. For six hours the seas lifted and pounded her on the shoal and washed her decks, smashing in her skylights and hatches and gradually beginning to fill her. Soon there was enough water below to set the heavy cabin furniture adrift, and as she rolled and pounded, the furniture smashed the bulkheads out of her until she was one seething, open room from stem to stern, with wreckage batting about so that no man dared go below decks, though it was scarcely less perilous on topside as the seas washed her. This loose debris, the captain believes, broke off some of her plumbing or other openings through the hull and hastened her filling.
Despite the hammering, the old ship refused to break up and at six o'clock in the morning she had washed clean over the shoal and was afloat in the deeper water to leeward. They anchored, but with the motor pump out of commission, the water gained two inches an hour despite desperate work with hand pumps and buckets, and at 10.00 a.m. they made sail again and headed for where they supposed the lightship to be, hoping that if they reached her she could signal help to them.
Failing to sight the ship as expected, and with Ingomar settling under them, they finally headed her for the beach, but by then she was almost unmanageable and settling faster than ever, with her smashed portholes now awash. At 4:30 they launched the lifeboat.
By great good fortune Mr. Hoffman had equipped Ingomar with a big, new, steel, motor lifeboat which he intended to use for fishing when he got south. The motor was soaked and useless, and they hove it overboard to lighten her and bent to their oars. The schooner sank a few minutes after they left her, in the deep water to the southward of the Frying Pan, and there she will lie as long as the steel lasts.
Twenty-two hours of rowing brought the shipwrecked crew to the beach at Cape Fear where the Coast Guard station took them in. The keeper of Cape Fear Light had reported seeing flares that Captain Sparre sent up after the wreck, but had misjudged their distance offshore so that two Coast Guard boats that had set out to investigate had gone only as far as the slue and failed to see her. Had they found her in time and towed her to shelter, Ingomar might still have made that trip abroad this summer." (Source: Taylor, William H. "Vale Ingomar! A Yacht Long Famous in the Annals of Yacht Racing Meets Her End." Yachting Magazine, May, 1931, p. 63-64, 132, 134, 136.)
