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| Tragedy of The Jason |
 "If we ride the swells, we'll be OK," skipper John Finn told dockhand Lee Oppenhuizen according to the Chicago Sun-Times. "It can be pretty fun."
There was a small-craft advisory on the lake and waves were up to 12-feet. Oppenhuizen warned the men not to go out but Finn and his three-man crew set off anyway.
Finn and two crew members would never return to the dock. They were killed when their racing vessel shattered after striking a breakwater near 95th in Chicago.
Finn, according to his uncle, had been sailing for at least 10 years. "It was the beauty and the poetry of it," Charlie Finn, his uncle, said. "It was so much a part of him. The wind, the water. It wasn't schoolbook knowledge. It was a man in love. It was his passion."
His boat, christened The Jason, dashed upon the rocks as the crew attempted to rescue crew member Alexander Childers, 38, of Evanston, who had fallen overboard.
Childers, Finn, 45, and Adam Kronen, 33, died but the fourth crew member, 34-year old Joseph Sunshine, was pulled from the water and treated at Advocate Trinity Hospital.
The crew was taking down the sails and switching to engine power when Childers fell into the water, Gene Davis, spokesman for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, said. A distress call was issued to the Coast Guard but the boat slammed into the breakwall and split apart before help could arrive. All four men ended up in the icy water but all had on life jackets.
"Nothing diminishes the awesome sorrow here," Charlie Finn said, "but if you're doing what you love to do, maybe there is something right about that. In the middle of all this, he really did love what he was doing that night."
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