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"We're considering it an accident," police Sgt. Scott Erickson said after looking at the body of Jacobs, who hadn't been seen since the night of Feb. 13. Erickson said it would be up to the medical examiner to open an investigation.

Jacobs, 45, was under 120 feet of water when volunteer divers pulled him up, not far from boats anchored in the bay. Divers searched the same general area for five days after Jacobs' wife, Adrienne Reynolds, reported him missing, Erickson said.

Gene Ralston, of Boise, Idaho, picked up the search for Jacobs on Friday afternoon and continued Saturday, without even getting wet. He had contacted Reynolds after reading in the online edition of the Juneau Empire that she was looking for divers to continue looking for her husband.

Jacobs and Reynolds, longtime Juneau residents, lived on a sailboat. They had been in Auke Bay for several months after moving from Harris Harbor, Reynolds said.

Jacobs was last seen alive on a security camera at the harbor. After the unsuccessful initial search, Reynolds said she remained certain her husband had fallen in the bay. One of his shoes was found not far from their boat, and Reynolds said dinner was in the oven.

In flew Ralston, an environmental consultant whose equipment doubles as search instruments and whose passion is helping grieving families. He scans the Internet to find drowning cases in which he can help, and California police even summoned him in the search for Laci Peterson, whose killing and dumping in the Pacific Ocean drew national attention.

Ralston said he understands the need for people to find loved ones, although he never has lost a spouse or family member to an accident. He said he did lose a friend in a boating accident.

"It kind of gets into your heart," he said of his searches.

Last summer he spent more than 130 days on searches, he said. Wednesday he got a call to help searching a California lake where two boys were missing, but he had committed to Juneau.

Typically, he uses a side-scanning sonar, which looks like a towed torpedo. But because of cables that run through the waters where the boats are anchored, that wouldn't be feasible in Auke Bay. Instead, he attached a rotating sonar device to a tripod. From a boat the crew lowered it to the bay's bottom, more than 100 feet below.

The sonar bounces sound waves off objects on the water body's floor. The returning signal draws shapes and sizes of the objects in the murky depths, clearer than some photographs.

Visibility isn't a factor because Ralston is measuring a reflection of sound and not light, he said during Saturday's search as a snow shower picked up intensity.

The sonar sends back the information it receives in sweeps through a circle, the way people think of radar, he said, though radar uses radio waves and not sound.

Some objects got his attention from the start. Shortly after lowering the first drop, the pivoting wand on the orange-tinged screen swept over a 6-foot-long object that looked like a good possibility. It was about as long as Jacobs was tall, but from another angle it appeared too narrow.

"It can be a slow process," he said in the cabin of the boat he was working on while others pulled up the tripod to move the boat and sonar to another location.

He has scheduled a presentation of his use of sonar equipment for Monday night at the Glacier Fire Station classroom to show local emergency responders what it can do.

Searching with sonar is safer and less labor-intensive than with divers, and certainly less expensive than with commercial divers, Ralston said. Divers are essential, though.

"I'm never 100 percent sure, for the most part, until we send a diver down," he said.

Reynolds, who thanked Ralston with a hug before he headed out on the search Friday, said that although Ralston volunteered his time, she is raising money for his airfare and lodging. Donors can call Joab Cochrane at 586-1559.

• Tony Carroll can be reached at tony.carroll@juneauempire.com.