Beloved home meets rough sea – two boaters rescued from sinking catamaran

lives saved

Boat sinking

Boating

Crash or collision

Normal conditions

Ocean

What happened?

This is so hard to write; tears are streaming down my cheeks as I tell you our sailing journey has ended and we are blessed and happy to be alive.
We left Turks and Caicos on Tuesday Afternoon (April 19th) afternoon for a 375 nautical mile, 3 full day journey to Puerto Rico. It was tough going, beating into six to nine foot waves, with winds much higher than expected.

A day later we hit a massive underwater obstruction (rock, volcano, lost container?) in what was supposed to be thousand foot depths! The boat stopped dead, we, and everything on the boat, went flying. And then the most horrible sounds of crunching exploded in ours ears as the boat bobbed on the huge seas and crashed back down on what we hit.

After a minute or two of shock and panic, our survival instincts were turbo-charged. Thomas was at the helm, trying to get the boat off the obstruction. I kicked into packing survival essentials in case we needed to abandon the boat. Filling water into anything with a lid, grabbing peanut butter, canned chicken, beans, and a can opener. I grabbed headlamps, portable VHF and batteries, scissors, knife, and life-vests. The last thing I grabbed were the medications, passports, and phones into the dry-bag.

Thomas managed to get the boat off of the obstruction but it was too damaged and within 10 minutes of the original strike, the hull was filling with water fast. Within 20 minutes of the accident the boat was a third of the way sunk and we had deployed the dinghy and life raft.

Words of wisdom

Thank you note to the Ocean Signal team