Solo sailor, 73, describes sudden trouble at sea
Alone in the mid-Atlantic, 73-year-old Mervyn Wheatley awoke early Friday to heaving swells threatening to capsize his weathered sailboat, Tamarind.
He stumbled from his bunk in the dark, grabbing a flashlight to assess the damage.
Limp floorboards were stripped away, he said Monday, and water poured into the boat through a punctured porthole. His pump was clogged by floating socks.
“It was in unbelievable shambles,” he said.
“The boat had inverted. The mast was gone well down by the water.”
Wheatley told his story to a packed theatre on the Queen
Mary 2, the luxury liner that plucked him from his storm-damaged sailboat over the weekend and was bringing him to Halifax.
At least three other boats in a transatlantic race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, Rhode Island, required rescue in rough seas.
Tamarind, outfitted with a bathtub, had for decades been a second home to Wheatley, a former Royal Marine who was making his 19th trip across the Atlantic Ocean.
But the race ran into heavy weather, and when he awoke Friday the boat he had helmed for years seemed to be falling apart. The steering was off. The engine cover was missing. Even the distress signal wasn’t working right.
“I had no intention of sending a mayday at this stage — but I couldn’t turn it off,” he said, according to a recording of the event provided to The Canadian Press.
A few ships offered assistance, but Wheatley said his ears perked up when he heard the Queen Mary 2 was near.
As the cruise liner pulled up his rescue, Wheatley scuppered the nearly 20-year-old vessel for safety reasons.
“It wasn’t easy getting off,” he said.