Michele hopes to get lost boat back on the sea
ITALIAN yachtsman Michele Zambelli was delighted to come to West Kerry last week and stand once again on the deck of the boat he was forced to abandon off Newfoundland. He was delighted as well to meet the men who brought his yacht to safety when she washed up on Fermoyle strand after drifting for six months across the Atlantic.
Michele was in second place in the highly competitive Plymouth to Rhode Island single-handed transatlantic yacht race in June when he hit – or was hit by - a whale and lost his keel in the dark of night. His first thought was that he wouldn’t be able to finish the race; his second thought was that the water gushing in through the hull was very cold and he was all alone 650km from the nearest land.
He spent seven hours on the Illumia before being rescued by helicopter and he thought at the time that he would never see his boat again. However, he was contacted at home in Italy a month ago by Valentia RNLI who told him the boat had been reported drifting about 100 miles off the south west of Ireland.
The yacht then disappeared again and Michele know nothing more of her whereabouts until he was contacted on Tuesday, November 28, by Frank Heidtke of Dingle Coast Guard who told him the boat had washed up on Fermoyle strand.
Frank, who is the Officer in Charge with Dingle Coast Guard, enlisted the help of Dingle builder Pádraig McKenna to lift the boat to the safety of higher ground where she now remains, missing most of her gear but in remarkably good condition despite months drifting at sea.
Michele arrived in Dingle last Thursday where he met Frank and Pádraig to thank them for saving the boat. He was accompanied by a group from the Fondazione Ikaros polytechnical school in Bergamo, Italy, who plan to bring the yacht back to Italy and restore her as a school project.
Michele, who cryptically told
The Kerryman that he didn’t own the yacht before the accident but does now, said there was a lot of good luck in the story. Admittedly, he was unlucky to hit a whale and become shipwrecked in the middle of the Atlantic. But after that things improved: he was lucky to be alive, lucky that his boat washed up on a nice sandy beach, and lucky that she was found by people who went above and beyond the call of duty to save her.
All he needs now is to get her back to Italy and if anybody has a truck going in the general direction of Bergamo he’d be delighted to hear from them. The boat measures about 9m x 4m and Michele can be contacted via info@ michelezambelli.it