On the trail of the trio all at sea as night out goes badly wrong...
Three sailors from a Russian cargo ship were found by lifeboat crews stranded on an island in the middle of the Bristol Channel. Jessica Walford attempted to find out how they got there...
It sounds like the start of a very bad joke, but what happened to the Russian, the Dutchman and the Filipino who went out drinking in Barry and then got lost at sea?
After a day of scouring Barry to find the answer, I can tell you that everyone finds the question very funny, but I’ve no idea what the punchline is.
However, I have managed to piece together a picture of three men who must have endured a difficult few hours late at night trying to find a place to stay – and will almost certainly have got back on their inflatable dinghy in the middle of the night in desperation.
As is now well known, a major search was launched for the three sailors from a Russian cargo vessel after they were reported missing in cold, foggy conditions in the early hours of Thursday.
The sailors, who are Russian, Dutch and Philippine nationals, were thought to have left Barry at 3.45am on Thursday after a night out drinking in the town.
But they failed to make it back to their vessel, which was moored off Minehead, on the Somerset coast, prompting a major search-and-rescue operation involving several lifeboat crews.
They were eventually found, cold and wet, on Flat Holm island in the Bristol Channel by volunteer crew from Penarth RNLI.
But how did a night out go so badly wrong?
Walking around Barry, I had no idea where to start.
After walking into every pub in Barry, and trying not to be envious of those having a tipple on a Thursday afternoon, I was simply laughed at for asking what happened to three potentially very drunk sailors and if they had been in their bar.
No-one seems to have seen them, or noticed them, at least.
Then I got a message from a woman who said she had seen our story, and remembered she found them on a beach late at night.
Samantha Elmore, 25, from Barry, was at Cold Knap beach at around 11pm yesterday when she saw some people come “out of nowhere”.
“They approached my car and asked for help because they were stranded,” she said. “They said they were off a cargo ship and needed warmth and a hotel. I called a taxi and asked them to take them to Mount Rooms Hotel.
“After that we went to the pebbles to see if there was a boat because it was odd, and there was.
“It was an orange boat with life jackets and jerry cans. We thought it was odd so we called 101 as we weren’t sure who they were. We called police but they never showed up. It was crazy. They walked out of nowhere. You don’t see that everyday.”
Off I went to the Mount Rooms Hotel, in Barry, where I met the manager, Sara Lewis.
After she’d looked at CCTV, and heard a Russian voice, she confirmed they had tried to stay there.
She said: “They turned up at around 11pm but we were fully booked, so the night concierge called a taxi for them to go to the Premier Inn.
“There were two people and one man was speaking what sounded like Russian. They did definitely come here but didn’t stay.”
So I rang the Premier Inn.
A source told me that, once again, they were turned away, because they didn’t have ID.
Yet again, they took a taxi. But to where? Who knows?
It can’t have been a good place to be. According to data from the Met Office measuring station at St Athan – the closest one to Barry – visibility was down almost to zero in the early hours of Thursday and was throughout the night.
It was also pretty chilly at around 80C between midnight at 8am, around the time they were found.
In these difficult conditions, probably unable to find somewhere to stay, they ended up getting back onto their rigid inflatable dinghy in the middle of the night hardly able to see anything.
Somehow they then found themselves stranded 7.1 miles away at Flat Holm island in the middle of the Bristol Channel.
They were absolutely nowhere near Minehead, where their ship was moored, as the map shows.
Rescuers took them back to the Barry Dock lifeboat station but they did not want to speak when we approached them.
One of them said simply: “We are safe and we just want to thank the friendly people here.”
So I guess this becomes one of those stories that gets stranger the more you find out.
I didn’t find out what happened, and I guess we never will.
And I’m probably the only person to have done a pub crawl of pretty much every drinking spot in Barry and managed to stay sober.