Sailors rescued after epic waves in ocean
LONDON — It was on Day 82 of the 2018 Golden Globe Race when officials declared a Code Red Alert.
Skippers sailing nonstop and alone around the world — unassisted and without modern navigation aids, as the rules of the notoriously challenging race dictate — found themselves in a vicious cyclone on Friday in the southern Indian Ocean.
Don McIntyre, founder and chairman of Global Globe Race, told The Washington Post the seas were “horrific.”
“It was the absolute worst type of storm,” Mr. McIntyre said. “The wave state was extreme. The conditions were almost unheard of.”
The seas were not only confused — coming from one direction and then another — but huge, rising to the height of fivestory buildings, then curling and breaking over the vessels.
The winds were clocked at 80 mph, which is hurricane strength, and shifted from north to south within minutes.
Three of the small sailboats were repeatedly knocked down. One sailor — race leader Mark Slats, 41, of the Netherlands — was dragged overboard and saved only by his safety tether. He told race officials “he has never seen conditions as bad.” A wave smashed through his companionway and flooded the boat, frying his electronics and sparking a small fire.
Two boats were rolled over completely in the 50foot seas; both of these vessels lost their rigging, masts and sails.
One of the racers, 39year-old Abhilash Tomy, an active-duty commander in the Indian Navy who was making his second solo circumnavigation, was severely injured in the maelstrom.
In a text sent to race headquarters in France, Mr. Tomy typed out a distress message that read, “ROLLED. DISMASTED. SEVERE BACK INJURY. CANNOT GET UP.”
Over the next four days, rescuers struggled to reach Mr. Tomy, alone and adrift in a crippled vessel, his mast and sails dragging in the water, in a location that Australian officials described as one of the most remote on earth, at the very edge of possible rescue, some 1,900 miles southwest of Perth in Western Australia.
The Indian sailor was saved Monday by the French fisheries patrol vessel Osiris.
The Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Canberra, Australia reported: “Tomy is conscious, talking and on board the Osiris. Australian and Indian long range P8 Orion reconnaissance aircraft are circling overhead.”
The Australian navy also dispatched a warship, the frigate HMAS Ballarat, and reconnaissance aircraft over the weekend to search for the 32-foot sailing vessel, as Mr. Tomy lay in his bunk and his yacht, Thuriya, drifted in the ocean. The Indian navy also sent a ship and plane to the search area.
After his sailboat was dismasted in the storm, Mr. Tomy spent the next four days trapped in his cabin. After his first text message, the skipper was not heard from for almost 24 hours.