NEWS AND NOTES
Blue Water Sailing
JANUARY 27, 2010
Meet the luckiest sailor alive
Dennis Clements, battling gale-force winds and 30-foot seas for four days, was tossed from his Cal 39, Gloria A Dios, about 250 miles east of Cape Hatteras, N.C.
"I couldn't see anything," says Clements, recounting the Jan. 2 incident. "These were big waves, man, and it was dark and the wind was blowing like 40 knots. I was just floating there, trying to conserve heat."
Responding to the 55-year-old sailor's EPIRB signal - which Clements later learned only went off because he had mistakenly placed the beacon backward in its bracket - the Coast Guard dropped two life rafts from an HC-130J Hercules aircraft. But Clements couldn't see the rafts and the aircraft was low on fuel and had to leave the scene.
Clements started to pray, then kicked off his boots and swam blindly in the darkness. In a stroke of luck, he bumped into one of the life rafts, which had capsized. "I was able to flip it over and somehow get in," he says.
About an hour later a Navy helicopter, dispatched from the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, was on the scene and a rescue swimmer was in the water. Winds were blowing 50 knots, with 10-foot seas and driving sleet and snow.
Clements was en route from Hampton Roads, Va., to the U.S. Virgin Islands when he ran into heavy weather. His 10-year-old EPIRB activated when a wave crashed through the port side of the cabin and soaked the beacon - another stroke of luck because it was a manually activated model that normally would not go off in that situation. Clements, who bought Gloria A Dios in 1994, had made only one other long passage - a 740-mile cruise across the Gulf of Mexico from Tarpon Springs, Fla., to Galveston, Texas. The sailor says he properly planned and prepared for the trip to the USVI.
"I spent a month refitting, provisioning, checking everything out, making equipment upgrades," he says. "The recommended time to make this trip is [after] November, when hurricane season is over. That's really the main concern for an offshore run like that." The weather forecast for the week after Christmas was good. . .Read the whole story and watch the video!
From: soundingsonline.com.
Click on the video below to hear Clements talk about his rescue, and see infrared footage taken by the Coast Guard.
Read the whole story: http://www.soundingsonline.com/news/dispatches/392-jan-8/248172-rescue-is-a-race-against-time-weather.
