Last Sunday the Australian Marine Safety Authority in Perth received a call from a Canadian citizen reporting that his 70-year-old brother had twice missed his daily contact messages during a passage from Darwin, Australia to South Africa across the Indian Ocean.
The AMSA launched a Challenger jet and set out to look for the sailor who was estimated to be 1,000 kilometers south of Christmas Island which in turn is south of Indonesia. The jet scoured the ocean and found the man sitting in his dinghy which was attached to his sinking catamaran.
The Challenger crew parachuted a package filled with a life raft, EPIRB, food and other safety supplies to the sailor and then began coordinating his rescue. The Australian naval vessel Supply, an oiler resupply ship, was in the vicinity as it was working with the U.S. Navy at their bases in Cocos Keeling.
The Supply launched their twin-engine Seahawk helicopter which was able to home in on the castaway’s emergency beacon 300 kilometers away. The rescue was complicated by bad weather but the naval crew was able to deploy a rescue swimmer and soon managed to winch the sailor, whose name has not been released, to safety.
The images and video taken by the rescue crews show the cruising catamaran sinking by the sterns and the sailor in his dinghy with a towel draped over his head. When he heard the sound of the rescue jet he raised both arms in recognition and relief.
While the sailor did have a large dinghy, it appears that he did not have a life raft aboard his catamaran, possibly in the belief that catamarans are unsinkable. Obviously, that was not the case. It also appears he did not have an EPIRB.
The rescue 1,000 kilometers from land proved a logistical stretch for the Perth AMSA and the crew of the Supply. It was also a matter of some luck that the Supply was near enough to launch a helicopter that still had to cover 300 kilometers to rescue the sailor.
