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A 62-year-old French man survived for 16 hours in an air bubble inside his capsized sailboat within the Atlantic Ocean earlier than being rescued by Spanish coastguard divers in what they described as an operation “verging on the unimaginable”.
The 40-foot (12-meter) Jeanne SOLO Sailor despatched out a misery sign at 20.23h on Monday from 14 miles from the Sisargas Islands off Spain’s northwestern Galicia area, the coast guard mentioned. Monitoring information present it had set sail from the Portuguese capital of Lisbon on the morning of the day gone by.
As a rescue ship carrying 5 divers set sail, certainly one of three helicopters despatched to assist the search positioned the upturned vessel because the solar went down.
A diver was winched onto the ship’s hull to hunt indicators of life and the person inside, who has not been named, responded to his banging on the hull by knocking from inside.
With the ocean too tough to try a rescue, they connected buoyancy balloons to the ship’s hull to forestall it from sinking additional and waited till the morning.
Two divers swam beneath the boat to assist the sailor out, who they discovered carrying a neoprene survival swimsuit and submerged in water as much as his knees.
Vicente Cobelo, a member of the coastguard’s particular operations crew, advised an area station the person voluntarily jumped into the freezing water and swam beneath the boat to achieve the ocean’s floor.
“Of his personal initiative, he received into the water and freedived out, helped by the divers who needed to pull him via as a result of it was troublesome for him to get out in his swimsuit,” he mentioned.
He was airlifted to security and brought to hospital for checks however launched quickly afterwards with no points.
(Reuters – Reporting by Silvio Castellanos and Emma Pinedo, enhancing by Aislinn Laing and Christina Fincher)
