[aabella]

Hola, gracias por corregir el link.

Recordé que una vez apareció el relato del superviviente y por suerte lo copié, porque parece que ahora no está disponible. Es en inglés y va en dos partes porque no me deja mandar algo con más de 20000 letras.

May 2, 2010

Yachtsman Richard Charrington tells of his struggle to survive
An overturned boat. A savage storm. Five men fighting for their lives. Only one makes it. For the first time, Richard Charrington tells about his epic struggle for survival

When I couldn’t find a publisher for my book Legend of a Suicide, I gave up writing and went to sea. I became a captain and boat builder for the next eight years, running sailing charters along the Turkish coast and in the Caribbean. In 2004, I built a catamaran and sailed it to the British Virgin Islands. The financier Richard Charrington was on the first charter I ran.

It was the first time he had sailed since his ordeal at sea in 1995, when the catamaran he was on flipped and four of his friends died. Although he told me his story for no more than 15 minutes, the details — the freak storm, the deaths one by one, the long night alone, the horrors of a kind of dungeon in a French hospital — remained with me. It was a story I simply couldn’t forget.

Richard and I stayed in touch, and when my book was finally published and I came to London for its launch last autumn, he told me more of his story. Enough time had passed. He was ready now.


They each have one leg in the hatch, an opening in the bottom of their overturned boat. Five men, friends, two of them brothers, and four will die. It is night, and the air is filled with water. Wind at hurricane speed, pumping in blasts, cold. Each wave a monster, breaking over the far hull and churning over the men, tearing at them for 10 or 15 seconds. They cling to the hatch, to a piece of rope, to each other. They wish they were anywhere but here. They don’t speak. Their rescue beacon has been swept away, so they know the search will be in the wrong area. Nobody is coming to help them.

Richard’s tracksuit bottoms have been swept away, so he’s naked from the waist down. He’s wearing a waterproof jacket and a life vest, but he can’t zip the jacket. He’s cold, and the hatch is tearing the skin from the back of his bare leg. The hull beneath him lurches upwards and falls again, and another wave buries him. He hooks his leg, tears more skin, holds his breath and closes his eyes. Count to 10, count to 15. Then gasp for breath, open your eyes to see if your friends are still here.

Hervé has been knocked out of the hatch. He’s slipping down the hull, clinging to a piece of rope. Jean-Claude leaves the hatch to try to pull him back in. He and Hervé are experienced sailors. They wear orange neoprene immersion suits, known as “Gumby suits”. Richard wishes he had one of these, padded and warm. But the suits are bulky, the gloved hands thick. Hervé can’t pull himself up. Then another wave hits and Hervé is gone. Jean-Claude is sliding down the hull, looking at Richard. “He knew this was it,” Richard says. “He knew it, I knew it, and he was gone. I was the last to look him in the eye as he was swept away.”

Richard can fit both his legs in the hatch now. Feeling survivor guilt already. Philippe is on one side of him, distraught at the loss of his brother, Jean-Claude. Pascal is on the other. They can’t speak, the roar of the storm too loud. Philippe manages to get his body down into the hatch, jammed in with Richard’s and Pascal’s legs. He feels safer here, less likely to be taken away by a wave. But he’s also immersed in cold water, and he’s skinny. By midnight, after three hours in the water, he loses consciousness. Richard reaches out to shake him, then has to cling to the rope again as another wave hits. All the flesh torn away from the back of his legs, freezing from the waist down. He knows none of them can survive much longer.

Philippe is dead. Another hour passes, and another, and he hasn’t moved. Richard is seeing things. Rescue lights from helicopters, but then there are no helicopters. He’s lost his glasses, and the night is black, the storm still raging above. The wind hits with hammer blows, pumped by bellows unimaginable in size. The waves are relentless. The hull is trying to throw them off.

Pascal wants to go below, inside the boat. He will find an airspace, a place to hide. So Richard pushes Philippe’s dead body into the hatch, and Pascal slides into the water. He’s back in a minute, maybe less, and he says it is impossible to find his way. Too many objects are floating around. He climbs out, but he’s colder now after his swim. He’s hypo-thermic. He feels hot. So he pulls off his jacket, throws it into the sea. “No!” Richard yells, but Pascal is in his own world now, a madman fooled by hypothermia, by exhaustion, by exposure. He tears off all his clothing, throws it into the sea, feeling searing hot still. But really he has no warmth. He wraps the rope around his body, and this holds him, but his hands relax their grip, his legs relax, and Richard knows before long that Pascal is dead. Richard is the only man still alive now, unless Hervé or Jean-Claude, floating alone in that storm miles away by now, are still breathing.

Richard is tied to a dead man, buried by another wave every 20 or 30 seconds, in terrible pain as the flesh is torn from his legs. But he holds on.


sigue ...