A sailor and his crew have been rescued after calling his best friend more than 6,000 km away. Mark Corbett's 78 meter long boat began taking on water while he was navigating through Caribbean waters last Wednesday, but all means of communicating with local lifeboat rescue teams proved impossible. So Corbett used his satellite phone to call his friend in Britain. Alex Evans, himself a lifeboatman, picked up the call while shopping in Aberystwyth but at first thought it was a joke because of the name of the vessel, the Motor Yacht Titanic.
"I'm on a ship in the Caribbean," Corbett told his friend, "we're taking on water and we're sinking. We've lost all power so we can't use the long-range radio. We're too far from shore to use the VHF radio so I'm using the satellite phone - and yours is the only number I could remember off the top of my head. The ship is the Motor Yacht Titanic."
Evans wrote the details on the only piece of paper he had to hand, a till receipt from the DIY store where he had been shopping. He then launched an international rescue by calling Milford Haven Coastguard and asked to be passed to the Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Falmouth, Cornwall, which deals with all international incidents.
A major rescue operation was then launched for the 1,700-tonne yacht owned by a company called White Star Ltd, the same name as the cruise line which owned the ill-fated original Titanic. Three hours later French and U.S. spotter planes found the craft barely above water, and it was towed by U.S. coastguards to safety in St Kitts.
"It's lucky Mark knew my mobile number off by heart - he calls me enough," Evans said, "'It's also lucky he got through to me - the mobile signal isn't too good around here." A U.S. Coastguard spokesman in Miami said, "Once at the scene, a rescue and assistance team was deployed aboard the Titanic to pump water from the vessel. After the team removed more than 8ft (2.4 meters) of water from the engine room, the vessel was stabilised and power was restored." A Maritime and Coastguard Agency spokesman said, "It's pretty remarkable that this all started with a phone call to a friend in Britain."