Back on June 29, 2018, as we were sailing into Mauritius, we got a MayDay call around 1:30 AM that a fishing vessel was taking on water and they needed some help. The coast guard had been notified however, they were unresponsive and couldn’t get to them, so we diverted to go to their location and took all 8 of their crew on board our boat. It was quite an exciting rescue for all of as we struggled to get them aboard our boat without slamming into theirs.
SV Prince Diamond’s Youtube Channel just released the video for this rescue and I thought I’d share it with you. If you want to skip to where the actual rescue begins, go to around 4:00 on the video. Here’s the video.
After a 2-3 hour journey we got them all safe into the Port of Saint Louis and the owner of the boat was waiting for us there, happy that we saved all his crew members. We were told that the boat was also recovered later that day, but it was a scary time for all the members of that boat.
Note, as an aside, the term, Mayday, actually comes from the french phrase, m’aider, which means help me! This article talks about the fact that, “Mayday got its start as an international distress call in 1923. It was made official in 1948. It was the idea of Frederick Mockford, who was a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London. He came up with the idea for “mayday” because it sounded like the French word m’aider, which means “help me.”
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