Rescued sailors ride a boat after getting off the oil tanker Silver Muna, Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022, in New York. (WABC via AP)
PA
Two men who were left adrift in the Atlantic Ocean for 10 days after a storm battered their sailboat off North Carolina thanked the tanker crew who rescued them and said they were lucky they survived.
“By a freak chance,” a crew member of the Silver Muna spotted the sailboat off the Delaware coast Tuesday despite it being “a toothpick” compared to the tanker, rescued sailor Kevin Hyde said at a news conference Wednesday. .
Hyde, 65, praised the Silver Muna’s surveillance protocol.
“Their training paid off and they found us,” he said.
Hyde and Joe DiTomasso, along with their dog, were sailing from New Jersey to Florida when they lost contact with their families on December 3 off the Outer Banks island chain in North Carolina.
After he, DiTomasso and the dog were brought ashore in New York City on Wednesday, Hyde said they were “sailing and enjoying themselves” and headed for Cape Hatteras when a storm blew them off course and toppled the mast of their ship, the daring II.
The sailboat also lost power and fuel.
“By then we were being pushed further and further out to sea,” Hyde said.
They had little food and ran out of water.
“We had no water for two days,” DiTomasso said. “And I had bought beans. And the best thing about the beans is that they had water. They were soaked in water. And from there we take”.
The two men described towering waves.
“We’ve never seen 40-foot (12-meter) waves before,” DiTomasso added. “How tall is this building? How high is the ceiling?”
The US Coast Guard was notified that the sailors could not be contacted on Sunday and began a search that stretched across waters north of Florida to New Jersey, authorities said in a news release.
Source: El Nuevo Herald
