French sailor survives 16 hours in capsized boat in Atlantic

When a boat capsized, a 62-year-old Frenchman kept himself alive for 16 hours at sea by employing an air bubble. The 12-meter ship, which had departed from Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, sent out a distress call from the Atlantic Ocean late on Monday night.

The sailor had to wait till dawn when the Spanish coastguards discovered the capsized boat since the sea was too choppy for a rescue. According to coastguard divers, the man’s survival was “verging on the impossibly.”
At 20:23 local time on Monday, his yacht broadcast a distress signal 14 nautical miles (26 nautical kilometres) off the coast of Spain’s Sisargas Islands, close to the Galicia area in the country’s northwest.

The unnamed individual was searched for and saved by a rescue ship carrying three helicopters and five divers.

The individual responded by hammering from inside the ship as a diver was winched onto the hull to look for signs of life. The rescue team affixed buoyancy balloons to the boat to prevent it from sinking and waited till daylight because the sea was choppy and it had already darkened.

Two divers swam under the boat the following day to rescue the sailor, who they discovered knee-deep in water and wearing a neoprene survival suit. The man then leaped into the chilly water and dove beneath the boat in the direction of the water’s surface.

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