I am on Kos. In Zurich it’s raining and cold. The weather is not worthy of the summer. Here in Kos it’s just marvellous. Sun, wind and sea. I am very well. Actually I am fantastic. That’s how relaxing summer holidays should be.
I am sailing a catamaran. It consists of two skids and two sails. I am hanging in my trapeze and race against wind and waves. It is a thrill of speed. The wind is blowing, salt water is spraying into my face and I am fully concentrated, all muscles are tense and nevertheless my mind is completely relaxed. I am at ease with myself, the world and the sea. One could become addicted to that feeling.
We are sailing the two of us since it is very, very windy and it would be impossible to sail the catamaran alone. In the front we have another rolled-up sail, a gennaker. We are sailing to and fro in a set area.
Suddenly the rolled-up gennaker sail detaches itself. This gives us much more drive. The wind blows merciless and forces us further to the open sea. We make a desperate attempt to change direction and to turn but that’s not possible with the detached sail. Then we try another possibility and turn the front sail and open the rear one. Several times we try to collect the wrong front sail. Without any success!! The wind forces us further out to the open sea. I think that the ones on the tower have to see us, realise our difficulties and come with the motor boat. That’s the advantage of sailing in a supervised area.
The catamaran is no longer controllable. The only solution is to capsize or even better to turn turtle.
And then everything goes very fast. I fall off board into the sea and just manage to catch a rope. But I don’t have any strength anymore to pull myself up to the boat. And the next wave washes me away. I can’t hold the rope any longer. Even though the catamaran capsized, the wind is caught in the net between the skids. This gives it an incredible speed and I don’t stand a chance to catch it by swimming. My partner on the catamaran cannot come to fetch me because the catamaran cannot be controlled and alone he has no chance to turn it around again.
He jumps into the water and swims to me.
For a moment we consider to swim in the direction of the catamaran but it’s way too far away and also moves away from us pretty fast.
We have to get rescued. The shore is approx. 4km away and with these waves and the current we will hardly manage it to the shore. I am a good swimmer. Today in the morning I was swimming for an hour in the pool. But swimming in the open sea with up to 2m high waves is a different kettle of fish. We swim in direction of the shore but make no headway. Why is nobody coming, I ask myself. And then the suspicion sneaks up that possibly nobody saw what happened. Perhaps they don’t even miss us. Maybe they only miss us at 5 in the afternoon, when they put away the gear and realise that a boat is missing.
By now the catamaran is no longer to be seen.
We have to rescue us ourselves but with these waves, which regularly bury us under them it seems rather impossible. Perhaps we have to wait until the evening until the wind calms down as usual and then swim to the shore. But will we have the strength for it?
The main thing is that we stay together. We hold each other’s hands. He is swimming on his back, I have to see the shore in order to not lose orientation and swim breaststroke. Thanks god the shore is hilly and I can see it at least. Why is nobody coming?!?
We continue swimming and suddenly we see a huge yacht. It is far away but we call and wave. Again and again!! But the yacht does not see us. So close and yet so far. Suddenly I see that the yacht is changing course. They must have seen the capsized catamaran. The yacht is going to the direction where the catamaran drifted off. Then it turns and comes in our direction. We call, scream, wave and it is coming closer. We still don’t know whether they see us but the direction is fine. They blow the horn. They have seen us. Oh my god, what a luck. We are drifting in the sea but have again hope.
And there she comes. The yacht is so close that I can read her name. Lotus. My rescuer, our rescuer is called Lotus. They throw us a life belt on a rope and pull us with the belt to the boat. They lower a ladder to the water and two men pull me up. I would hardly have had the strength to pull myself up. I am save. We are save. After almost two hours of drifting and swimming in the windy sea that’s a great feeling.
They shower us with warm water, give us to drink and wrap us in towels. I want to know who had seen us. First the captain from the bridge and then Inga.
Rarely before I had been so thankful like now. Thank you. Thank you Inga. Thank you captain.
Michaela Merz 
Hi Michaela, Captain David here. We are all very happy to have saved you both. I very nearly gave up but had one last look and then saw you in the water that is when we turned toward the Catamaran. I was very worried when we must have gone past you heading towards the Cat, as it only took a few seconds and I lost sight of you. This is when Lotus went to emergency stations. I was only a few seconds away from making a MayDay call and requesting helicopter assistance from the coast guard. It was so hard trying to find you in those conditions. Great job by Inge for spotting you!! Great job by all my crew for our first live Man Overboard Rescue. Thanks for the training excercise!! Hope it never happens again. Glad you are both ok.
All the best. Captain David Brooker, 1st Mate Ferdi Coetzer, Chief Stewardess Inge Coetzer, Engineer Billy Preston, Chef Nic Barratt, Deckhand Simon Chisholm and Stewardess Drue Frost and thanks to our Guests Ron and Mira for assisting with the search.
Regards
Team Lotus
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Hi Captain David, Hi Ferdi, Hi Inge, Hi Billy, Hi Nic, Hi Simon, Hi Drue, Hi Ron, Hi Mira
I was probably not able to say thank you to everybody who participated in saving my life on your boat. It does not happen to me neither that somebody has to rescue my life. THANK YOU ALL!!! You did fantastic job, you behavied like professionals, you did clever decisions and I will never in my life stop being thankfull for what you did for me. Whenever anybody of you is going to travell to Switzerland please let me know. You are people who I would love to meet at least once again. And I will cook you the best dinner you have ever ate in Europe.
For ever thankfull Michaela
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Hi Michaela,
What a story ! When reading your blog I was wondering whether Michaela was just as good in writing romans as she is with dealing with tax/vat complex matters….taking the opportunity of holidays to satisfy another art, why not.
No, it seems to be the real world….
I am happy with the end of the story like in all excellent roman, and I am very respectful to the courage you did demonstrate !
All the bests, any vat issue is going to be ever simpler than ever before.
If I may,… take care…
Best regards,
Jean-Pierre
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Hi Michaela,
Here is a copy of the report I sent to our Management company, Camper and Nicholson in Antibes, France. I sent this the day after we rescued you not knowing what actually happened to you and how you ended up in this situation. All big yachts have a SMS (Safety Management System) onboard for emergencies. We do drills every month. I sent this to them hoping it could be useful for any future safety training practice onboard the yachts. To do it live is very stressful and nothing compared with theory drills!!
Report MOB rescue Kos Island, Greece 22/07/12
Location: Kamari Bay, SW corner of Kos Island. Greece 36 44.2N 27 05.5E
Weather: NNW wind 25-30Kts (Meltemi) Sea state 0.5-1.0m wind chop with extensive white cap coverage of the whole bay and out to sea.
Visibility: Good. Sunny with overhead sun (1530). Sea spray misty haze on horizon.
Situation: At 1445 we departed our anchorage at Kamari and headed on a course to round the headland of Ak. Chelona where the Didelas Hotel is located.
Shortly after settling on our course I noticed that there was a lot of activity directly in front of the hotel with windsurfers, kite surfers and catamaran sailing boats. My course would take me too close to this area where they had a buoy set up so I altered course to stb to keep well clear. My radar gave me a target 3nm to Stb that I couldn’t clearly identify. At first I thought it was a fishing boat drifting. Through the binoculars I saw what appeared to be a box shape target. I assumed the stern of a fishing boat of some description. The radar return was not great so I kept looking at it to confirm what it was.
As I got closer to the hotel end of the bay I realized that in fact this target was an over turned catamaran. I could now clearly make out the bottom profile of the hulls.
My immediate thoughts were that this boat is a long way out of the designated hotel sailing boundaries set up by the buoys. The buoys were 0.5Nm off the beach. The over turned cat was now more than 2Nm off the beach and moving at 3-4kts with 30Kts of wind pushing it along and heading for Crete.
I spent 10-15 minutes looking at this cat trying to see someone in the water attempting to right it but couldn’t see anyone.
My thoughts were it could have blown off a mooring however as I got closer and more angle I just made out the sail was rigged. Now I knew there had to be someone either on it but couldn’t see them or they were maybe rescued by the hotel rescue tenders and eventually the hotel would return and tow the cat. I also thought oh well it’s not really my problem. I have my boss and family onboard and surely if there was someone missing the hotel rescue tenders would all be out here looking…???
At this time I made another final sweep of the area around the cat with my binoculars just in case! Nothing. I decided there was nothing I can do. I don’t know what the situation is. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong apart from a cat adrift with no one on it.
This is when I felt a strong feeling that something was not right and if that was me in the water I would be praying that whoever was in that big motor yacht would realize that something isn’t right with this picture. I started looking again now the cat is just fwd of my beam to starboard still + 1Nm away. I searched around the cat with the binoculars again and decided that there was no one on or around that cat so I started looking in a line from the cat to the hotel making several sweeps. Nothing!
I thought about it again and nearly convinced myself the people must be ok. I took one last look and there more than half a mile from the cat I saw two people in the water. I only had them in my view for about 2 seconds but enough to confirm my worst thoughts.
I was standing by my starboard pilot house windows and had to take my eyes off the people for a few seconds to get to the controls and phone. I turned towards them and slowed the boat and raised the alarm for all crew to report to the bridge to search for 2 MOB. In the space of 10 seconds I had completely lost sight of them.
My crew mustered along with the boss and his wife. I now had 9 people stationed on the bridge and sun deck searching. We slowly motored towards the direction of the cat and searched both sides of my course. Nothing. I turned when we got within 0.5nm of the cat as I knew I had gone past them. At this time a Greek guy in a hotel rescue tender came out to see what was happening. I explained to him that there were 2 people in the water and we were searching for them, please assist us. I told him to get help!!
He drove around for about 2-3 minutes then disappeared back to his station to keep an eye on his hotel patrons back at the sailing area, he never returned!! We were now heading back toward shore. We continued on searching but it was incredibly hard to see anything so small as a head in the choppy conditions. I was starting to get very concerned and had already decided another 5 minutes of searching and then I would put out a Mayday call to try and get assistance from the coastguard or a helicopter. We continued along this track, nothing. As I started turning to port and head back toward the cat my Chief Stewardess Inge called from the bow to say she saw something to starboard half a mile so I turned and she saw it again and said she is sure she saw them. Now the two lookouts on the sundeck also found them and we quickly moved towards them. I sounded the ships horn to try and give them some indication that we had seen them. I had all the crew start waving their arms and soon we got a response from the 2 people in the water, they also started waving their arms. I kept sounding the horn for reassurance.
My 1st Mate called up and asked how we should retrieve them from the water. I said we will get close and see how they look but my first option will be deploy a life ring on a long line. My crew prepared a life ring and extended the line. We got close enough to see they were capable of swimming still so I called for the ring to be bought to the fordeck with the line attached at the aft deck.
I explained to the crew that I would come alongside the people keeping the bow into the wind when we were 10 meters away from them and just forward of their position the engineer threw the life ring which drifted perfectly into position for them to grab. I kept the boat head into wind with the thruster and main engines in neutral. The crew quickly pulled the people around to the swim platform and retrieved them from the water.
They were wearing wetsuits and buoyancy aids. We put them under a warm shower and checked their condition. They both seemed fine, stressed and scared but ok. We got the name of the hotel from them and called up on VHF 16. I explained the situation to the hotel and after 15 minutes a rescue tender came out to transfer the two people. They explained to my crew they had been in the water for more than an hour. Something went wrong with the rigging on the cat with the spinnaker up and they crashed tipping the cat over. The wife became separated from the cat as the wind pushed it along faster than she could swim. The husband decided to abandon the cat to stay with his wife.
Where we found them was approx 1.5-2nm off the beach. At this time the cat was a further 1.5-2nm away. The hotel staff had no idea of the situation. There were no other boats around that would have seen the cat. We pulled them onboard at 1530, it is dark around 2045. My feeling is had we not found them it could have ended up very bad for them.
They thanked the crew and owners of Lotus for saving their lives. I think, had I called in air support to search they would have been found quickly but who knows??
We as a crew are very happy with the outcome and it has been a fantastic experience. It doesn’t get any more real live than this. It clearly demonstrated how difficult it is to find a person in the water.
Lessons learnt! I should have posted extra lookouts earlier when I had “That feeling”
I should have taken a compass bearing immediately. It only takes a few seconds to lose sight and it is very difficult to find them again.
In total we searched with 9 people looking, 5 pairs of binoculars and spent 25-30 minutes searching.
My advice to my crew and anyone is if it looks out of the ordinary it most likely is. Have a look!! Don’t give up!!!
Captain David Brooker and the Lotus crew
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Hi David and Lotus crew
Thank you very much for this detailled information. If I am very honest I am very happy that I did not know all these details when I was swimming toward the coast on that Monday. I am however very interested to know all the details now. I knew that the situation was bad, but reading your report it seems to me that it was worst than bad.
Me being in these huge waves I did not lose at any time the hope that I will survive and I will manage. Not for a second. On the coast my little fellow (5) was waiting for me. I knew I have to. It was very exhausting because I was swimming all the time but I did not feel tired. Probably some hormons kidly overfloated my body and helped me quite a lot. My body was doing what I want him to do and my mind was very focused and positive.
It was however close. If you had have not made the trip it could turn very badly.
Thank you very much for not giving up. One of my lesson lernt is about equipment – my suit, my life jacket helped me to survive that time in the water. Your professional behaviour, your persistence, your correct decisions allow that I still give my little boy every evening his good night kiss. THANK YOU David, THANK YOU LOTUS CREW!!!
Michaela
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When I saw the title of Michaela’s blog I first thought she was joking about the firms email system Lotus Notes or that she was pleased to have it so that she has the freedom to work during vacation. But when I read the entire story I realized that this was a rather serious issue, what a story, It becomes all so more real if such a thing happens to someone you know. All the best Michaela to you and your partner and thank you from my side to the Lotus crew and owners. Markus (one of Michaelas 175 other partners of our firm)
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Wow. This is intense. Happy to hear everything turned out so well for you, Michaela! I guess I’ll have a different attitude towards cats going forward… And I’ll definitively keep David’s lessons learned in mind whenever I am at sea again. Thank god there is people like he and his crew out there who care about others and help whenever they can!
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