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Crew saved in fishing drama
Western Morning News
26th January 2004
Trawlermen had 15 minutes to get off vessel
A Westcountry-based Royal Navy helicopter crew lifted five fishermen to safety yesterday after their vessel sank 30 miles off the coast in the second incident of its kind in just 11 days.
The French vessel Duguesclin radioed that it was in trouble at around 5.30pm, 30 miles south east of Falmouth. Its skipper, Yves Tassel, later told how he and his crew had 15 minutes to get off the sinking vessel.
Mr Tassel told how he first noticed water filling the boat. He said he believed a leak had developed in the sea water cooling pipe, which takes in water to cool the engine. "We tried to get the water out with the pump but it wouldn't work.
"We left the boat about 15 minutes later. I threw the two life rafts and waited for them to inflate and we all got into one. It was fine weather so we did not panic at all. It was all very quick. I decided to evacuate the crew in case the vessel capsized."
The men then watched in horror as their 23-metre trawler sank.
It was the second French fishing boat to get into difficulty off the south coast in the past 11 days - on Thursday, January 15, the Bugaled Breizh sank 14 miles off The Lizard in Cornwall, with the death of five crew. There has been speculation it was hit by a container ship or a submarine taking part in naval exercises in the area.
Petty Officer Aircrewman Alan Marjoribanks, who was on board the Sea King helicopter from RNAS Culdrose that carried out last night's rescue, said the aircraft was in the air 12 minutes after getting the alert. "As luck would have it, the pilot was in the aircraft doing the end of day checks, and they had just started the engines."
He said the Sea King took around 25 minutes to get to the vessel's last reported position. Half a mile away they spotted a light, and found it was on a life raft. The Sea King's crew floodlit the scene while the men were winched to safety one by one.
The spokesman said: "The sea state was high, but they were in their immersion suits and they had state-of-the-art safety equipment. One or two were getting cold, but they were in quite high spirits - one was even sending a text message on his mobile phone."
The men were last night being checked over at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.
Sean Brooks, acting watch manager of Falmouth Coastguard, said: "We put a broadcast out on the VHF distress channel 16 and had a big response, a very good response, from other vessels as there happened to be a lot of shipping in the area this evening. We got a location and we had an inkling there was a problem. We heard the urgency in the voices."
Lifeboats based at Falmouth and Fowey were among vessels which responded to the emergency call. In the Bugaled Breizh incident, the last words of the crew were: "Come quickly. We are sinking." Two bodies were later found - the bodies of the other three crew members have not yet been recovered.
The men apparently did not have time to put on life jackets or launch a life raft.
Following the loss, the French authorities mounted an underwater expedition to take pictures of the wreck on the sea bed. A prosecutor in Brittany claimed the pictures showed evidence of an "extremely violent impact on the vessel's starboard bow, consistent with a ramming by a large and powerful vessel of the container ship type, which caused the trawler to sink extremely rapidly". There were large-scale military exercises going on in the area at the time, but initial speculation that it had been hit by a submarine was denied by the Royal Navy. The French authorities have drawn up a list of vessels they believe may have been in the area, and they have been checking ports across Europe.
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