Weeping tears of relief, the first of 64 students, teachers and crew rescued from disaster at sea reached dry land in brazil this morning.
Survivors of the wreck of Canadian sailing vessel Concordia told of a freak vertical downdraft that capsized the tall ship in seconds, giving the terrified passengers and crew just minutes to take to the lifeboats.
All are safe, Brazilian navy officials told the Globe and Mail, after spending nearly 40 hours in lifeboats and being plucked from the sea by merchant ships reacting to a distress call.
"Life and death thoughts were going through our heads," Keaton Farwell, 17, of Toronto said. "We were thinking the worst."
Ms. Farwell was among the first 12 of the shipwrecked brought to Rio de Janeiro on a Brazilian frigate dispatched after spotter planes located the life rafts.
She and her friends held hands, hugged and a few wept tears of joy and relief as the frigate tied up at port. They were wearing Brazilian naval caps and the T-shirts given to them by the Filipino crew from a Toyko-registered merchant ship that pulled them from their life lifeboats.
We saw a light in the sky...We forgot our exhaustion. We were hopeless, and then the plane appeared. I can't explain it.— Lauren Unsworth, 16-year-old Canadian student
William Curry of Seattle, the ship's captain was in his cabin when he felt the severe heel. His first thought, he recounted, was that it was "pretty normal."
Then, however, the ship kept being pushed further over, and "I knew instantly that it was not right."
Mr. Curry said he had seen bad weather coming -- gale or near-gale winds with thundershowers and high seas. In preparation, he had lowered some of the tall ship's 16 sails, trimmed others, notified the cooks to prepare sandwiches in case thr rolling seas made cooking impossible, and notified the students. Although bad weather was coming, Mr. Curry thought what lay ahead was nothing terribly special: discomforting but not threatening.
Instead, he said, the ship was struck by a micro-burst of a vertical downdraft.
Normally, heavy horizontal winds will cause a sailing boat to heel thereby putting the sails at an angle to spill some of the wind, he explained. A downdraft, by contrast, takes a sail already an angle and pushes it further down, which was Concordia's fate. "The more you go over, the more the sail is exposed to the wind," he said. It was an "extraordinary event," of "bad luck" such that within 15 minutes the ship was over on its side and slowly disappeared.
The 64 high school students, teachers and crew were the victims of a fierce vertical downdraft, called a "micro-burst" knocked over the Concordia. The ship sat in the water for 15 minutes on its side before it sank, an agonizingly short period old time during which all aboard were able to evacuate.
Once inside the three 20-person liferafts, and two that could accommodate 8 to 10 people, "it was very crowded, very cold," recalled Lauren Unsworth, 16, a Canadian citizen living in the Netherlands.
Rain squalls struck, but Ms. Unsworth described them as a blessing because those in the rafts were able to collect and drink the rain water.
They were somewhat cheered when a crew member saw floating in the sea a device that ships in distress use to send signals to satellite. The crew member jumped into the water, retrieved the device and activated it.
Two merchant ships had seen the original distress signal from Concordia before it sank, and they headed to the area. But the most important move belonged to the Brazilian navy that contacted the airforce.
Two search planes were immediatel dispatched, and using flares of their own, and spotting flares sent up from the rafts, pinpointed the location of the lifeboats and communicated that to the nearest merchant vessels.
