Outside the Beltway

Rescue At Sea

Kate McMillan · Wednesday, January 19, 2005 · 3 comments

Ottawa Men in 12-Metre Boat Rescued at Sea by U.S. Aircraft Carrier (Nealenews)

An Ottawa man and two friends ran into trouble in their sailboat, off the coast of North Carolina.

Glynn says he and his friends – John Rae, 44, and Peter Goodeve, 39 – had a satellite phone on board the sailboat, but they didn’t have a phone number for the U.S. Coast Guard. However, on an old receipt they found a number for a Cape Hatteras marina and were able to place their distress call. While they abandoned ship for a lifeboat, the coast guard called the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier on an exercise in the area. The Roosevelt’s captain turned its 91,000 tons around, and dispatched two helicopters with rescue divers “As we were floating in the life raft, one of the divers just popped over the edge of the raft as casual as could be,” Glynn says. “He was, like, ‘Hi, how are you doing? Great, we’re going to get you out of here.'”