Cape Town - A Bellville mother is beside herself as her son – who went on a catamaran trip – was last heard of in mid-January, and was expected to arrive in Phuket, Thailand, onFebruary 2.
“No, I haven’t been fine. I’m very emotional, and sometimes feel like I’m going to have a meltdown if we don’t find something soon,” said Lisa Green.
Her son, 20-year-old Jaryd Payne, and two other crew members, Anthony Murray, 58, and Reginald Robertson, 59, are on the catamaran being delivered in Phuket.
The last contact with the yacht was via satellite phone on January 18, and was reported to be in the mid-Indian Ridge Region about 2 300 nautical miles north-north-west of Perth, Australia.
Skippered by experienced yachtsman Murray, the Sunsail RC 044-978 left Cape Town on December 14 to deliver the catamaran to Phuket for world maritime leisure business TUI Marine.
Robertson’s daughter Storme had no words to describe the horror of not knowing whether her father was alive or dead, or suffering out at sea.
“I’m trying to be realistic and stay strong because I know that’s what my dad would have wanted, but I can’t help falling apart at times,” she told the Cape Times from Bournemouth, where she lives.
The families have been joined by Matthew Thomas, an experienced yachtsman who was the search-and-rescue co-ordinator of the civilian search for Moquini, a yacht that went missing during the Mauritius-to-Durban race in 2005.
Thomas is working as adviser to the families, while TUI Marine is also trying to locate the yacht.
Thomas points out that it should be noted that the emergency position indicating radio beacon has not been deployed, which is a device that is to be used only if there is imminent loss of life, and sends digital messages to satellites globally.
“To our knowledge, this has not been activated, and that gives us some hope,” said Thomas.
“We know they experienced some bad weather, particularly off the back of tropical cyclone Bansi, that caused some damage in Mauritius, but we don’t think it was anything life-threatening that seasoned sailors like they are, couldn’t have handled.”
A floatation test carried out by the maritime rescue co-ordination centre indicates that if the yacht were drifting, it could be anywhere in a 2 million nautical square mile area, making a search-and-rescue effort all but impossible.
Thomas added that the chance of the catamaran being captured by pirates was highly remote, given how far from land it was, and in incredibly deep waters.
“If there are pirates out there, it’ll be our guys who are saving them,” he quipped. “The big concern is that they had food for 65 days, so what have they been eating for the last two weeks?”
Searching
an area of ocean of more than 2 million square nautical miles is virtually impossible.
But for three distraught families, there may just be some hope in the form of a digital online global search application that allows anyone to search satellite images and mark off items they believe to be out of place.
Tomnod (www.tomnod.com) has activated a campaign and encourages as many people as possible to scan the ocean view of their computer screens and mark anything they think may be a vessel, life raft or catamaran.
Any untrained person is able to use the device, which operates on the crowd-sourcing theory that observers who pick up the same target can be as accurate as an expert.
* For more information on this, refer to www.facebook.com/groups/1550511385236726/
Cape Times