Gold Coast sailor, missing with four others, sails in Coquimbo, Chile

by Nancy Knudsen on 12 Apr 2010 Australian student sailor Mitchell Westlake from the Gold Coast has sailed into the Chilean port of Coquimbo on board SS Columbia, after being reported missing for two months in the Eastern Pacific. With him were two fellow students and the skipper Boguslaw 'Bob' Norwid and his wife.

Yesterday, (Sunday), the 13-metre sloop carrying the seven, arrived safely in port in Chile – two months after it was scheduled to dock and was feared lost.

According to early reports, the vessel found itself adrift in the Pacific Ocean more than 1000 nautical miles off the coast, caught in the ITCZ or Doldrums. As the Captain travels with the VHF radio turned off, they were not in touch with other yachts and knew nothing about the disastrous earthquake that had hit Chile, or that there was a dramatic search underway to attempt to locate them. The captain refused to allow his sailing students access to the radio to try to contact friends and family to tell them they were all right.

Mitchell's father Nick Jermyn told the Sydney Morning Herald he felt 'raw' with relief when he heard his son was alive, but he is still waiting to talk to him. So far Mitchell has simply posted a short message on Facebook - 'im alive, i dont know what has happened yet. i am sorry for worrying anyone', left a message on his father's phone, and made a short call to his grandfather Ernie Westlake.

Family and friends of the three student sailors, who had paid around $3500 for the training voyage, which would enable them to achieve their Skipper's ticket, had had coast guard officers search up and down the coast of Chile, where the 13-metre steel sloop was likely to be. The vessel had left Salinas, Ecuador, Jan. 16th, with vague plans to arrive in Coquimbo, Chile, around Feb. 27, the day the earthquake hit. They had also put the word out among cruising sailors in the area, with no result.

Students had been told that they planned to sail around the Galapagos Islands, though when documentation was later checked, Norwid hadn't paid the requisite fees or included the 1000 mile detour in his official plans submitted to the coast guard in Ecuador.

However, all the time the search was underway, authorities, families and friends hesitated to be convinced that the vessel was lost was the previous record of the skipper. The Polish-French national Norwid routinely arrives 20 to 30 days late at his destination.

In 2002, the same SS Columbia, with the same captain, disappeared for 13 days on its way from Vancouver to Mexico before it finally arrived in Manzanillo.

By then, the U.S., Canadian and Mexican coast guards, as well as sailors up and down the Pacific coast, were looking for waitress Eva Petkovic and the rest of the crew. Upon their return, they explained that they had had to sit out a storm and wait in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for favourable winds