Five sailors, missing two months, sail into Coquimbo, Chile

by Nancy Knudsen on 12 Apr 2010 Five sailors, missing on the sailing yacht the SS Columbia for nearly two months in the eastern Pacific, have turned up in Coquimbo. This includes the skipper Boguslaw 'Bob' Norwid and his wife, and their three student sailors - Canadian women Josee Chabot and Lisa Hanlon and Australian Mitchell Westlake.

Yesterday, (Sunday), the 13-metre sloop carrying the five, 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.

Martin Neufeld, partner of Josee Chabot, said, after talking to his wife, 'I’m very, very relieved.' He had earlier received word from Foreign Affairs officials that the SS Columbia had reached safe harbour after arriving 'under the radar.'

His wife had told him that 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.

Family and friends of the 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.

Martin had been told by Josee 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 1,800-kilometre 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