Rescued Australian father and son are recovering fast

by Sean Flynn | The Newport Daily News on 26 Feb 2015 The Australian father and son who were rescued from their 43-foot sailboat Sunday morning in 60-mph winds and 25-foot waves two days after setting out from Jamestown were recovering Monday at the Coast Guard Air Station in Forestdale, Mass., a village in Sandwich.

'We are good; we have been really well looked after here,' Jason McGlashan, 37, wrote during a Facebook chat Monday afternoon.

He and his father, Reg, 66, were two days into their 8,600-nautical-mile trip back to Port Macquarie on the coast of New South Wales, Australia, when they had to be rescued by a MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew that lowered a swimmer to put them in metal rescue baskets so they could be lifted out of the water. The rescue happened 150 miles south of Nantucket Island.

Jason McGlashan communicated with reporters from around the country and Australia on Monday from the air station via Facebook because, he said, 'Unfortunately, our Australian phone provider charges us a huge amount to talk on the phone even if you called us.'

The McGlashans left Conanicut Marine Services in Jamestown on Friday on board the Sedona, in spite of warnings about the approaching storm.

'We did our best to discourage them from doing it,' said Conanicut Marine owner William S. Munger. 'We saw them sailing out into the bay and thought, ‘This is not good.’ We were encouraging them to hang out in Newport Harbor where the boat would be sheltered until the bad weather blew over. We tried hard to get them to do that.'

'Being in the marine business, we watch the weather like a hawk,' said Matt Gineo, manager of Oldport Marine Services in Newport. 'We saw this thing coming on Thursday. I have no idea why they left, given all the warnings. It was very irresponsible to put Coast Guard lives at risk. They should pay for the rescue.'

Jason McGlashan was asked about the warnings via the Facebook chat.

'When we left Rhode Island, we had a Coast Guard boat board us and go over everything,' he responded. 'They were happy and thought we would easily outrun the storm. But with so many things going wrong, this wasn’t possible.'

And what went wrong?

'The charging units from the motor and our wind generator both failed, causing the auto pilot to not work; then the sails became torn, as I was trying to fix the problems,' he wrote. 'After that I started to motor. Then, the motor failed, making us dead in the water.'

Petty Officer Myeonghi Clegg, a Coast Guard spokeswoman, said the service had been broadcasting warning advisories as the storm approached and sent out a plane to transmit the warnings to mariners at sea. She said the McGlashans would not be billed anything for their rescue.

'We don’t typically do that, unless someone is perpetrating a hoax,' she said.

Jason McGlashan bought the Sedona on eBay for $10,000 from Len Hubbard of Jamestown, who had the boat built in 1995 and raced it competitively all over the East Coast. The McGlashans planned to sail south to Bermuda and then across the Atlantic to South Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then follow a straight line across the Indian Ocean to Australia.

People have been responding online to the Coast Guard’s statement about the rescue and articles in The Newport Daily News about the adventure before the trip got started, as well as the rescue story in Monday’s newspaper.

Tom O’Connell of North Kingstown, an employee of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Middletown for more than 30 years, wrote that he spent four years in the Coast Guard in his youth.

'Raced sailboats with Len Hubbard back in the 80’s although I never sailed on this boat,' O’Connell wrote. 'I am sure everything about that boat was to go fast, Lenny liked to win. ... How many times have we seen a boat leave Rhode Island, crews got no clue, never looked at the weather, just takes off. First leg to Bermuda no less, ever hear of the Gulf Stream?'

Trisha McElroy of Jamestown wrote: 'Who would buy a boat on eBay and two weeks later set sail for a million miles away? They were using old racing sails that probably would have come apart in 20 knots.'

McGlashan took questions like these in stride.

'I bought the boat last year in October,' he wrote. 'I came here on New Year’s Eve and worked on the boat since. We did have racing sails, but the racing headsails were not used. We had a one-season-old racing main that was in great condition, which we purchased before we left.'

The First Coast Guard District command center in Boston received an alert beacon signal Sunday at about 4:50 a.m., when the on-scene weather conditions were 9-foot seas and 40-mph winds, according to the Coast Guard. An Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon or EPIRB is used on boats to alert search-and-rescue services in the event of an emergency.

'After the EPIRB was activated, is when the conditions became very rough,' McGlashan wrote. 'Most people assume we set off the EPIRB because of the storm. That had nothing to do with it. We were stuck dead in the water unable to move it. It wasn’t until the rescue was in full effect that the storm hit. I have had experience in rough conditions but not to the extreme every one has seen on the (Coast Guard) video. Those conditions came on just before the helicopter arrived.'

The boat was at Conanicut Marine for about a week before the McGlashans began their journey. Before that, it had been at Clark Boat Yard & Marine Works in Jamestown, where Hubbard stored it.

'They came over to our place to provision the boat,' Munger said. 'We didn’t do any work. We had nothing to do with it.'

McGlashan said he is working with his insurance company to see if the boat can be salvaged.

'I need to find a crew and boat willing to go out and look for it; my insurance company is currently trying to do this,' he wrote. A locator beacon on the boat would guide them to it.

If the boat can be salvaged, it will be strapped to a deck then shipped to Australia, McGlashan said. With all the repairs that need to be done, he would have to spend too much time away from work to attempt another U.S.-to-Australia sailing trip, he said.

Before the trip started, McGlashan said his father was not a sailor, but a quick learner. He originally intended the trip to New England to pick up the boat to be a solo vacation. But then his mother, Lee, got wind of the adventure and said it would be best if his father went along.

McGlashan was asked if his father would go on a boat again.

'Dad enjoys boating and will be back on the water,' he responded.
How is his mother doing?

'She is a nervous lady at the best of times,' he wrote.

His father is heading back to Australia soon, but McGlashan said he may stay in New England 'a little longer depending on the salvage effort.'

Although he is good shape physically, emotionally is a different story, McGlashan said.

'The nicest way I can put it, is a bit pissed off after everything I went through to get this to happen,' he said of acquiring the boat and planning the journey. 'Then, to have so many problems, I got to get my head around it all.'