The rescue of Laurent Camprubi is a miracle. The French skipper spent a night at sea, stuck under his overturned sailboat, in a 30 centimeter air pocket. He was rescued in extremis off the coast of northern Spain on Tuesday. “A rescue at the limit of the impossible”. This is how “Salvamento Maritimo”, the Spanish sea rescue service, described this perilous operation on Facebook, when the navigator’s boat had capsized in the Atlantic in the middle of the qualifying course for the Route du Rhum 2022.
The 62-year-old Marseillais, accustomed to major offshore races, was 14 miles (22 kilometers) from the small Sisargas archipelago, off Galicia (northwest of Spain), when he triggered his beacon of distress Monday at 8:30 p.m. “The sea was choppy, difficult, with a wind of around thirty knots, but the boat was going well. I was resting in the cockpit when I hit the water violently: the boat started to tilt and I realized that I had lost the keel, “he told the AFP.
Access to the cockpit was impossible
Within seconds, I found myself upside down. The boat started to sink and the water was coming in. I said to myself: there we are not well”, continued the navigator, who said he had “put himself in a corner, squatting”, while waiting for help. “My hours were numbered” because the free space “diminished little by little”. Mobilized aboard a ship, supported by three helicopters, the Spanish emergency services managed to locate the sailboat about two hours after its accident. He was “keel upside down” in the dark, tossed about by high waves, explains the Salvamento Maritimo.
Dropped with the help of a helicopter on the boat, one of the rescuers then knocks on the hull. He perceives “return blows” which make him understand “that there is a person stuck inside”, says the sea rescue service, which ensures that the emotion is then “skyrocketed”.
At this moment, the sea is stormy. And access to the cockpit, almost impossible. The rescuers therefore decided to install rescue buoys to prevent the boat from sinking. It was necessary to work in a “frenzied” way to secure the ship, assures the skipper of the rescue ship, Rodrigo Piñeiro.
“We had to hold” in 30 centimeters of air
In the early morning, divers equipped with flashlights finally manage to penetrate under the hull, where they see a red boot. “The immediate reaction was to touch it and the foot withdrew instantly”, explain the rescuers, who then stretched out a pole that Laurent Camprubi immediately grabbed.
For the latter, it is deliverance. “I knew they were there, but we had to hold on”, confides the navigator, who then threw himself into the water: “I took my breath and I went out in apnea: there were two meters to do to get under the door, then four to get out of the cockpit”. It is then 12 o’clock and Laurent Camprubi has just spent nearly sixteen hours “in barely 30 centimeters of air”, according to the Spanish rescuers. In shock, but unscathed, the navigator was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital in La Coruña, Galicia.
There, “I had a series of exams: I was at 34.5 degrees and very dehydrated, but I’m better now,” says the skipper, who stayed in La Coruña to supervise the refloating of his boat, but who is about to return to France to find his wife and children.
“I was afraid for my loved ones”
“I’m going to put my Route du Rhum project on hold (…) I’m going to continue sailing” but “I was afraid for my loved ones and I don’t want this to happen anymore”, confides the navigator, who has on his record several victories in regattas, notably on the Rolex Giraglia, in the Mediterranean.
In a press release, the Spanish emergency services praised the courage of the navigator as well as his “knowledge”, “which allowed him to wait calmly” for the arrival of help. “Every life saved is our greatest reward,” they tweeted. The Marseillais paid tribute for his part to the divers who saved him: “these are moments that I will never forget”.