Mayday on Christmas: Epic Ocean Rescue (Repeat)

0:00Insurance isn't one size fits all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy. Or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options. No guesswork, no surprises.

0:34Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit progressive.com and give the Name Your Price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life on your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

0:56It's Christmas Day, 1996. 1 ,400 miles from land, deep in the Southern Ocean. 35-year-old marine turned yachtsman, Pete Goss, is nearly two months into the world's toughest sailing race, the Vendee Globe. And right now, a storm is whipping up around him. A powerful swell churns the dark waters, stretching the waves into hills that quickly become mountains. Twisting, turbulent winds spin Pete's boat and lash it with spray. The gusts are well over 70 miles per hour. It's hard to breathe through the salty bluster. Pete is no stranger to terrifying tempests, but this one is especially sinister. Every storm is different, but this particular storm just didn't feel good.

1:5440, 50, 60 knots of wind, and I could only just keep up with the sail changes. I mean, the boat got knocked down. Imagine a big breaking wave the size of a three or four-story building knocking it on its side. So it's pretty wild. Pete scrambles below deck. But as the boat pitches and yaws, there is a violent bump. and he's thrown into the ceiling. Another huge impact shudders through the hull and he's catapulted onto the chart table. There's water slopping around the boat, tools and equipment strewn everywhere. It's a nautical nightmare. And then, amid the chaos, a high-pitched alarm suddenly screeches out.

2:38It's coming from the onboard satellite system. I wasn't sure what it was. I worked my way across the boat, kind of wedged myself down, called up the message to find it was a mayday. Another raceboat, the Algemus, has capsized and is being swallowed by the waves. The skipper needs help, fast. Steadying himself, Pete grabs a chart, wipes the water off it and locates the mayday position. The stricken vessel is 160 miles away, directly upwind into this hurricane force storm. While no one can compel him to turn back, there is an unwritten code among these skippers. They may all be racing one another, but they're also facing the sea together.

3:29I remember just sitting down and thinking about it. very quickly. Your mind goes at 100 miles an hour. And so I decided to do something, but I don't actually think I had a choice. I think it was laid down many years ago by a tradition of the sea, and that is that if someone's in trouble, then you help them.

3:57Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet English seafarer Pete Goss as he takes on the most draining and dangerous sailing race on Earth. Most don't make it to the finish. Some don't survive. Less than two months in, hundreds of miles from land in the Southern Ocean, he is beset by the worst storm he's ever faced.

4:40But when a fellow racer needs help, Pete answers the call. and his battle to stay alive also becomes the most daring of rescue missions. I was just trying to survive, hoping to get through it, and then suddenly thrown into the mix is a mayday. A mayday means it's a life-threatening situation. If you don't do something, someone's going to lose their life. I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is Real Survival Stories.

5:34It's November the 3rd, 1996, in the French Atlantic seaside town of Les Sables-d 'Olon. The harbour is abuzz of activity, with 16 racing yachts roped up along a long pontoon-style jetty. The vessels bob rhythmically in the cool winter grey. A crowd is gathering around the bay. They are here to watch the start of the toughest yacht race on earth, a 24 ,300-mile, single-handed, round-the-world epic known as the Vendée Globe. Making his way slowly along the jetty, Pete Goss stops at every boat in the race fleet. He shakes hands with each skipper and wishes them good luck and a safe return. They're all relative strangers, but they are bound by this one dream, to win, or at least finish, the Vendée.

6:32All around, the land teams bustle through last-minute preparations. They've been prepping in the Bay of Biscay for three weeks now. But for Pete, the journey to get here has taken a lifetime. Well, I consider myself a Cornishman, so the sea tends to get into your blood. But I guess for me, my father sailed, my grandfather sailed, my great-grandfather was a shipbuilder. So I actually don't remember learning to sail a bit like you don't remember learning to walk. Because of his father's work as an agricultural consultant, Pete's family constantly travelled when he was young, living in Yemen, Pakistan, Thailand, Uruguay, and Australia.

7:14But one constant was that he always sailed. Pete left school at 16 and went straight to work on seafaring salvage tugs out of Plymouth on the UK's south coast. Only a couple of years later, in 1979, he received an eye-opening lesson in the harshness of the ocean. The Fast Net Sailing Race, a yachting competition held off the south of England, was hit by an unexpectedly severe storm. The boat Pete was working on at the time was called into action. Over 130 lives were saved in one of the largest peacetime rescue missions ever seen. But tragically, 15 sailors were also killed. It showed Pete the serious side of the sea and the risks sailors face, something he'd go on to learn more about in his nine-year career with the Royal Marines.

8:08I was always going to sail all my life, but I got a very lucky break when I was in the Royal Marines, and I got a job as mate on their sail training yacht. And I then was working full-time as a sailor, teaching people, taking them out, and just getting those miles in. While in the Marines, a kind of unwritten agreement evolved. If Pete could raise the money and build a boat for a high-profile race, his superiors would give him the time off to compete. It was all the incentive he needed. I then did my first ocean trip, which was a two-handed transatlantic race, and really was very naive. We were good sailors, we could make the boat go fast, but had never done any ocean sailing.

8:55And it was a hard race. We had a lot of problems with the boat. We had to bail it out. The keel was coming off. So it was this really seminal trip and this amazing apprenticeship. But I can still now remember 2.31 morning bailing the boat out. It just struck me that I'd stumbled across what I wanted to do in life. And this was to go ocean sailing. So I just made this commitment. I'm doing a single-handed round-the-world yacht race. That race is the Vendee Globe. But sailing is an expensive sport. To get to the start line, there are a lot of sacrifices to make. Pete leaves work and builds a small office in his home in the West Country, where he lives with his wife, Tracy.

9:40He regularly hitches up to London, meeting with potential sponsors. He raises enough money to start building a boat, But when he hits cash flow problems, Tracy suggests they sell his family home to fund his dream. That's the moment the project really takes off. It's also when the hard work truly begins. You have to work on behalf of sponsors, do the publicity. I did a single-handed transatlantic racing back that year. So even before the start, you've done two Atlantic trips that same year in terms of preparation and trying to iron out the wrinkles and polish things. You're living your dream, but it's very tough.

10:23It's very stressful. You're pulled in all sorts of different directions. But the beacon is this amazing race, which is nonstop, single-handed around the world with no outside assistance allowed.

10:39By the time the competitors meet at Les Sables d 'Holland, they've truly earned their place at the starting line. Grueling qualifying races, huge fees, weeks at sea, and hundreds of hours of prepping and enhancing their boats. Right now, Pete's vessel, the Aqua Quorum, is as good as she'll ever be. Everything is organised and ready. You have to have specialist safety equipment. You have to go on courses to know how to use it. You have to be a radio operator. There's a doctor, Dr. Johnny. You go through his medical course and he gives you the equipment which you take with you. So it's not easy to get into the Vondi Globe.

11:24And if you don't manage to jump those hurdles, then you don't get to do the race. Of the 16 boats competing, one is slightly different. Experienced skipper Rafael Dinelli didn't manage to finish his qualifying in time. He's tried to persuade the committee to let him enter anyway, but despite having jumped through all the other hoops required, they've refused. He can still start the race, but not under the official umbrella. He was an illegal entrant with some blessing from the organization. They said, well, we'd like you to have the safety transponders, which, you know, if you're in dire straits, you press the red button and an emergency beacon sends out your position.

12:12and that you want help. So although he was an illegal entrant, he did have some blessing.

12:23It's lunchtime on November 3rd, 1996. The start of the race is imminent. Through the drizzle and the wind, the 16 boats jostle for position in the choppy surf. Along the coast, around the bay, and in the harbour itself, thousands of people line the banks. waiting to watch these elite sailors set off. Hundreds more flank the racers in a flotilla of spectator boats, ready to accompany them out to sea for the first few moments of the race. Even the foul weather can't dampen the skippers' spirits. This is the moment they've all worked so hard to get to. When you go to the start of these events, it's terribly exciting, and there's the razzmatazz and the thrill and everything.

13:09and you look across the fleet and all of those skippers have their ambitions and dreams, but a lot of them it won't work out as they hoped. At 50 feet, Pete's boat is the smallest in the fleet. Most of the racers are sailing 60-foot yachts. The decision to downsize was largely financial, but it has its advantages. When we set off, statistically only 50 % of the fleet would finish. and there would be one if not two lives lost so it's a war not a battle to win first you have to finish now if you're at 60 feet you have to introduce extra complexity to enable one human being that individual to work it and so they had bits of equipment which introduced unreliability I guess.

14:03And by going to 50 foot, we could just throw those problems over the side. And so although we were the smallest budget, the smallest boat, we were at the run to the fleet, we actually felt quite confident that we could get a good result. At 1.02pm, a cannon shot fires and they're off.

14:27Raphael's boat, the Elgemus, starts behind Pete's Aqua Quorum. They're among the lucky ones who manage to get through the initial stages unscathed. Rough conditions hamper many of the skippers' starts. Two yachts are forced to pull out early due to weather damage, and several others return to the start to make repairs before continuing. It's a reminder of just how tough this race is going to be.

15:20We'll be right back. student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at aka.ms.collegepc. It's mid-December, and Pete has been at sea for around six weeks. The aqua quorum cuts through the heaving surface of the southern Atlantic, heading down the west coast of Africa. So far, the race has taken him south from France, across the equator near the Gulf of Guinea, and through the doldrums where the tropics converge. He's travelled the Atlantic a little slower than he'd hoped, but he's still very much in the race. Throughout, he has remained methodical and disciplined. To be a good single-handed sailor, you've got to navigate, you've got to sail, you've got to maintain equipment, you've got to study weather, you've got to make strategic decisions.

16:14And it goes deeper and deeper and deeper to, you know, when I did it, one of the things I did was study sleep patterns, because sleep is very limited and therefore we were able to make best use of this limited resource. We developed clothing. You have to have quite a good knowledge of medicine because there's nothing out there. It is just you and you have to deal with everything. The only minor worry thus far is an injury to his arm. In the rough and tumble of seafaring, Pete has ruptured the muscles around his elbow. It's making the physical demands of the race just that bit harder, but for now he's doing okay.

16:54His boat rides swiftly over another wave as he approaches the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of South Africa. Soon he'll hit the Southern Ocean, and that's when the real endurance test begins. The Southern Ocean represents a necklace of very, very deep depressions which keep circling the globe, there's no landmass to inhibit the waves. And the net result is this huge swell builds up, which in turn generates quite a strong current. So you have on the one hand, this huge amount of energy, this resource that you can tap into as a sailor, whereas on the other hand, it gets really quite hostile. You know, sea temperature can drop to minus one, wind chill on deck can drop to minus 30.

17:37Then you have icebergs dotted around. Out here, technology and communication systems are of the utmost importance. They are crucial, invisible lifelines connecting the various vessels. There is an interesting dynamic within the race. You're competing with this fleet, absolutely. It drives you every second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But at the same time, they provide a safety net. So there's quite an intense relationship between the skippers it's christmas day 1400 miles southwest of perth australia despite its fearsome reputation today the weather in the southern ocean appears to be relatively mellow pete peers up at sunny skies above but he knows looks can be deceiving and the sway of the ocean is telling him that something awful is on its way.

18:40It's a funny thing. You'll have really quite nice weather but then underneath it is this big swell, big swell. The distance between the wavetops is just absolutely vast and it's like this malevolent heartbeat just beating out from this thing that's on the way. It was a funny, a funny period. You know, the pressure just fell like a stone and just kept falling and falling. And clearly there was some really bad weather on the way. And that's one of the worst things is the waiting. You know that there's hurricane force winds on the way, but there's nothing that you can do about it. Merry Christmas.

19:20While he waits for the worst, Pete dresses the boat for what's coming. He adjusts the rigging, makes sure he's eaten properly, and goes around the vessel tying everything down. as the wind increases. So you reduce your sails down to literally the size of a domestic door. It's all about pre-empting things as best you can. You don't sleep because it's so violent. And there's always an underlying tension, anxiety. And each wave, you never know which wave is going to present a real problem. These storms are all consuming and it shrinks your world down to you, your little boat and just what's happening immediately around you.

20:12When it arrives, the storm proves to be even worse than anticipated. Pete and his boat become a tiny speck in a vast pandemonium of enormous waves and swirling hurricane force gales. Bearings mean nothing now, nor does the race. It's just a matter of holding on and riding it out. With freezing torrents of water sweeping across the boat, Pete seeks refuge below deck. But it's not much better down here. The galley is in chaos, with equipment and food clattering all around. A tin can lodges itself behind the generator, up against the battery terminals. sending sparks flying. As the aqua quorum is clobbered, Pete is thrown from one side of the cabin to the other.

21:03And then, through the damage and the din, an alarm shrieks out.

21:11A May Day call is being issued. Pete's eyes widen. The algemous has capsized. Rafael, its skipper, is in trouble. The boat is sinking. The race organizers have put out a plea for anyone nearby to come to the rescue. In conditions like this, in the vast expanse of the ocean, nearby is a very relative term. There was three of us in that storm, all trying to survive and just get through the other end. There was myself, so I was out ahead, 160 miles. Then there was Rafael. And then from memory, about 40 miles behind him was Patrick de Rodriguez, who was the next motorcycle racer, real character. We all had our own problems in the storm.

22:01His problem was a big wave had smashed through his cabin door and flooded all his communications. So imagine the race organisation, they get this emergency beacon goes off from Raphael and 40 miles upwind of him, in the perfect position, is Patrick de Rodriguez. They send him a message to tell him, but it can't get through because he's lost his communications. And they sat at their desk and watched Raphael's chance of survival just sail past and on into the distance.

22:36Pete is Rafael's only other chance. There's nothing else for it. A fellow sailor is in danger and Pete doesn't hesitate. The sea is a wonderful thing and if you're a seafarer you're drawn to it, you love it, but it's also a very, very hostile environment and so seafarers have this code if you like and that is that if if someone's in trouble then you help them it was christmas you know and i just thought i must tell tracy because clearly i could imagine there'd be quite a lot of publicity around this and i sent her a really quick email hi trace i don't know happy christmas just so that you know don't worry i'm turning around in a storm i didn't realize it's the only time i've ever told tracy not to worry It was the worst thing I could have done.

23:36The storm rages on. The frothing surface of the southern ocean grows and drops and splashes and swirls. Before Pete can even attempt to rescue Raphael, first he has to survive himself. Right now, the storm is too bad for him to pull the aqua quorum around and head back. Sailing against these immense winds is impossible. So I turned the boat up to the wind and it was just horrifying. You can't hear yourself think. I found it hard to breathe with the volume of water being torn off the surface of the sea. Aqua quorum just lay flat on her side and was just shaking violently. and then was just slowly trying to get the boat to move.

24:21Not really to get back to Raphael. That initial phase was to just try and hold my position and not get blown further away from him. Pete's training from the Marines comes to the fore. Stay focused. Don't panic. He breaks the whole mission into smaller objectives. One, survive the worst of the storm. Two, set a course for Raphael's last known location and battle your way back. Deal with three when you get there. Easier said than done, particularly when the tempest shows no sign of calming. It was so violent that the generator was ripped off its mounts. It was getting damaged and trying to repair that.

25:06And it was flooded back aft where the autopilot system was. so crawling back there and slopping around trying to bail out. It was pretty wild. And then basically also very cognizant of I need to keep eating and drinking, so you watch your urine, make sure that's not getting too yellow. It's a long game, and I was getting quite badly injured actually. So once I'd really done everything that I could, I tied myself down to the boat and waited to see what would happen.

25:43One of the innovations that Pete's team installed on the boat to give her more speed now really begins to shine. It's something called a swing keel. Normally, the keel is a fixed beam that runs end-to-end beneath the boat and helps to prevent it from capsizing. Instead of being molded to the boat, Pete's keel is hinged Which means it can pivot around, allowing the boat greater stability and balance This ingenious device saves the aqua quorum As it's buffeted by the swell and the gales That was the thing that got us through the storm Because when we got hit by big waves on the side The boat could just skip sideways It's literally like, if you imagine throwing a stone on a river and it skips along, well, I was in that stone, skipping down the face of the waves, and then she would come back up again.

26:42After 12 brutal hours, the winds finally begin to ease off. The tempests haven't totally passed, but conditions are getting slightly better. Barely pausing to rest, Pete gets to work on phase two of his mission. Time is of the essence, and he needs to start heading back towards the Algemus now. And then it was a case of, right, now we've got to make up those 160 miles. And I was going around the boat doing repair, climbing up the mast. I'd had damage to the head of the mainsail, so I had to, you know, tie myself to the mast. And I was drilling through the sailcloth to try and bolt it together to be able to get more drive to go back to Raphael.

27:28But locating the sunken boat will be far from easy. Even with radio, satellite, and beacons aboard every vessel in the race, there are no guarantees of finding a sailor's exact location. Pete tries to home in on Rafael's emergency signal, which is currently transmitting a rough position. Having set his course, and with the winds dying down, he can start making repairs while the aqua quorum does the sailing. Then, while he's on deck, he hears the unmistakable sound of a plane overhead. And it was the Royal Australian Air Force. It was unbelievable, this massive, great four-engine plane. So I ran down below, I got on the VHF radio and called them up.

28:16And it was just amazing to have a voice. I remember calling them up in this lovely Australian voice, saying, you know, happy Christmas and how you're doing. And I remember asking them, I was saying, well, who else is involved in the rescue? And he just said, oh, it's you, mate. And that was a really sobering moment, that.