A 32-foot cruiser with two people on board sank after being hit by a huge wave. The incident took place at around 8.15pm on a recent sunny evening near the Baggy Point in Devon, which the men were visiting to buy pasties.
The RNLI and coastguard were both called to the incident after the vessel, Gazelle, began taking on water with two men onboard. According to RNLI Ilfracombe, owner of the boat Paul Hadfield from South Wales, is a very experienced sailor who has spent more than 50-years working on boats.
Paul regularly sails over to Ilfracombe from Swansea, with his love for Ilfracombe's pasties being one of the main attractions, DevonLive reports.
“It’s the pasties,” he explains. “You can’t get anything like them in Swansea. We’d been in Ilfracombe for the day and I’d got nine pasties for colleagues back home.”
Paul goes on to explain how his boat came into difficulty on the water. He said: "It was a bit snotty as it is around Baggy but we weren’t horsing it, just easing round to the quieter waters. Then a wave hit us and there was pretty sick swell so I think that is what did it – the wave popped out the saloon window and rushed in and the volume of water already on the foredeck from the swell also swamped us and suddenly we had water up to our knees in the saloon.”
They set the bilge pumps going to get rid of the water and tried to ease the boat very slowly south-west to get away from Baggy and back towards Ilfracombe but they were taking on far more water then than they could pump out.
“I could see those nine pasties were already floating”, he remembers. “And we knew that trying anything more was just going to cause personal risk to ourselves. It wasn’t worth trying anything more. I knew this wasn't going to end well like it does in the movies.”
After the coastguard received Paul’s call for assistance, they tasked the lifeboat crews who quickly found the Gazelle. They took Paul and his colleague straight off the boat and then attached ropes to begin to tow it back to Ilfracombe Harbour.
Sadly, after a short time, the boat began to sink. Paul, sitting inside the lifeboat at the time, remembers “I heard the engines of the lifeboat ease back and I thought ‘that’s it, she’s on her way."
Since the sinking, the Gazelle has been breaking up with various pieces of debris having already been retrieved by the lifeboat including the Gazelle’s wheelhouse roof.
Stuart Carpenter, coxswain on the all-weather lifeboat that day, said "The two men were absolutely right to call for help: they were in an extremely precarious situation with the boat taking on so much water so quickly. Our first priority is always to rescue people before vessels and we are very pleased we were able to do that on this occasion.
"As we found out, the Gazelle had only minutes before sinking - if her crew had not been so cautious and called the coastguard when they did, they could have been in the water with their boat."
The Gazelle was a former race cruiser built more than 50 years ago in 1972. Paul and his family feel the loss of her greatly. “She’d had a complete refurb just before coronavirus >Covid,” he says “and so she had another 50 years in her I’m sure.”
Paul described the sinking as 'a day I will never forget'. All is not lost, however, he already has plans to visit Ilfracombe again to buy some more pasties.
