Skip to footer

British yacht missing: Search for Cheeki Rafiki's crew called off

British yacht missing: Underwater images captured by a Navy swimmer showed the raft of the British yacht was still stowed in its storage space, indicating that there is little chance of finding the four missing sailors alive.

  • By Staff Associated Press

| London

The family of the skipper of a British yacht found upturned in the sea a week after it went missing said Saturday they are shocked and saddened after the vessel's life raft was found unused.

Britain's Foreign Office said it has decided to recall a Royal Air Force plane which had been due to search for the Cheeki Rafiki's four missing crew for one more day, after the U.S. Coast Guard also called off its search.

A helicopter spotted the overturned hull of the 39-foot (12-meter) yacht roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) off the coast of Massachusetts on Friday, days after the crew reported trouble and disappeared on May 16.

Underwater images captured by a Navy swimmer showed the raft was still stowed in its storage space, indicating that there is almost no chance of finding the four missing sailors alive.

"We are obviously shocked and deeply saddened by the news," the family of skipper Andrew Bridge, 22, said in a statement. "Andrew will be dearly missed by everyone who knew him."

The families of the other three crew members — James Male, 23, Steve Warren, 52, and Paul Goslin, 56 — have requested privacy.

The Cheeki Rafiki had been returning to England from a regatta in Antigua. Coast Guard officials said extreme sea conditions at the time of the distress call put the crew's estimated survival time at 20 hours.

A Navy swimmer found the boat's cabin completely flooded and its windows shattered. Simpson said the swimmer also knocked on the hull and reached below the waterline but got no response.

The search covered more than 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometers) and involved American, British and Canadian vessels and aircraft.

The British Foreign Office said it had informed the missing sailors' families of the hull's discovery. The Foreign Office said earlier Friday that the families were "saddened to hear that the US Coast Guard will be suspending the search. But they were prepared for the fact that this would have to happen."

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to British yacht missing: Search for Cheeki Rafiki's crew called off
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0524/British-yacht-missing-Search-for-Cheeki-Rafiki-s-crew-called-off
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe