If you’ve ever had a hard time finding your boat in a mooring field after a late dinner or a night out, and you realize all the anchor lights look the same – or worse yet, you don’t see any anchor lights at all – you can relate to this story.
Three men left their boat, the Russian cargo ship Alana Evita, anchored in the Bristol Channel in South West England, for a night of drinking on shore. They took the ship’s 13-foot RIB eight miles to the waterfront town of Barry. They left the bar there at 3:45 to return to the ship, but they got lost in a dense fog.
The ship’s crew reported them missing at 7 a.m., and local authorities launched an extensive search, involving a Coast Guard helicopter and five RNLI lifeboats. It turns out the three men ended up on Flat Holm Island, which is rocky and windswept and has only one inhabitant, Richard Twinning, a local ecologist, and he’s there only three weeks out of four.
Twinning saw the men about 8 in the morning and gave them blankets, hot tea and porridge and called the search parties. “I asked the men if they would be in trouble with the captain when they got back,” he told the Penarth News, “and one very sheepishly told me, ‘I am the captain.’” Read more:
