The Coast Guard rescued four people from a life raft after their boat sank 25 miles northwest of Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, on Sunday morning. One of the men lost parts of two fingers while deploying the raft, but he kept them on ice and flew to Cornell Medical Center in New York where they were reattached.
The boat, a Marlow 76 named Clam Chowder, from Shelter Island, New York, was on its way from Puerto Rico to the Turks and Caicos when it suffered a catastrophic failure. Four people were on board. The owner, was not. The boat spent the summers at Shelter Island.
At 5:22 a.m. the Coast Guard station in San Juan heard a Channel 16 distress call saying the boat was sinking. The stern was mostly under water and multiple pumps could not keep up with the flooding. The boat was listing to starboard, it lost power, and the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship.
The Coast Guard sent a cutter and a Dolphin helicopter to the scene and it alerted marine traffic in the area. The helicopter found the four men in the raft and lifted them to safety in multiple hoists. A 680-foot container ship, the Calais Trader, stayed nearby during the rescue. The copilot of the helicopter said that having the right survival gear, lifejackets, VHF radios and the raft helped save the lives of all four people on Clam Chowder.
Early reports said the problem started in the toy garage.
