One dead, three missing after incident off Cape Sable Island
Posted Mar 27, 2012 08:49:09 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The search is underway for three missing sailors after an incident aboard a sailboat off Nova Scotia’s southwestern coast.
Lt. Edward Stansfield, public affairs officer at Maritime Forces Atlantic, says a freighter found the vessel in distress last night about 80 nautical miles or 128 km south of Cape Sable Island.
“They had already taken three people off a sailing vessel and there were three people on the vessel and three in the water,” said Stansfield.
The freighter took the three uninjured survivors to Saint John.
A Cormorant helicopter and Hercules aircraft were dispatched from Greenwood and removed three more people from the sailboat. One was declared dead at the scene and the other two were airlifted to hospital in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
A Coast Guard ship and U.S. Coast Guard aircraft have joined the search for the three missing people.
Stansfield says the weather, so far, hasn’t impeded the search.
“We know that the ceiling last evening was very low, in terms of visibility, and certainly the state of the weather right now is a bit of a challenge,” he said. “It’s not really having an effect on the search per se, but it might have been a causal factor in what happened last night.”
Stansfield says it’s believed the sailing vessel is Russian, but said it’s not clear at this point where the boat was sailing from or to.
