Sailor rescued after being swept overboard from Porco Rosso yacht

The captain of Porco Rosso, Luke Watkins, who fell overboard says he was thrown off the 15-metre yacht by a big wave.

Transcript

00:00So we went down a rather large wave, and the boat went into the trough of the wave, hit

00:09the back of the wave in front, and completely washed the deck.

00:14And then we tipped over what we call Chinese jibe, we tipped over to the other side, and

00:19I got pinned to the leeward side of the boat underwater.

00:23So I somehow managed to unclip myself from the boat because I could feel that I was on

00:26my last breath.

00:28And when I popped up above the water, the boat was probably 200 metres in front of me.

00:32Well, first thought was, well, this isn't fun.

00:36And then basically just tried to keep calm and work through my safety training really,

00:43which is, you know, get into my emergency beacons, so I set those off.

00:49We also carry glow sticks, so I cracked my glow stick so I could see what I was doing.

00:54And yeah, set off my AIS beacon as well as my PLB, personal locator.

01:00And once I had those up and running, obviously my life jacket went off automatically.

01:04And once I had those going, then did a check of my pockets to see what I had on me at the

01:10time.

01:11And luckily I found my head torch in my pocket.

01:13Also had a bit of food, but that probably wasn't my concern at the time.

01:19And then, yeah, just tried to huddle up and try to keep myself warm.

01:24After about 10 minutes I could feel myself starting to get a bit cold, so yeah, just

01:28went into a bit of a survival pose, so to speak.

01:32Kept my elbows in.

01:33It was pretty rough, so getting thrown down waves, so it was pretty hard to keep my head

01:38above water most of the time.

01:40So I swallowed a fair bit of salt water.

01:43And then, yeah, just tried to keep the thoughts under control.