A sailor who vanished at Florida’s east coast was rescued alive after 48 hours.
62-year-old Stuart Bee departed at 4 pm on Friday from the Port Canaveral Marina. The family reported him missing when he didn’t return home after 24 hours as he never used to stay out for so long. The authorities launched the search immediately and sent a Hercules C-130 aircraft for the rescue. Nobody was able to find the missing boater until Sunday when the crew of Angeles spotted him.
Angeles is a 225-foot container ship that encountered Stuart Bee clinging on his boat’s hull on Sunday at 11:40 am. He was rescued from the Atlantic ocean, about 86 miles off the coast of Port Canaveral. The vessel was disabled on Saturday due to some mechanical issues.
Bee said the water gushed into the forward cabin, and he was expelled from the front hatch of the boat. After the sunrise, he noticed a container ship at some distance; he looked at it as a ray of hope and waived his shirt to catch the crew’s attention.
Lacruiser P. Relativo was one of the merchants in Angeles; he said they had received an emergency call at midnight that they need to rescue someone. As a marine merchant, he said they were prepared to deal with these kinds of situations, and the rescue didn’t turn to be that difficult.
Relativo offered his lucky shirt to Bee and captured a photo with him after the rescue. He said the first thing Bee asked him was, “What day it is today?” When he told him that it is Sunday, November 29, he got tears in his eyes.
He also said that he could read and feel the tale of persistent struggle in Bee’s eyes as he must have gone through the most stringent degree of distress. A slight movement could drift the balance of the vessel, and it would sink.
It needs determination and guts to hang onto the boat’s keel for two long days. We are glad that a fellow member of the human race avoided death.