Dutch Fishing Vessel Rescues British Kayaker Clinging to Buoy in Dover Strait

Posted on by October 28, 2022

The BBC reports that a Dutch fishing vessel has rescued a British kayaker found clinging to a buoy in the Channel after his kayak capsized. He is reported to have been holding onto the buoy for several days.

The captain, Teunis de Boer, said he had by chance seen the kayaker waving frantically as his boat Madeleine sailed past.

“He was clearly in distress,” the captain told Dutch media.

After the man was given water and a chocolate bar, he was airlifted to a hospital in nearby Boulogne by French authorities.

The drama unfolded late on Thursday morning several miles west off the French coast, in a shipping lane of the Dover Strait, also known as the Pas de Calais.

The boat captain said he was checking they were not steering too close to the Colbart Nord buoy when he suddenly saw something moving around on it. “I picked up the binoculars and saw a young man just in his swimming trunks waving at us like a madman,” he told De Telegraaf website.

“He was covered in bruises and explained that he’d stayed alive by scraping mussels off the buoy and eating little crabs and seaweed,” De Boer told public broadcaster NOS. He was dehydrated and suffering from hypothermia, so the crew wrapped him in blankets.

What is less clear is how long he had survived clinging to the buoy. The fishing boat captain said the man had told them he had left Dover in his kayak on 15 October, 12 days before he was picked up.

In a statement, the French maritime prefect for the Channel and North Sea said, however, that he had left Dover around 48 hours earlier.

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.

 

Comments

Dutch Fishing Vessel Rescues British Kayaker Clinging to Buoy in Dover Strait — 2 Comments

  2. Thinking aloud through my kneejerk “gee, he should have been more careful.”

    But maybe he was perfectly scrupulous, and genuine bad luck stacked up?

    Thinking about it a littler further, where we sail I’d guess about 50% of VHF calls from CG asking for assistance from the general boating public are to do with kayakers. On any average day in summer, 2-3? 1-2, maybe. Something like that.

    Getting through my next kneejerk: so many calls sounds terrible, but after all that’s action covering the whole expanse between lower Puget Sound and Gulf Islands. Thousands of square miles, a lot of kayakers out and about on any given day.

    Most kayakers are having an unalloyed good time. To the extent nobody is seriously hurt among the small fraction of kayakers who end up needing help, “the system works.”

    To my mind we should think of helping other boaters as being part of normal or at least expected sailing activites, even if not a regular occurrence.

    All calm again. 🙂

    And to the present story, no matter how long the the guy clung to that buoy, it’s remarkably pleasant that his adventure ended well.