An Irish skipper had what he called a “Marie Celeste moment” when he came across an unmanned yacht drifting in the Atlantic, hundreds of miles from home.
Michael McVeigh, a charterboat captain, spotted the vessel floating out of thick fog near Downings harbor in County Donegal in late July. When he sent two divers on board, they found rotting vegetables and the email address of its owner on a table.
The yacht was found to be from the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic.
“If you find a boat floating at sea, you always think the worst,” he told BBC News. “You always think there is going to be a dead body on board, someone has fallen off and they have died, some poor person is going to be told a loved one is dead. It is never good to find a boat floating unmanned at sea.”
The Marie Céleste is the name of a ship in a fictional story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based on the real-life Mary Céleste, a British-American merchant brigantine famous for having been discovered in 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean, unmanned and apparently abandoned in fine weather.
Click here for the full BBC report that details the story behind the ghost vessel.
