This yacht will never sail again

Tied to a coconut tree on the beach in the fishing village of Lambeau, on Tobago’s windward coast, is a million-dollar Bavarian yacht that will likely never sail again.

The boat, named the Vagant, has been there for five years, settling into the sand, lashed by the high hide, watched over by fishermen who found the vessel floundering on the reef one morning, with no one aboard.

Days later, the village would learn the fate of the people aboard—an elderly Polish couple who had set off from the Canary Islands on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean on November 2, 2017.

It was the beginning of their retirement dream to circumnavigate the globe. But the yacht never made it to its first port of call in the Caribbean. Four hundred and fifty miles east of Barba­dos, the dream of 74-­year-old Stanislaw Da­browny and his wife, Elizabeth, ended.

At her home in Gdansk, Poland, the cou­ple’s daughter, Aga Blazowska, answered a call from her mother on November 20. Elizabeth was screaming her daugh­ter’s name. Then the sa­tellite phone went dead. The couple could not be reached after that.

With the help of the yachting community, the family issued an alert to all vessels traversing the Atlantic Ocean to be on the lookout.

No one knew what happened, until six days later when the crew aboard a cargo ship chugging towards Brazil in South America spotted the lost yacht. It was a mere speck in the deep-blue sea. The cargo vessel’s cap­tain launched a rescue vessel.

There was only one person to save aboard the Vagant—Elizabeth. Her story is heart-breaking. – Full report