Popular BVI Charter Yacht Victoria Sinks
Editor's note: On June 2, we posted an update to this initial report with newly released information from the U.S. Coast Guard that corrects several details. The 48-foot Swan sailing yacht Victoria, a popular charter yacht in the British Virgin ...
Editor's note: On June 2, we posted an update to this initial report with newly released information from the U.S. Coast Guard that corrects several details.
The 48-foot Swan sailing yacht Victoria, a popular charter yacht in the British Virgin Islands, reportedly sank on Saturday after hitting a submerged object about 100 miles southwest of Puerto Rico.
I spoke moments ago with Dick Schoonover of management company CharterPortBVI, who says owner-operators Martha Cabada and her husband, Klaus, were en route from St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands to Panama when the collision occurred. "The boat went down in about two hours," he told me.
Sail-World is reporting that Martha and Klaus, who holds a 100-ton captain's license, were adrift in the yacht's life raft for more than 24 hours before being rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard and airlifted to Puerto Rico.
Martha and Klaus are now safely back on Tortola in the BVI, where I reached Martha via telephone this morning.
"I don't know how we are," she told me, her voice trembling. "We are trying to be all right. We are alive, and we have each other. I mostly just feel sick."
She added that they have been advised not to discuss details of the sinking with any journalists until insurance procedures are completed.
Cabada earned a whirlwind of attention for Victoria in November 2008, when she won first-prize in the Tortola charter yacht show's cooking competition while working from Victoria's 4-by-4-foot galley, one of the smallest in the local fleet.
In this exclusive interview done immediately after that win, she talked with me about how she and her husband came to own and love Victoria.
"Klaus had cruised the Caribbean from 1992 until 1994 and always wanted to go back, so we moved to Grenada," she told me in 2008. "We knew the skipper of the 48-foot Swan sailing yacht Victoria, and it turned out the family wanted to sell, so we bought the boat in 2004. We wanted to have fun and live aboard. Then in 2006, we were in St. Lucia, and we met the couple who run the 52-foot sailing yacht Silent Partner II. They told us all about charter, so we sailed to the British Virgin Islands and signed into the fleet.
"In February 2008, at the Swan Rendezvous at the Bitter End Yacht Club, we won Best Maintained Swan. That was out of all the 43-foot to 100-foot Swans, and we are a 1975 build. Klaus and I are both engineers with a quality-control background, which of course helps. If you look at all the screws onboard, they are all aligned in the same direction. Every pump, every switch, every light always works."
The couple built this website to promote Victoria for charters. The yacht was considered an excellent "honeymoon charter" option, as many of the guest testimonials make clear.
My thoughts and best wishes are with Martha and Klaus as they come to terms with the terrifying events of this past weekend.
Editor's note: On June 2, we posted an update to this initial report with newly released information from the U.S. Coast Guard that corrects several details.
