The Spanish trawler Monte Galineiro was burning and slipped below the frigid Atlantic Ocean Sunday morning 400 kilometres off St. John’s, but the 22 crew members aboard were rescued safely. It is said that the crew would have known they could be only minutes away from hypothermia and death.
It is their god luck that a Canadian Coast Guard ship was just a few kilometres away and had responded immediately. Jeri Grychowski, a spokeswoman for the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre, said shortly after the men were rescued that a Coast Guard vessel, the Leonard J. Cowley, was about 10 minutes away when the distress call came. So they were on the scene fairly quickly.
According to her a military Hercules aircraft and a Cormorant helicopter based out of Gander, as well as a provincial airline flight, also assisted in rescuing the men from waters Environment Canada said were registering a numbing zero degrees C. Meteorologist Tracey Talbot told that the ice pack is right down pretty much to the northern tip of the Avalon Peninsula. So around St. John’s, water temperatures are right around zero.
Grychowski opined that some of the survivors “were in life rafts, some were in immersion suits and some were in the water. But because the Cowley was so close, they were able to get them out pretty fast, she said. Another crew member suffered smoke inhalation and was being flown to the Health Science Centre in St. John’s. The rest of the crew were reported to be in good condition.
