Capt. Kelly Gordon of M/Y Freddy is a well-known name on our site. (If you haven’t seen her “Ask Captain Kelly” column, make sure you check it out.) But this time, she’s making waves for a different reason: coming to the rescue when another vessel’s guest experienced a medical emergency.
Capt. Gordon was moored at Obrien’s Cay in The Bahamas on August 1 when her first officer, Shawn Riera, heard the call over the radio. “I tried to communicate with the vessel, but they were just out of range. I could hear them, but they couldn't hear me,” Gordon says.
According to Max White, the nephew of the injured man, a slip and fall on their catamaran resulted in serious injuries — as White detailed later in a letter, his uncle, Chris, slipped and landed face first on the swim deck, breaking his jaw, both arms, ribs, and losing 10 teeth. He was unconscious after the fall and ended up in the water.
His family jumped in to rescue him but were struggling to get him back on the boat. “We radioed over the VHF to see if anyone could help,” White says. “We had no idea what to do, everyone on the boat was shook. We were about [a] 15-hour sail to a hospital — we were absolutely screwed, or so we thought.”