Sailing Vessel Found Floating in Mid-Atlantic

There was just a light breeze by the time the Belgian yacht Genesis spotted the white-hulled sailboat adrift in the middle of the Atlantic.

The drifting boat, a French vessel named L'Actuel, was upright, the mainsail still on the mast. The headsail was torn and partly furled. Lines trailed in the water.

There was no one aboard, and the satellite phone and survival gear had been left behind.

The discovery of the empty yacht on Sunday, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest landfall, leaves a mystery about the fate of its crew, two French sailing enthusiasts, who had left Newfoundland on May 24.

'There was no signs of anybody on board. ... Anything could have happened,' said Jeri Grychowski, a spokeswoman for the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax.

Search operations will continue, said a duty officer at the Gris-Nez Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre in France.

The skipper, a veteran regatta racer named Gaétan de la Goublaye, 62, had set off from the French Caribbean island of Martinique with a friend, Denis Guilmin, 47. The two were on their way to Le Havre in Normandy.

'He's not a novice. He's very competent, very cautious. That's why I have trouble grasping what could have happened,' said a friend, Gilles Jolly, who lives next door to Mr. de la Goublaye's villa in Martinique.

Mr. Jolly noted that L'Actuel's sails were reefed, meaning that the two sailors had reduced the amount of sail exposed to the wind. The reefing, Mr. Jolly said, suggested that the two men may have been trying to keep the yacht from capsizing during a storm. Inside the boat, loose items had fallen to one side, suggesting that the 10-metre Jeanneau Sun Rise 35 had rolled.

'Was there a big wind gust? Did the boat capsize? Did he grab a buoy to go find his crewmate who had fallen in the water? We don't know,' Mr. Jolly said.

The search began when Mr. de la Goublaye's daughter, Marie, reported him missing last Thursday.

Canadian, British and French search planes scoured thousands of square kilometres of the Atlantic. On Saturday, a long-range Lockheed CP-140 Aurora from CFB Greenwood in Nova Scotia spent hours looking for the French boat.

The Belgian yacht found L'Actuel about 500 kilometres west of the Azores, 1,150 kilometres southeast of the spot where Mr. de la Goublaye made his last communication.

Complicating the search was the fact that L'Actuel did not carry a satellite rescue beacon as required by law, according to a duty officer at the Delgada Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre in the Azores.

Mr. Jolly said Mr. de la Goublaye's wife, Sylviane, had been in hospital with an unrelated illness and is too sedated to react. 'It'll be harder when she'll come home,' he said. 'This is a great tragedy,' Mr. Jolly said. 'It's very hard on us'

The last contact with the boat was on May 24, when Mr. de la Goublaye phoned Marie in France. He had left Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, off the south coast of Newfoundland. He said he wanted to stop either in Ireland or Scotland, depending on the weather.

The French Coastguard at Griz Nez received the first call reporting that the vessel was overdue and passed the information to a Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, Canada, from where the response to the incident is being coordinated. Numerous attempts to contact the missing yacht have been made, but without success.

The search effort includes a Hercules aircraft out of Greenwood, N.S., a Nimrod out of Falmouth, England, and a plane from France. Broadcasts were made to cover mid Atlantic as well as coastal broadcasts by Clyde, Stornoway and Falmouth Coastguard and the Irish and French Coastguard.

A retired entrepreneur who ran a packing and export business in Le Havre, Mr. de la Goublaye and his wife moved to Martinique six years ago.

Mr. Guilmin and Mr. de la Goublaye had sailed together when Mr. de la Goublaye brought L'Actuel to Martinique. They had agreed to reunite should Mr. de la Goublaye want to cross the Atlantic again.

They were returning home after sailing down to the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.

The skipper told family members that he might make a stop in Scotland or Ireland on the way home but there's nothing to indicate he did.