Excerpt from Latitude 38 article posted today:
"Captain Marc Winn and his crew, Kathy Nurkowski and Todd Holt, were sailing south from Washington to California aboard the
51-ft sailboat Rogue's Scholarship when a powerful storm clobbered them Monday, leaving the big
sloop with tattered
sails, a broken boom, a fouled prop and no steerage.
For three days they drifted under cloudy skies, with
batteries too diminished to broadcast a call for help. After skies cleared on the third day, the boat's
solar panel finally generated enough juice for the weary yet uninjured crew to reach Coast Guard watchstanders via their DSC-enabled
VHF.
The response was impressive: Two MH-65 Dolphin helicopters were dispatched from different
Oregon bases, at least one of which put a
rescue swimmer in the
water to assess the situation and give the sailors a fresh VHF; a C-27J surveillance aircraft out of Air Station Sacramento was sent out to
monitor the situation; and the 110-ft
cutter Cuttyhunk was sent out from Port Angeles, WA. She towed Rogue's Scholarship toward Reedsport, OR, eventually handing off the tow to a 47-ft
motor life boat from Station Umpqua River. "