TRAPPED ON SHOAL

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 10 January 1931, Page 2

TRAPPED ON SHOAL

YACHT’S DESPERATE PLIGHT

SIX HOURS AT THE PUMPS REDUCED TO THE LAST FLARE Seven men and two women were rescued from the motor yacht Auriga after a six hours’ fight with raging seas which drove the yacht fast into the treacherous Ship Wash shoal, seven miles off the coast from Walton-on-the Naze. The yacht was rapidly sinking while its occupants strove desperately at the Eumps, and the last sheet was being urned as a flare when the Walton-on-the-Naze lifeboat arrived just in time to save the shipwrecked party. The rescued people were: Mr Guy T. Lee, the skipper, of Edith-grove, Chelsea, and Airs Lee, his wife; Mr P. I. E. Pellew and his mother, Mrs Pellew, who lives in the south of France; Mr D. Scott-Aloncrieff, the racing motorist, of Englefield Green, Surrey; Mr L. Johns, the steward, of London; Air Peter Hales, engineer, of Regent’s Park; Air G. Shepherd, engineer, of Lowestoft; and Mr J. C. Pigou, the mate, of Burnham-on-Crouch. AT THE PUAIPS

The Auriga, a 100-ton vessel, left Burnham-on-Crouch for Heybridge, where it was to be refitted preparatory to a world cruise, including visits to the South Sea Islands and Hollywood. Mrs Pellew had come specially from France to make a trial trip on the yacht before purchasing it for her son. “We worked frantically to draw attention to our plight,’’ she said to an interviewer. “Some of the party were seasick below, but the rest of us worked on the pumps or lit flares, which we made by soaking sheets, and when they were all destroyed, our personal clothing, in paraffin and lighting them. _ “These signals, I learn, were noticed by the Sunk Lightship, which sent up a rocket and wirelessed to the shore. ON THEIR “LAST LEGS” “At length we saw the lifeboat fighting its way toward us. We were then on our ‘last legs.’ Aly son had been injured when the boom crashed, and our little dog mascot Bingo had been washed overboard and lost. “A ten-gallon drum of petrol had caught fire while we were lighting flares, and for a time the yacht was in peril of being burned, but the skipper, disregarding his personal safety, seized the can and flung it into the sea. He was badly burned.” Mr Lee, the skipper, was the last to leave the yacht. He was anxious to remain on board in the hope that he could steer the ship to port when the storm abated. He paid tribute to the fortitude of his companions during the ordeal when he came ashore from the lifeboat.