Rare visitors to the island of Tobago, nestled between Central America and the Caribbean, are usually intrigued when they arrive in the small fishing community of Lambeau to find a large sailboat visibly abandoned in the sand on the beach.
But the condition of the boat is pathetic.
The hull of the once beautiful boat, once immaculately white, is now rough, dirty and gray, the glass in all the windows is broken, the grass on the shore now envelops it, and in its cabin no longer just a piece of furniture remains.
The ship’s mast is still there, but it lacks the keel, as fundamental a part of a sailboat as the sails which are also gone.
On the front, however, the name of the boat is still clearly legible: Vagant. And at the rear of the origin: Gdansky, a port city in Poland, as shown in a video posted on the Internet last week by the news portal Trinidad Express.
If new, this boat would be worth about a million dollars. But even in this sad state, it’s still worth some money.
But for the past five years, in this forgotten fishing village, this large sailboat, almost 15 meters long, has been lying rotting on the beach and its owner has done nothing to save it.
Image: Google Earth
There?
The answer lies in a tragic fact that happened on this boat exactly five years ago.
dream of your life
In November 2017, retired Pole Stanislaw Dabrowny, then 74 years old, finally began to realize his lifelong dream after a life of work and family: sailing around the world.
Image: Playback/Facebook
With only his wife Elizabeth, a quiet 67yearold housewife, he left the Canary Islands for the Caribbean, aboard the sailboat he bought and christened with a humorous name, like himself: Vagant “Vagabundo” in English .
It would be the first voyage on this great voyage: crossing the Atlantic.
The sail got tangled and…
Image: Personal archive
The voyage went smoothly and seamlessly until 19 days after departure, in the early hours of November 21, 2017 (five years old last week), when the couple sailed some 800 kilometers from the island of Barbados, Stanislaw Dabrowny had to unravel one of the Sails of the sailboat tangled in the mast.
Then he went to the bow of the boat and tried to loosen the sail under the watchful eye of his wife, who knew nothing about boats. But one end fell into the sea, got soaked and became too heavy for the seventyyearold.
But he did not give up and, despite his wife’s fears, tried to pull the sail back into the boat.
“There was no time to say”
“I just thought why didn’t he drop that candle in the water and that was it. But there wasn’t time to say it,” Elizabeth recalls today, half a decade after the tragedy that would forever shape her life.
With the exertion a little too much for his advanced age Elizabeth’s husband lost his balance, spun on the deck and fell into the sea.
It was night, the sea was pitch black and Stanislaw Dabrowny wasn’t even wearing a life jacket.
It was the end.
Disappeared in the dark sea
Despite the accident, the boat continued to move forward, propelled by the remaining sails and by the autopilot, equipment that autonomously propels boats that Elizabeth was unable to turn off.
Frightened, she found herself alone aboard a boat that was still sailing, not knowing how to handle it or turn around to help her husband at sea.
All Elizabeth managed to throw into the water was a float and sail folded on the boat deck in the hope that her husband would grab the items and stay afloat while she tried to stop the boat both to no avail.
Soon Stanislav was left behind until he vanished completely and forever from Elizabeth’s sight in the darkness of the sea.
Stanislaw Dabrowny was never seen again, nor was his body ever found.
“I didn’t want him to go alone”
It was only long after her husband went overboard that Elizabeth was able to turn off the autopilot and stop the boat’s travel only to later find that she didn’t know how to make it back to the crash site.
She was then left adrift in the sea alone, helpless and desperate.
“I should have learned the basics of navigation before I went on this trip,” Elizabeth later admitted.
I left because I didn’t want him to go alone. But I couldn’t help at all.
I didn’t know how to use the phone
Alone on the sailboat, Elizabeth also soon discovered that she did not know how to use the satellite phone that the boat had, which she used to communicate with her children during the crossing.
That said, she had no way of calling for help either and the boat was too far from islands for the VHF radio to work, although she didn’t know how to use it either.
Just two days later, when even the boat’s power had already gone out, Elizabeth had to spend the nights in the dark (because from time to time it was necessary to start the engine to recharge the batteries, but I know she did that too Not).
And he called his daughter Agnieszka in Poland.
something was wrong
The call was brilliant, it only lasted a few seconds and was then cut short because without a power source to charge the boat batteries, the charge on the mobile phone was also exhausted.
But the daughter was sure something had happened because it was always the father, not the mother, who called.
And she just screamed desperately into the phone.
Five days at sea
Despite knowing what could have happened, the daughter called the Polish Maritime Authority, who, after tracing the origin of the call, contacted the sea rescue base on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, which in turn dispatched a reconnaissance plane to the area.
Soon the sailboat was sighted and nearby ships were called to perform the rescue.
Five days after the tragedy, a large Liberianflagged oil tanker bound for Brazil from the United States pulled up alongside the Vagant and rescued Elizabeth, who was already in near shock.
It was only now that the world and Stanislav’s children learned of the tragic fate of the Pole, who wanted to fulfill his lifelong dream but failed to make the first crossing.
Brought to Brazil
Aboard the ship that rescued her, Elizabeth was taken to the port of Santos on the Brazilian coast, where she disembarked a few days later.
But not the Dabrowny’s sailing boat.
According to international rules for sea rescue, only the boat occupant was saved not the sailboat, which was left at sea to be sunk by nature over time.
But that didn’t happen.
Found by fishermen
Days later, as they went out to fetch their nets from the sea, the Tobago fishermen from Lambeau saw a beautiful boat stranded unmanned on the coral reefs off the beach: it was the Vagant, the Polish captain’s sailboat, that carried away by the sea. .
Unaware of the story behind the mystery, the fishermen towed the sailboat, already damaged by losing its keel when it hit the coral reef, warned authorities and abandoned it on the beach where it lies today, five years later.
Another abandoned boat on the beach
But the Dabrowny’s sailboat isn’t the only boat with a sad history lying abandoned on a local beach.
Image: Playback/nationalgallery.org.ky
Also nearby, to the amazement of tourists from the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean, lie the remains of the trimaran boat Teignmouth Electron, which became world famous in the 1960s for being used by the English navigator Donald Crowhurst to perform the greatest vertigo in the history of sailing competitions by simulating a trip around the world that never took place.
When it is discovered that the sailor abandoned the boat at sea and committed suicide, click here to find out more about this story, which was even made into a film four years ago, starring English star Colin Firth.
In the case of the Dabrowny family sailboat, the future could be the same.
“The boat counts least”
“We don’t know yet what to do with the boat,” says daughter Agnieszka, who since losing her father in the sea has only devoted herself to caring for her now 72yearold mother.
“I’ve been there, I’ve seen the boat, but we haven’t decided what to do with it because that’s the least important thing,” Agnieszka adds with surprising indifference to something that’s still worth good money but , on the other hand, brings back bad memories.
‘Go back!’, ‘Go back!’
The mother, Elizabeth, an eyewitness to the tragedy, is still suffering from what happened that night five years ago and because she did nothing to prevent her husband’s death.
“I should have learned to use the boat, the telephone and everything to do with safety at sea,” the captain’s widow regrets having taken the sea away from her.
Image: photo 5 reproduction Facebook
“To this day I hear him screaming in my nightmares: Go back! Go back! And I didn’t know how to bring the boat back.”
A grain of sand in the desert
Although it may seem trivial, falling into the water is the worst thing that can happen to anyone sailing the high seas.
In the vastness of the ocean, a person with just their head above water is as hard to imagine as a needle in a haystack almost a grain of sand in the desert.
Even worse when you are alone on the boat because you have no one trying to rescue you.
In such a situation, an involuntary fall into the sea is almost a death sentence when the boat is in motion, it is practically impossible to reach it.
Fortunately, however, there are exceptions to this macabre rule.
A rare case that worked
Two years after Stanislaw Dabrowny’s disappearance, another sailor, even older and sailing alone on the boat experienced the same misfortune of falling into the sea but survived to tell the horror he had endured.
Image: Personal archive
Australian Bill Hatfield was 80 when he decided to sail solo around the world, much to his family’s fear.
What he didn’t expect is that midway through the voyage, a banal change of sails would trip over the cables and fall into the sea.
Bill Hatfield survived only by clinging to the same sail that had thrown him into the water and slowly climbing the hull in a desperate lifeanddeath maneuver.
If his fingers could not bear the exertion or weight of his own body, he would be irrevocably doomed to death.
The suffering lasted several minutes, until the Australian’s fingers managed to feel a small rope, which, being pulled vigorously, lowered a ladder onto the fuselage.
Only then did he manage to get back on board and escape the terror of certain death, as you can see in this impressive story by clicking here.