A BRITISH SAILOR has had a narrow escape after being rescued from the sea when his boat – ironically called ‘Titanic II’ – sank on its first outing.
Mark Wilkinson, from Birmingham, ran into difficulty as he tried to bring his 16-foot cabin cruiser back from its first journey at the West Bay harbour in Dorset last week.
The boat began to take on water as he returned from a fishing trip, and attempts to pump the water out of the boat were unsuccessful – resulting in Wilkinson having to abandon the boat as it sank, stern first.
The harbour master later said the £1,000 vessel had a hole in the hull about six inches square, which had been badly repaired by the previous owner who sold it to the sorry Wilkinson.
“It’s all a bit embarrassing and I got pretty fed up with people asking me if I had hit an iceberg,” Wilkinson told a local paper.
AFP quotes another onlooker as saying: “It wasn’t a very big boat – I think an ice-cube could have sunk it!”
