Yves Le Cornec was ready to die.
Facing his third night drifting amid massive swells in a tiny rubber raft in the middle of the Atlantic, the young French sailor who had his solo crossing cut short by a capsizing wave was trying to come to terms that this would be his last.
He was shivering in the cold and his small distress beacon was nearly out of battery.
As dusk descended on May 9, 1980, Le Cornec was 21 years old, and he was filled with a deep sense of sadness, thinking about how his friends and family would react to his death.
And then, the faint sound of a plane.
On board the Canadian Air Force Argus about 5,000 feet above was navigator Steve Nichol of Victoria, then 23 and a recent grad from Royal Roads Military College. He was with a crew coming back to their base at Summerside, Prince Edward Island from the Azores and finishing a covert operation tracking Soviet submarines.
“He was outside of shipping lanes and regular flight paths, so it was an absolute miracle we were there and actually heard the very faint chirp from his beacon,” recalls Nichol.
Nichol said flight engineer Bill Getson — “the oldest and most deaf of the entire crew” — asked on the intercom if anyone had heard an emergency locator beacon.
No one did, but Nichol working the navigator’s station aft of the cockpit marked the position, and the plane’s captain, Maj. Jean Lefebvre, called the crew to action and the plane flew a corrected reverse course at a lower altitude. It wasn’t long before the whole crew could hear a faint signal.
Then a flare went up from the water.
“By now we were already down to 300 feet and we passed just to the right of an orange single-man life raft,” said Nichol as he strained to see out a window in the Argus.
“It looked like an orange grain of sand. I couldn’t believe it. And there was a survivor.”
Nichol and Le Cornec met each other for the first time this month in France — 43 years after that harrowing evening in the mid-Atlantic.
They shared their stories of euphoric relief, sense of duty and mutual gratitude of how their paths inexplicably crossed on a desolate part of the Atlantic Ocean.
“When the third night was about to come at dusk, I thought I would not see the following morning,” Le Cornec, now 64, said via email. “And then I heard the noise of a plane flying over my raft … I jumped and saw a plane, but wasn’t quite sure if they had seen me or not until I saw it take a bend and come back.
“I believe it was the greatest joy I ever experienced in my life and probably still is,’ said Le Cornec.
After locating him, the Canadian crew circled the tiny raft with dropped flare buoys, and couldn’t believe their luck when they picked up a Spanish freighter on radar about 20 nautical miles away. The aircraft didn’t have marine channels, so it flew across the bow and “waggled its wings” to get the ship’s attention. They did manage to reach the ship by radio via a high-frequency channel and informed the freighter of a raft and survivor in the water. The Argus crew then dropped a trail of flares for the ship to follow.
“We put another tight circle of flares around the survivor and watched,” said Nichol.
With impressive seamanship, the freighter’s captain, manoeuvred to have the life raft drift down to its port side. A scramble net was thrown over the side along with two life lines, which they used to haul Le Cornec off his raft.
The last Nichol heard, Le Cornec was safely on board, severely hypothermic, but alive.
Low on fuel, the Argus crew was diverted to St. John’s, Newfoundland and celebrated in a pub.
Six months later, Nichol said a package was delivered to their crew room in Summerside. It had come from the Department of External Affairs and contained six photocopied sheets of a letter from the survivor, which filled in gaps about the rescue.
The survivor was Le Cornec, who did solo around-the-world and cross-Atlantic voyages. He had left Boston en route home to France when, mid-Atlantic, a massive wave flipped his sailing craft over in stormy seas.
Le Cornec said he had had just enough time to grab his life raft, a bottle of water and his ELT before the sailboat sank (it washed up in the Orkney Islands a year later).
Le Cornec said he tried to get in touch with the Canadian rescue authorities some time after “to find out who the people who saved my life were, but did not get any success.”
Nichol was also trying. Earlier this year, he took a chance and sent the survivor an email using Le Cornec’s name.
It worked and the pair immediately made plans to meet for the first time as Nichol, a rugby fan, and his wife planned to travel to France to watch a World Cup rugby game.
“My eyes lit up like a child,” Le Cornec said in an interview with Ouest France, a French newspaper. “I was going to meet the man who more than 40 years ago saved my life.”
Nichol, now 66, and Le Cornec, 64, spent two days together talking about the rescue and their lives.
Both raised two children and both continued to do what they loved — sailing and boating for Le Cornec and flying for Nichol.
Nichol is the second of four sons of Sabre/Starfighter pilot Jack Nichol and the only one to follow his father’s footsteps into the Canadian air force.
He entered Royal Roads Military College in 1974, graduating in 1978 with a bachelor of science in physics and physical oceanography. He received his wings in 1979 and was posted to 415 squadron at CFB Summerside on the CP-107 Argus. He converted to the CP-140 Aurora at CFB Greenwood in 1981 and two years later got his second set of wings. He did a three-year tour with 407 Squadron at CFB Comox.
In 1991 he was hired by Cathay Pacific Airways in Hong Kong where he flew the next 17 years. Nichol is currently president of the British Columbia Aviation Museum, a member of the Vancouver Island Ex-Cadet Club and continues to fly recreationally out of Victoria.
“This was the most satisfying of any of the flights I’ve had because we ended up saving a person’s life,” said Nichol. “It was very rewarding. We wanted to talk to him, but at the time he was too cold to even speak. They put him in a hot shower for a long time, and we couldn’t hang around because of fuel.”
Le Cornec now lives in La Trinite-sur Mer in Brittany, where he manages the Nautor Villefranche Service Yard, selling boats and expensive yachts to wealthy patrons.
He is well known in competitive world sailing circles, becoming the youngest sailor to ever do a solo Atlantic crossing at age 19. He’s won the prestigious Whitbread Round the World Race and has crossed the Atlantic 29 times over his lifetime, including six times on trimaran vessels.
“Over 40 years after this happened to me, I can still remember every moment of that rescue as if it happened yesterday … it brings me tears,” said Le Cornec.
“What luck it has been,” he said. “Destiny had probably decided my time had not come yet. This experience probably changed my life forever.
“The truth is that you and the rest of the plane crew saved my life. And thanks to the ‘deaf’ man … unbelievable. This whole story is unbelievable.”
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