‘A difficult day in the office!’
Barrister Richard Hendron had to be rescued by helicopter after his sailing boat capsized off the Spanish coast.
In a Facebook post on Sunday, the lawyer-cum-sailing enthusiast provides a detailed blow-by-blow account of his brush with death which eventually resulted in him being airlifted to safety by the coastguard.
Richard, 38, was sailing along the Spanish coast in the Bay of Biscay with the intention of making an Atlantic crossing. “The conditions were reasonable with a steady sea state,” he writes. “Nothing that would raise an eyebrow.”
But the sea conditions soon changed. “Suddenly I was surrounded by breaking waves, and they were big,” Richard explains. “Two minutes later, I looked right and see a wave as big as a football stadium about to come crashing down on my boat, don’t know where it came from but I braced for impact.” The resulting impact left the barrister’s modest vessel with ripped sails, torn solar panels and severely flooded.
Now without power or steering and drifting perilously close to rocks, Richard is forced to press the emergency button on his radio. “[I] get nothing back,” he says. “I have no idea if [the] emergency signal went through.”
Still unsure if help was on the way, Richard — twin brother of barrister Henry Hendron — eventually bailed out of the badly damaged boat and into a life raft.
Fortunately, help was on its way. Dramatic footage posted by Richard (embedded above) shows the moment he was winched to safety by helicopter. Describing it as a “difficult day in the office”, Richard has since launched a crowdfunding page to enable him to continue his voyage.
The dramatic rescue comes just weeks after Richard was sanctioned by a bar disciplinary tribunal for not attending a hearing in which he was due to represent a client.
