ABANDONED

The crew, relative strangers to each other, set out from New Zealand bound for Tonga on the trimaran, ‘Rose-Noelle’. Its captain, a shrewd old salt, doesn’t let on that a storm is coming. He intends to use it to rack up the miles. But the weather becomes much worse than expected and in the middle of the night, after hours of terror, Rose-Noelle is flipped upside down by a giant wave. Four men face almost certain death trapped in a small space within one of the hulls for 119 days. Finally the yacht and her hapless crew are smashed against the rocky shoreline of New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island. But their miraculous survival is only the beginning of a new nightmare. A media frenzy develops as doubts grow around the veracity of their story. Only after a lengthy enquiry is their story confirmed and the men allowed to continue with their lives.