D.C. Captain, 74, Rescued in Atlantic After 3 Days in High Winds and Cold

During the worst of the storm, with the engine dead, one sail shredded and the 70-mph wind off the Massachusetts coast shrieking in the rigging, the 33-foot ketch Sara Gamp rolled wearily onto its side and seemed ready to succumb, the skipper said.

Visibility was about 100 yards in cold rain and mountainous seas. The slender Virginia-based vessel had been pounded for hours by the nor'easter that enveloped it this week. And its 74-year-old captain, a veteran Washington mariner who already had been swept off the deck once, was cold, bruised and hallucinating.

With the masts tipped to about 10 feet off the water, Vic Gillings tried to coax his 38-year-old boat upright. "You come on, Sara," he said. "You can handle this. Get back up. Get back up."

Gradually, it did. And Gillings, who lives on a boat at the Gangplank Marina on the Potomac River at Water Street in Southwest Washington, eventually was plucked amid heavy seas from the Sara Gamp on Wednesday by a Coast Guard helicopter. He was flown to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he was treated and released.

He had some cuts from being tossed about the cabin, had suffered hypothermia and was still a little disoriented Thursday when he recounted the story from a motel in Gloucester, Mass.

"Apart from feeling like I was being kicked all over the place, I'm all right," he said.

During his solitary three-day ordeal, Gillings said, he prayed, ate raw onions and cheese sandwiches, saw visions of friends who were not there and sang songs by the Ink Spots and Frank Sinatra.

He said he had seen similar weather only once in 45 years of sailing but, being from "the old school," had not called for help.

In the end, as he was hoisted aboard the helicopter northeast of Provincetown, he said he felt as if he had abandoned the Sara Gamp, named for a character in the Charles Dickens novel "Martin Chuzzlewit." All his gear, including his two hearing aids, was still aboard. But he realized he might not have survived had he stayed behind, so he left the vessel to drift to its fate.

Gillings, a former police officer in Britain and Korean War combat veteran, began his adventure last week when he and a friend, Marcy Logan, also of Washington, drove to Nova Scotia to retrieve the Sara Gamp, which he had put up for sale.

Gillings, who works as a bricklayer when he is not on the water, planned to sail the boat to its home port of Kinsale, on Virginia's Northern Neck, to be viewed by prospective buyers, he said. It would be a two-week trip, he said, but largely "a milk run." He left Liverpool, Nova Scotia, last Friday morning bound for Gloucester, his first stop, where Logan was to drive to meet him.

He said he knew bad weather was coming, but he'd heard it wouldn't arrive until Tuesday. He thought he could reach Gloucester by Monday, "fool that I was."