Stephen Collett, a recently retired farmer, and Chris, his wife of 30 years, were in bed just before 7am on a Friday in October 2009 when the phone rang. It was his youngest sister, Sarah. ‘I knew it was something important,’ he recalls, ‘because she hardly ever rings us.’Sarah was calling because the emergency beacon on the ocean-going yacht belonging to their sister Rachel and her husband Paul Chandler had been activated. She had been up all night trying to get hold of them, without success.The Chandlers, then aged 58 and 55, had taken early retirement and were sailing around the world. They were due to be somewhere near the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, 800 miles off the coast of Africa. They had told Stephen about having the alarm on board just a few weeks ago, when they were back in the UK temporarily for a family wedding. ‘We actually discussed the risks, and they said there were very little,’ Stephen tells me. ‘They laughed it off. Their biggest concern was being run down in the night by a supertanker on autopilot.’
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