BAD NEWS:Ghost ship a woman and a child die in…….

July 11, 2024 Admin Sailboats 0

 

A “ghost ship” that recently washed up on a Florida Panhandle beach was traced to a Texas man who’ll likely lose much of his life savings after purchasing the vessel he had hoped to sail around the world.

Francine Farrar couldn’t believe her eyes early on the evening of June 18 when a 45-foot sailboat with no one aboard eerily floated toward her family’s beach rental in Pensacola.

“I saw this tattered sailboat, it looked ghostly, just kind of coming in,” Farrar, a 46-year-old Meridian, Mississippi, homemaker, told NBC News last week.

The craft washed ashore and the strange sight of a sailboat on the sand quickly became a source of neighborhood fascination, said 35-year-old Pensacola resident Allie Garrett.

“We called it the ‘ghost ship.’ It quickly became known as the ‘ghost ship’ across Pensacola beach,” said Garrett, a meteorologist and storm chaser who took multiple photos and drone footage of the prone vessel.

Wayward boats are common during the Florida hurricane season as vessels succumb to high winds and get taken off their moorings.

“We just thought this sailboat broke loose from the marina, that someone didn’t tie it down well enough,” Farrar said.

But this beached ship turned out to have a far more complicated journey to where it now sits in Pensacola.

Shortly after locals posted images of the craft on social media, those pictures gained the attention of 39-year-old Michael Barlow, whose life was saved weeks earlier during a harrowing Coast Guard rescue in the Gulf of Mexico.

Barlow immediately recognized the images and video to be The Lady Catherine III, which he purchased in Fort Pierce, Florida, in May.

Catherine pushed off from Fort Pierce on May 21, Barlow said, with plans to dock in Rockport, Texas, where he was closing down an excavation business and selling off belongings to start a new wandering life.

“We were just going to explore the world,” Barlow said of his wife and 9-year-old son. “We’re normal people. We have normal finances, which are very, very basic. And this is the only way I could take my son and show him there’s a whole world out there, beyond what’s in America. It’s the only way to do this realistically until this happened.”

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