abandoned by crew off the coast of Georgia and Sank 11.14.22. Reported took on water for hours.

SAVANNAH, Ga. — It took a pair of US Coast Guard helicopters and a Navy littoral combat ship, but three mariners in a sinking sailboat are alive today.

They’re just short a $1.125 million yacht.

It was approaching 4 a.m. Monday, Nov. 14, when a mariner on board the Chimera, a 1997 Hinckley 60-foot sailboat, activated the vessel’s emergency position-indicating radio beacon. It warned Coast Guard District 7 watchstanders that the mariners were in trouble.

A pilot of one of the two helicopters that took turns in the rescue, Lt. j.g. Thomas Breard from Coast Guard Air Station Savannah, told Coffee or Die Magazine that aviators “didn’t have to search for them at all,” thanks to the yacht’s beacon pinging out the coordinates.

Chimera’s crew consisted of three men between the ages of 60 and 70. After purchasing the vessel in Stuart, Florida, they were sailing north when it began to take on water, roughly 75 nautical miles east of the Georgia shore.

Luckily, they were within sight of the Navy’s Freedom-class littoral combat ship Little Rock.

Chimera’s crew tried to remove the salt water with their onboard pump, but their gadget failed. They borrowed a pump from Little Rock, but it also didn’t seem to work with their system.

Breard was piloting the second helicopter that arrived. The Chimera crew had asked the pilots of the first Coast Guard chopper on the scene for a third pump, but they didn’t have one on board the aircraft.

So they flew back to retrieve one. When they returned, the aircrew lowered their elite rescue swimmer, Aviation Survival Technician Mark Hansen, to the deck of the yacht to help out.

But then they started running out of fuel. They left Hansen behind while they returned to shore.