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JOHN PASSMORE, the Daily Telegraph columnist attempting to circumnavigate the British Isles, was rescued from the upturned hull of his 27ft catamaran yesterday two hours after capsizing off Shetland. Rescue helicopters found him clinging by his fingertips to the wreckage of the Lottie Warren, pounded by 25ft waves, with winds gusting to 75 knots, in icy seas 80 miles north-east of the islands. He was winched to safety and taken to a nearby oil rig for emergency medical treatment for hypothermia and was being transferred to hospital in Lerwick last night.
Mr Passmore said from the Murchison oil rig that he feared his distress signal might not have been picked up. He said he managed to clamber on top of his upturned hull. "I stood there and I looked at the sky, and I thought, 'all I've got to do is hold on'.
"At this point I began to think of my family, very hard indeed and I said, 'I am coming home. I am going to hold and I am coming home'. And I had to hold on for a long time. I think I was in the water for between two and three hours. I was absolutely soaked, and there was a 45-knot wind blowing and gigantic waves breaking over me. And I held on to the keel and shouted at the sky . . ." he said, his voice trembling with emotion.
"And I shouted, 'I'm not going to die. I am not going to die' . . ." His voice trailed off as he fought to suppress tears. "Sorry, I am having a bit of a reaction. So I just kept shouting it and shouting it. I was getting colder and colder and shaking convulsively but I was still shouting, because I believed it. I had to believe it.
"Then suddenly I heard this noise behind me. And there was a helicopter in the sky. The helicopter took forever to come down. The waves were so high. But they were terrific. Those guys were just fabulous. They winched me up and put me in the helicopter and I just started shaking and shaking.
"I am very sorry not to have got round for the record. But that does not really matter. I am sorry I lost the boat. But none of it really matters, does it?"
A spokesman for the Coastguards said: "He was very, very lucky to be found in that weather. And he is very lucky to be alive. The weather conditions were terrible, 25ft seas, winds between Force 8 and Force 9 , that is gale to severe gale, and winds of 50 knots. When they found him he was conscious, but very, very cold".
Mr Passmore, 55, married with two sons aged four and two, was attempting to become the first person to circumnavigate Britain and Ireland single-handed and non-stop. He was writing a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph about the voyage, which he began on June 3.
The alarm was raised at 3.44pm yesterday when Coastguards received a signal from his EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) which activates when it is immersed in water. The Coastguard said: "Without that he may never have been found.
"You can imagine, in that weather he would just have been a speck. It is credit to the skill of the helicopter pilot and
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