Here the sailing boat leaves the fish pen

On Thursday, Kyst.no wrote that a 30-metre-long sailing boat ended up at a Mowi facility in Ireland.

According to the newspaper Mayo News in Ireland, two children were reportedly among the 25 people on board the French sailing boat that crashed into Mowi’s fish farming facility off Clare Island. The rescue operation is said to have lasted around 16 hours.

The incident occurred, according to the newspaper, at around 04.30 on Wednesday morning, and several of the passengers may have been asleep when the vessel struck the facility.

After the collision, «Rara Avis» began taking on water. Rescue crews from Achill Island RNLI were dispatched, while a rescue helicopter from the Irish Coast Guard was also deployed.

16 people evacuated

Crashed yacht towed free from Mowi Ireland salmon pen

When the rescue crews arrived, it was decided to evacuate 16 people who were not needed on board. According to the newspaper, they were taken to Clare Island.

The lifeboat then returned to the vessel and monitored the situation while personnel at the fish farming facility worked to bring it under control.

Once the situation had been stabilised, the 16 evacuees were collected from Clare Island and transported onwards to Achill Island.

The rescue crews later returned to the facility and remained there until “Rara Avis” had been freed from the pens. The sailing boat was then escorted back to Achill, where it arrived at around 20:00.

The operation therefore lasted for around 16 hours.

The pens contained 100,000 post-smolts with an average weight of 500 grams. The fish were transferred to the wellboat “Inter Atlantic”, which has a capacity of 2,200 cubic metres, while work to tow the sailing boat back over the floating collar was under way.