Lost In Storm, Sailor, 74, Found

Knocked Off Course By Nor'Easter; Was Swept Overboard At One Point

(CBS)  Fifty years of experience as a sailor wasn't much help to Vic Gillings during a trip from Canada to Massachusetts earlier this week.

Gillings realized on Monday that he was in deep trouble on his 33-foot sailboat, the Sara Gamp. The wind was so fierce, he was blown overboard.

"I did have a safety harness on," he told (video) TJ Winick of CBS station WBZ-TV in Boston, "but it knocked me completely over the rails, and I found myself hugging something tight."

Armed with his hand-held GPS device, the 74-year-old Englishman had set sail from Liverpool, Nova Scotia, on Friday, expecting a three day trip to Gloucester, Mass, near Boston. But when the winds became overpowering, Gillings found himself smack in the middle of this week's nor'easter, and its 20-foot waves.

"The barometer was dropping slowly and steadily," he says.

A Coast Guard search that started Monday morning ended Wednesday morning, 22 miles off Cape Cod's Provincetown, Mass.

"I looked up," Gillings recalls, "and it was the Coast Guard (helicopter). And he hovered over me. And I thought, 'Oh my word, it would be nice to climb aboard him all right!' "

The Coast Guard's Kelly Newlin says, "We weren't actually able to get communications with the vessel, so what we did was, we flew a helicopter and dropped a rescue swimmer."

Despite his foul-weather gear, Gillings was suffering from hypothermia, Winick reports.

"He (the swimmer) took one look at me and said, 'You're going off this boat. You can't last much longer.' And I suppose I couldn't.

"It was the most fantastic feeling to be shooting up in the air and, at the same time, looking at the boat wondering, 'Am I going to see you again' "

The Coast Guard started the search after a phone call from Gillings' worried girlfriend. The search covered 230 miles before Gillings' boat was found.

Why was he out there in the first place? He claims he got a bad weather forecast last week in Nova Scotia.