Men Saved After 8 Days Adrift

When their vessel began to take on water, the five sailors issued a series of distress calls, fired flares into the air and burned tires on deck to attract attention.

When nobody came, they even set fire to their craft, the 60-foot ketch Inis Mil. But still nobody came, and they were forced to take refuge in an inflatable life raft.

On Wednesday, eight days later, the life raft finally drifted into an area with cell phone reception off the southwest English coast, and the group — two Britons, an Australian, a German and a Frenchwoman — was able to call coast guards, who sent a helicopter to airlift them to a hospital.

"I thought, I've got the signal, is anyone going to pick up?" said Ian Faulkner, who made the call.

"I really was scared that they would think I was joking, so I tried not to act panicky," he said. "The rest is history."

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which joined the search for the men, said they were suffering from hypothermia "and they were very hungry, but fortunately they are not too badly off."

Looking exhausted and dressed in hospital clothing, members of the group gave a news conference at the hospital in Treliske, southwest England, and thanked their rescuers.

"It's been a very exhausting and frightening episode," said David Faulkner, the Inis Mil's British skipper.

Faulkner and his son Ian; Australian Bjorn Bjorseth; German Jurgen Hensel and the vessel's French owner, Stephanie Preux, left Kenmare Bay in southern Ireland bound for Cherbourg in France on Sept. 6.

The vessel ran into trouble the following day, but was only reported missing Sept. 10, when coast guards from Ireland, France, Britain and the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey mounted a search.

A spokesman for Britain's Maritime and Coastguard Agency said the captain had taken a number of steps to alert authorities, including finally setting fire to the boat, "but unfortunately nobody saw."

He said the life raft had been loaded with food and water, but the water ran out on Tuesday.

Coast guards in the southwestern English port of Falmouth located the life raft off the remote, rugged Trevose head early Wednesday.

Bjorseth said they group kept each other's morale up, spending hours discussing what meal they would eat when they were rescued.

The day before they were rescued, they were reduced to sharing a small Mars candy bar.

Alan Tarby, coxswain of the Padstow lifeboat, said it was "unimaginable" to spend so much time in a life raft.

"Even seasoned seamen would feel sick spending 20 minutes in one as they get tossed around easily," he said. "Life-rafts aren't very pleasant at the best of times."