Bodies of Couple on Epic Trip Wash Ashore at the Atlantic's 'Graveyard'

It's not yet clear what happened to Sarah Packwood, Brett Clibbery
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 22, 2024 3:00 AM CDT
Couple's Trip Across the Atlantic Ends in Tragedy
Stock photo.   (Getty Images / EduardHarkonen)

The bodies of a couple who went missing amid an attempted Atlantic crossing washed up on a small Canadian island on July 12. Sarah Packwood, 54, who was British, and her Canadian husband Brett Clibbery, 70, set sail from Nova Scotia in their 42-foot yacht on June 11. But after a final ping from Clibbery's GPS device (from about about 40 miles southwest of Sable Island) two days after that, the couple wasn't heard from again, the Guardian reports. Their bodies were found aboard a life raft that washed up on Sable Island. They are believed to have abandoned the yacht before they died, with one theory being that perhaps their vessel was struck by a passing cargo ship that failed to notice the collision, the BBC reports. No sign of the yacht has yet been found.

Packwood and Clibbery, who met in 2015 and quickly bonded over a shared love of travel, married on the yacht the following year. Their plan this summer had been to take the yacht on a 21-day trip with their destination the Azores, an archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic more than 2,000 miles away. Clibbery's son said an investigation into their deaths is underway. "They were amazing people, and there isn't anything that will fill the hole that has been left by their so far unexplained passing," he says. The uninhabited Sable Island is known as the "graveyard of the Atlantic" due to the more than 350 shipwrecks recorded there since 1583. The island lies on a common storm path, not far from a major shipping route, and "tricky" currents surround it, experts say. (More Atlantic Ocean stories.)

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