Five people who spent a week adrift off the Cornish coast in a tiny life-raft today described their ordeal after surviving storms and 30ft waves.
The four men and a woman also ran out of food and water after their trawler sank off the Isles of Scilly last Wednesday.
They were finally airlifted to safety by helicopter this morning when the inflatable raft drifted into an area of mobile phone reception.
David Faulkner, from Surbiton, south-west London, the boat’s skipper, described their experience being battered by high seas as like “going up in an elevator on a yo-yo”.
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He added: “Your head ends up in your stomach, and your stomach ends up in your head.”
His son, 27-year-old Ian Faulkner, said the seven days he spent adrift was “probably the most terrifying experience of my life”.
At a press conference at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro, where they are being treated for hypothermia, they were able to joke about the two bottles of urine that were the only liquid left on the raft when they were plucked from the sea.
The mobile phone they used to summon help had only one bar of battery power left when they found a signal.
The five left Kenmare Bay, Co Kerry, Ireland in their 60ft converted trawler named the Inis Mil on Monday, September 6.
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The 56-year-old boat had been bought less than a week before by Stephanie Preux, a 25-year-old French air traffic controller, who joined the passage to Cherbourg, France.
Jurgen Hensel, 44, a German farmer who previously owned the vessel, and Bjorn Bjorseth, a 19-year-old Australian gap year student, made up the crew.
In the early hours of Wednesday the boat began taking on water. When all the pumps failed, the five started trying to bail the water by hand.
The skipper recalled: “We bailed and we bailed, but we failed - we couldn’t bail fast enough, it’s an exhausting business.”
They tried everything to attract attention, from issuing a “pan pan” warning - a step down from a mayday call - on the boat’s VHF radio, to setting fire to tyres on deck.
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At one stage a fishing boat passed within 400m of their trawler but it either ignored or did not see their distress flares, to David Faulkner’s anger.
“I really hope one day I will meet that man,” he said.
Eventually, after all their mayday calls went unanswered, they abandoned the boat 55 miles north-west of the Scillies at 5.30pm last Wednesday.
Before stepping into the small life-raft, which had been loaded with supplies from the boat, the skipper poured petrol into the wheelhouse and threw in a match to set it alight.
The five then had to paddle frantically away from the burning boat, fearful that its 60ft masts would topple onto them.
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Their food supplies dwindled so that by yesterday all they had to eat was a small Mars bar, which they shared between the five.
Mr Bjorseth said they kept each other’s morale up, spending hours discussing what meal they would eat when they were rescued.
The 6ft by 4ft raft was blown west, north and then south until at first light this morning they saw land and phoned the coastguard at 9.18am.
Ian Faulkner, who made the 999 call, said: “I really was scared that they would think I was joking, so I tried not to act panicky. The rest is history.”
After the emergency call, the crew were located off Trevose Head, near Padstow, by a Royal Navy helicopter from RNAS Culdrose and taken to hospital.
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Alan Tarby, coxswain of the Padstow lifeboat, recovered the life-raft after the crew had been rescued. He said: “It is unimaginable to spend that long in a life-raft.
“Even seasoned seamen would feel sick spending 20 minutes in one as they get tossed around easily. Life-rafts aren’t very pleasant at the best of times. I would say they are extremely lucky to have survived, considering the weather in the last week or so.”
Among the belongings left in the raft were torches, a sleeping bag and drinking containers.
Search and rescue teams had been looking for the vessel for the past five days after the skipper’s wife reported they had not reached their destination.