When cousins Ellen Glynn and Sara Feeney were swept out of Galway Bay and spent 15 hours drifting into the Atlantic Ocean, they kept their spirits up by belting out every Taylor Swift song they knew.
Now the singer has sent Glynn a letter to say how moved she was by their ordeal. She has also sent a painting with a maritime theme which includes some of her lyrics.
Glynn and Feeney, then aged 17 and 23, went out on their stand-up paddleboards on the evening of August 12 last year. They planned a 15-minute sail off Furbo beach, Co Galway, but northeasterly winds blew them away from the shore.
Night fell and the women were alone in the darkness. Glynn said one song “repeated” in her mind — the chorus of Swift’s song Exile.
“I’d say that at first Sarah thought I was insane, but then she started singing along, and it was just a bit of . . . a distraction,” Glynn told Documentary on One: The Miracle of Galway Bay, which will be broadcast on RTE at 6pm today.
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The cousins had lifejackets but were wearing only bikinis rather than wetsuits. They endured a heavy swell, rain, and thunder and lightning.
They had no way to say where they were, but lashed their boards together early on. Twelve hours later, and by then south of the Aran Islands, they grabbed some crab-pot floats to stop them drifting further.
A rescue operation had been going on for most of the night after Helen, Feeney’s mother, reported them missing.
Documentary on One reveals that the cousins were seen from the southernmost island of Inis Oirr by a woman out walking, who raised the alarm.
A review of the incident by the Irish Coast Guard said that while rigid paddleboards are incorporated in search-mapping software, inflatable paddleboards are not. Thousands of inflatable boards have been sold during the pandemic and they are popular because they are light and easy to store.
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The coast guard is carrying out satellite-tracked trials on inflatable paddleboards and is to share its data with “international search and rescue colleagues”, and with a Marine Institute project on drift modelling.
The review found that the women were carried 18.5 nautical miles or more than 33km, not 27km as initially reported, at a speed of 2.2 knots or 4kph.
It said there were several false sightings, all of which had to be checked out by coast guard helicopters.
Contact was made with the Naval Service at 6am on August 13 and a formal request made for a ship at 11.10am.
The Air Corps was requested at 7am but the Casa maritime patrol plane was being repaired and was only available after 1pm.
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By this time the women, who were exhausted and hypothermic, were being flown to hospital in Galway by Rescue 117, the coast guard’s Waterford-based Sikorsky S-92 helicopter.
Claddagh fisherman Patrick Oliver and his 18-year-old son Morgan, had rescued the two women after midday, having spotted them clinging to crab pot floats south of the Aran islands.
