Late Sunday, news broke of a lone Frenchman stranded in a life raft after having to abandon his yacht in the Southern Ocean. As most of us headed to bed, the word was that the rough conditions, huge swells and bad weather would make the rescue mission to save the yachtsman extremely difficult.
But this morning, it was good news all round.
Frenchman Alain Delord was indeed rescued by the MV Orion about 9.30 last night. Captain Mike Taylor from the ship joined Adam to explain the high-risk operation.
"We were about 680 miles south of his position and actually on our way to Macquarie Island, when the Rescue Coordination Centre in Canberra called us and said we were Johnny on the Spot, pretty much!"
It took the Orion 53 hours to get to Mr Delord's raft, during which time he was huddled inside the raft in rapidly deteriorating conditions. Fortunately, the Rescue Coordination Centre had planes monitoring Mr Delord, with up to four planes keeping an eye on him the whole time.
"The rescue couldn't have been done without the Rescue Coordination Centre - It was unbelievable how difficult it was to see."
When the Orion eventually arrived on the scene, the Centre had a Hercules "come down to about 100 feet above the mask and overfly" the ship as it approached.
"They dropped smoke and light floats into the vicinity and actually guided us right into him," Mike Taylor told Adam. "And we couldn't see the light floats until we were about three quarters of a mile away, and we didn't see the raft until a half a mile."
"Without their help and in the conditions, there was no way we were going to find him."
Once they located Mr Delord, there was also the challenge of getting him safely onto the ship - with Mike contributing it to "team work and a lot of luck."
"We're an expedition ship, and we tend to go to pretty remote areas like The Kimberly and Antarctica, and we use Zodiacs for landing.... but this was extreme as I'd seen it," he told 702 listeners.
"We had a two man crew in the Zodiac and dropped it down onto the crest of a wave, they went down and dropped the hook and away they went."
They then "grabbed him by the scruff and pulled him from the raft into the boat... we then had a pulley-block and rig, they passed the line down, hooked it onto his survival suit, and basically hauled him up the ladder and in through the door."
While the passengers on board the MV Orion, who were meant to be on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, were "heartbroken" that their trip had been diverted to save the Frenchman, Mike Taylor told Adam that they all burst into applause when Mr Delord was safely inside the ship.
As Mike Taylor told Adam, in the end "it was a good feeling."
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