Cheated death by minutes, rescued Spanish mariners say

The captain of a Spanish fishing vessel said Monday he and his crew were in mortal peril when a Canadian Coast Guard ship pulled them from the frigid North Atlantic.

"In five minutes, the ship [was] sinking very fast," Ivan Blanco, the captain of the Monte Galineiro, told reporters in St. John's on Monday, just a day after the entire crew of 22 were safely plucked fromthe Atlantic.

Blanco and the ship's cook, Justice Ehun, saidan explosion occurredintheMonte Galineiro's engine room.

They said they had mere minutes to escape the ship and were delighted that the coast guard vessel Leonard J. Cowley was on the scene soon after the distress call went out.

The Cowley arrived Monday in St. John's, carrying21 mariners who had beenrescuedwhile the Monte Galineirosank, about 400 kilometres east of St. John's.

Another crew member, who had been suffering from hypothermia, had already been flown to hospital in St. John's. He has since been released.

Speaking earlier with reporters in St. John's, Capt. Derek LeRiche said luck played a role in the rescue of the fishermen, as the Cowley was in the area waiting to carry out a routine inspection of the Monte Galineiro.

"It's good that we were close," LeRiche said. "The closer the better."

LeRiche said just 20 minutes elapsed from the moment the Cowley received a distress signal to the time the ship sank. He said it took the coast guard crew about 10 minutes to arrive on the scene.

Rescuers donated clothes

Some of the fishermen had enough time to don survival suits, but others did not. LeRiche said one fisherman was wearing only underwear when he was rescued.

Some of the crew of the Cowley, he said, donated their clothes to the rescued men. "I don't know if they got it back or not," LeRiche joked.

Blanco and Ehun said the crew has been grateful for the assistance they have received from the coast guard, the Canadian Red Cross and citizens of St. John's who have volunteered assistance.

Speaking earlier with CBC News,LeRiche said he could see fear in the eyes of the crew as they were rescuedby two fast rescue craft, known as FRCs.

"They were all trying to jump aboard the FRC the one time, and of course we can't have too many people in the FRC. We had to stop them at one point," LeRiche told CBC News.

Robert Nerison, a crew member aboard the Monte Galineiro, said the incident unfolded so rapidly thatno one had enough time to react.

"We don't know where is the fire," Nerison told CBC News. "Emergency alarm blowing, beep beep beep everybody come up."

John Parsons, the second in command of the Leonard J. Cowley, said there was no time to spare.

"Basically, we just pulled up to the life raft and started pulling them out," said Parsons, who led the coast guard rescue team on the water.

"If we hadn't been there, they wouldn't last the guys in the water wouldn't have lasted five or 10 minutes. The water was that cold."

LeRiche also said the scene unfolded very quickly.

"She tipped over on her port side, and it kept getting worse until she sunk from the stern to the bow," he said in an interview.

The survivors clapped and smiled as they were being helped aboard the coast guard vessel, he said.

"They were pretty happy that we were there, of course," said LeRiche, adding he is very proud of his crew's response in saving nearly two dozen lives.

"We took as many as we could in the two FRCs and brought them back to the ship, and what we couldn't take, we left them in the life-raft and went back and made a second trip later on," he said.

Members of the Spanish trawler's crew smiled and waved from the Cowley as it arrived in port, and appeared happy as they left the vessel.

The ship's manifest shows that the crew is predominantly Spanish, thoughsome came from other countries, including Ghana, Morocco and Romania.

The crew are expected to leave St. John's for Spain on Tuesday night.