When the two men in the 26′ Queen Bee was washed overboard in a storm, they swam for two hours to reach land and were so thankful to be alive they didn’t much care that they would never see the boat again. In the three and a half years since that day, Scott Douglas and Rich St. Pierre assumed the Queen Bee had sunk somewhere near Nantucket, where they were sailing. Then the boat showed up off the coast of Spain last week, 3,500 nautical miles from where it had last been seen.
The Madrid Maritime Rescue Coordination Center reported the find to the U.S. Coast Guard, which speculates that the boat likely drifted into the Gulf Stream and then to the North Atlantic Current. After the voyage, the Queen Bee looks like something out of a ghost story. One can only imagine it looked a lot creepier while at sea: thousands of miles from land, setting its own course without a soul on board. That is, until it decided on northern Spain as a destination.
