But that left their rescuer with no obvious means to get out himself. Mr Suarez Meilla gave the father and son each a leg up to clamber out of the hold and on to the top deck of the three-storey boat. The three men crawled along the hallway as the ship submerged, checking every cabin to make sure no one else was trapped.Īfter reaching an emergency hatch, they discovered the handle on it was defective and were forced to find an alternative escape route. Mr Suarez Meilla said: “I didn’t panic, I was just certain we needed to get out as soon as possible.” Mr Suarez Meilla, an experienced diver, hoisted himself into the corridor where he discovered Mr Taylor and his son in “total panic”. “Water was coming through the cracks and the door was where the ceiling should be, so I knew I was in trouble.” “The window I was looking out of was looking towards the bottom of the sea,” he said. The starboard side lifted and he was sent crashing into the cabin window. Mr Suarez Meilla had descended to his own cabin to charge up his digital camera when the boat started sinking. I had lost the plot, I felt I couldn’t protect my son and I started to panic.” When we realised we couldn’t escape by the stairwell and no one had come to help us, it felt awful. He recalled: “We were shouting for help and heard crashing above us and had this deep-seated feeling of dread that something terrible was happening. When we realised we had capsized, we knew we were in trouble, there was something drastically wrong.”
What followed next reads more like a story from the Poseidon Adventure. He then became trapped himself.Īccording to witnesses, the sea was calm and the sky bright blue when the 137ft-long Carlton Queen suddenly started listing after taking on water. Fernando Suarez Meilla, a 60-year-old administrator in the EU parliament in Brussels, guided father and son to safety after they had become disoriented as the ship went down. Mr Taylor and his son Christian, 21, have praised the heroic actions of a fellow passenger for rescuing them from below decks.
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