yachting

Gareth Williams, a friend of Mr Thomas, told the BBC he had known the chef for 30 years as they had grown up together in Antigua, where Mr Thomas lived during yachting’s off-season.

Mr Williams said he had known the chef for 30 years as they had grown up together in Antigua, where Thomas lived during yachting’s off-season.

“He told me just the other day that he needed to work two more seasons to fix up his late parents' house. He loved yachting, but he was tired,” Mr Williams told the BBC's Insaf Abbas.

In the cloudy skies and on the choppy waters, the emergency operation is continuing here in Porticello, where a luxury yachting holiday turned to horror.

It was there, on 24 September 1844 in New York, at a site that is now slap in the middle of Manhattan near the junction of First Avenue and East 31st Street, that the USA met Canada for what many regard as the first international encounter in any sport, pre-dating the America’s Cup yachting by almost seven years.