Two men took off in their 30-foot boat, but a storm damaged their vessel sending them hundreds of miles off course in the Atlantic.
RELATED: Boaters 'fending off sharks' before Coast Guard rescue [ Ссылка ]
His voice was broken up by a bad connection. But on Dec. 3, Joe DiTomasso left a message with his daughter: The sailboat journey to the Florida Keys was going well. Then the 76-year-old, a former auto mechanic from New Jersey, stopped responding.
For the next 10 frantic days, fears grew as the silence continued. The Coast Guard launched a massive search of 21,000 square miles of ocean for DiTomasso and his friend, Kevin Hyde, 65.
The two men and a dog named Minnie had left New Jersey on Thanksgiving weekend on a 30-foot sailboat bound for Marathon, Florida, but hadn't been heard from since reaching the Outer Banks of North Carolina. “We were mentally preparing for the worst,” Nina DiTomasso, 37, told USA TODAY.
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