Meanwhile, Mr Suarez Meilla found his own way out, swimming to the bottom of the boat where he escaped through an open hatch after finding every other route “impossible”. “I had blood pouring from my head and felt so, so, tired,” said Mr Taylor, “I don’t know how the hell we are here, but thank God we are alive, that’s all that matters.” He jumped into the water and the crew threw him a buoy and he and his son floated until the life raft hauled them out. Mr Taylor said: “Fernando had helped us escape, and, this part still haunts me, he told us to leave and instructed us to go… It was so impossibly hard.”Īs Mr Taylor made his way to safety he was struck on the head by a large metal tank causing blood to gush from his forehead. 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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