La Presentation, Quebec, April 16, 2010-- Jade Chabot (L) hugs tightly onto her husband Martin Neufeld following an interview in La Presentation, Quebec on April 16, 2010. Jade was aboard S.S. Columbia, for a 40 day trip which ended taking 84 days.Christinne Muschi for the Globe and Mail
On the morning of her 50th birthday, Josée Chabot awoke aboard a drifting vessel in the Pacific Ocean, saw cloudy skies above her and water all around, and wondered if her family thought she was dead.
The Montreal woman had been on a training-school boat for 70 days. She was supposed to have been back in Chile a month earlier. Instead, the former banker languished on a ship with a hostile captain, incommunicado with the outside world.
"I felt powerless. I worried that my family must be imagining the worst," Ms. Chabot said in an interview Friday, one day after she returned to Montreal. "I thought, 'I'm going to lose it. I'm going to go insane.'"
While she agonized on board, it seemed to those waiting on shore that she had simply vanished. Her planned return to shore coincided with the earthquake and tsunami that laid waste to the area. Around the time of her birthday, Martin Neufeld, her husband, was on a beach in southern Thailand, beginning to grieve for his wife.
"It hit home for me at that point that I may never see her again," he said. "I didn't know what to believe any more. I had this dread in me that I had lost her."
Friday, the two sat side by side in each others' arms, reunited, after Ms. Chabot's boat finally resurfaced on its 85th day on the ocean.
One week ago, seemingly out of nowhere, her boat docked in Coquimbo, Chile - about 45 days past its scheduled return. Ms. Chabot, who left a career in banking in 1996 and began to travel the world - she now practises holistic healing - set her feet on terra firma and called Mr. Neufeld.
"I thought you were dead," he told her.
"I'm so sorry," she replied.
Ms. Chabot's expedition not only felt like a voyage of the damned for her, it set off an extraordinary search by the Canadian government and a half-dozen nations for the ship and captain.
While the SS Columbia sailed alone off the coast of South America, Canada's Foreign Affairs Department was contacting search-and-rescue officials in Chile. The effort widened to authorities in France, Australia, the United States and even the Falkland Islands. Private boaters were told to be on the lookout, and commercial airlines were asked to help in an aerial search.
Ms. Chabot's maritime escapade began when she joined a one-man sailing training school that embarked on Jan. 16 from Ecuador. It was supposed to return to port in late February; in her out-of-office reply to friends, Ms. Chabot wrote, "I will be at sea, sailing the Pacific … for the next 40-45 days."
Instead, the boat sailed on, helmed by a captain who brooked no dissent and administered authoritarian rule over the three students, according to Ms. Chabot.
"From Day 1, he told us we were not to question him or talk back," she said of fellow crew members Lisa Hanlon of Nelson, B.C., and Mitchell Westlake of Australia. "We were in constant fear of him."
Ms. Chabot said she never feared for her safety during the trip, for which she paid €3,000 (about $4,500 at the time), and she was unaware of the earthquake. But the captain, Boguslaw (Bob) Norwid, often let the boat drift for days in windless conditions rather than use the motor, and scoffed when the students asked to use the radio to contact family.
One day when Ms. Chabot forgot to shut off a water valve on board, "he joked that I was close to being thrown overboard, but it would be too much paperwork for him," she recalled.
Mr. Norwid, who did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment, is a Polish-born French citizen. His boat was registered in England, where he is reportedly being investigated by maritime authorities. Also, according to information from Canadian Coast Guard officials, his boat call letters appear to be bogus.
Ms. Chabot - who goes by the name Jade - arrived at Trudeau airport in Montreal on Thursday and fell, crying, into the arms of her father and brother. Her reappearance near Easter seemed well timed. "To me," Mr. Neufeld said, "it was like a resurrection."