Fears are mounting for a British sailor who fell from a yacht in the Pacific Ocean on Saturday night, almost 500 miles from land.
The US Coast Guard said the 35-year-old man was conscious and wearing a life jacket when he plunged into two-metre (6ft) seas but had not been found after more than 17 hours of searching. The US navy has been called in to help with the search.
A woman, also British and described as an inexperienced sailor, was hoisted from the ship by a rescue helicopter at 5am on Sunday.
A Coast Guard spokesman, Eric Chandler, said conditions were not particularly bad at 11.30pm on Saturday when the man tumbled into the water and it was unclear what caused him to fall overboard. Officials from the Marine Rescue Co-ordination Centre based at Falmouth, in Britain, reported to the US Coast Guard that one person from the 12-metre vessel had fallen overboard and another remained on board who had little sailing experience.
Their vessel, believed to be privately owned, was about 2,000 miles west of the Hawaiian island of Oahu and 500 miles west of the remote Midway Atoll at the time, making it too remote to reach quickly.
Chandler said four navy helicopters were now combing the area, along with two Coast Guard HC-130 Hercules planes from Oahu in Hawaii and a US navy warship which had been diverted to help.
"It's real challenging out there. We can't get our cutters out there," he said.
"I don't know what made the sailor fall overboard. The female with him said he was conscious at the time and he was wearing a yellow life jacket."
The pair were the only two people on the yacht. The purpose of their voyage was not clear but Chandler said that while the location of the incident was remote, it was not particularly unusual for the yacht to have been so far from shore at that time of day.
"People sail pretty often pretty far out of reach," he said. "I don't think that it's that unusual."
The Pacific News Centre website said there were winds of 25mph and two-metre waves at the time of the incident.
