A South African sailor who had her boat rebuilt in P.E.I. last year made a heroic at-sea rescue on Saturday.

Kirsten Neuschäfer began competing in the Golden Globe Race in September aboard her 36-foot boat Minnehaha, which Island contractors had fitted out with a new fibreglass deck, a new oak rudder and a hand-crafted tiller hewn from local ash, among other things.

The Golden Globe is taking elite sailors around the world in a competition expected to last nearly nine months.

On Nov. 19, waves in the Indian Ocean were four metres high when Neuschäfer was alerted to a boat in distress. Finnish competitor Tapio Lehtinen’s boat was sinking.

“Tapio describes simply hearing a loud bang, getting out of bed and realizing that his boat was full of water,” Helen Fretter, editor of Yachting World, told CBC Island Morning host Laura Chapin.

Neuschäfer, in her 36-foot boat Minnehaha, was closest to Lehtinen’s boat, which was about 450 miles off the eastern coast of South Africa.

Because the Golden Globe is a retro event meant to mimic the original 1968 race by the same name, the yachts are pretty low tech.

“They don’t have loads of modern communication devices on all the time,” said Fretter. “Compared to the modern race boats, where they’re tweeting and sending live video and all that, they’re quite off grid.”

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