A woman said she fell off a boat off the coast of Rhode Island, and her husband didn’t apparently know that she had been overboard for hours.
The U.S. Coast Guard told CBS News that the woman said she fell off her husband’s 39-foot sailboat on Aug. 17 as they sailed from Newport to East Greenwich.
The woman, who was not named in reports, was found on Prudence Island at around 4 a.m. local time on Aug. 18. The woman had mild hypothermia but refused medical treatment, according to the Providence Journal.
The man was found at around 2 a.m. in Warwick after he ran his sailboat aground. The man said that he believed his wife was in the deck below and sleeping. He didn’t realize that she had gone missing, as CBS reported.
According to the Boston Globe, the man told Warwick police that he remembered hitting the Claiborne Pell Bridge at around 1 p.m. His next memory was 11 p.m. when he woke up and discovered that his boat had run aground at Conimicut Point Beach, and his wife was missing.
The man went back to the marina and called the police to report his wife missing.
The U.S. Coast Guard said that the man had been drinking alcohol and operating the boat.
“It was pretty challenging because she could have been anywhere. She could have swam to another side of the bay or another buoy or another beach. She could have been anywhere,” Petty Officer Sam Van Lent told WPRI-TV.
“The story’s a little cloudy,” Lent also told the Journal.
The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management said that it is investigating the incident, the Globe reported.
