OTTAWA, July 23 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A British-Canadian couple who were attempting to sail across the Atlantic have been found dead on an island off the east coast of Canada.
Brett Clibbery, 70, and his wife, Sarah Packwood, 60, had been sailing on their 42-foot sailboat the SV Theros, but their bodies were found in a lifeboat that washed up on Sable Island, Nova Scotia, according to a statement from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
The couple left Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia on June 11 en route to the Azores, a group of Portuguese islands in the mid-Atlantic, around 2,000 miles away.
They were reported missing on June 18 and their bodies were found on July 10.
It is not clear why the couple abandoned the Theros and got into a lifeboat. An investigation is ongoing, the RCMP said.
Sable Island is a 27-mile-long sandbar around 186 miles southeast of Halifax. It is known as “the graveyard of the Atlantic” and there have been more than 350 recorded shipwrecks there since 1583, according to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.
Clibbery’s son James paid tribute to his father and Packwood in a post on Facebook.
“They were amazing people, and there isn’t anything that will fill the hole that has been left by their, so far unexplained passing,” he wrote.
Clibbery and Packwood described themselves as adventure travelers and documented their trips on a YouTube channel named Theros Adventures. — NNN-AGENCIES