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31 Crew Sailed Into Hurricane Mitch. None Were Ever Found | The Tragic Story of SV Fantome
21 de agosto de 2026 · 46 min · 536K vistas
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SV Fantome, a 282-foot, riveted-steel four-masted staysail schooner built in 1927, disappeared with all 31 crew aboard during Hurricane Mitch in late October 1998 in the Western Caribbean.0:54 Captain Guyon March, 32, first offloaded 97 passengers and 10 non-essential crew in Belize City on October 26, then took Fantome to sea because Belize City's shallow, open harbor offered no safe anchorage for a vessel of her size.11:57 The official forecast predicted Mitch would curve north toward the Yucatan, so March ran south to shelter in the lee of Roatan — but a high-pressure ridge over the Gulf of Mexico blocked that northward track and shoved the storm southwest, directly onto his position.14:24 Every shallow hurricane hole in the region — Rio Dulce's five-to-six-foot sandbar, the mangrove anchorages behind the Belize Barrier Reef — was inaccessible to Fantome's 13-foot draft.16:46 Boxed between the Yucatan, the Honduran coast, and the Belize Barrier Reef, March's only remaining option was to run east through the gap between the mainland and Guanaja, attempting to reach the navigable semicircle of the storm.18:27 At 1:15 p.m. on October 27, fifteen minutes after the Hurricane Center first forecast a west-southwest track, March and his Miami office agreed on that eastward run.20:23 No distress call was answered, no wreck or bodies were ever found.1:48 The absence of upper-atmosphere weather data over Central America in 1998 created a forecast blind spot that a satellite network — activated five days later — would have closed.14:38
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