The captain of a cargo ship struck by gale force 10 winds off the Isles of Scilly has been winched to safety after being seriously injured. A rescue helicopter lifted six people from the vessel, two more of whom had sustained less serious injuries. It is thought the three were hurt after a large wave hit the ship causing the cargo to shift. The rescue attempt which began on Friday had to be abandoned overnight because of the severe weather conditions and darkness. The vessel, which had been bringing fruits from Costa Rica was meant to be traveling to Dover but has now been re-routed to Falmouth and is expected to arrive their late this afternoon.

A Russian seaman has been airlifted to hospital after suffering a heart attack off the Islands.

According to the BBC, the man was on the fish processing ship Granitnyy Bereg 270 miles off Scilly when the alarm was raised.

Falmouth coastguard asked the vessel to head towards the Islands to reduce the distance necessary for an RNAS Culdrose helicopter to reach it.

The helicopter landed on Scilly to refuel before flying out to the ship, after which the victim was airlifted to the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro.

A pensioner died and two men were airlifted to hospital when their boat capsized off Scilly.

Margaret Yeats and her husband William were on board the 16ft vessel with friend Brian Richards when it capsized between St Mary’s and St Agnes at about 4pm on Sunday.

They were picked up by a local boat but the woman was already dead, Falmouth Coastguards said.

The couple, in their 70s, were believed to have been visiting Mr Richards, an Islander in his 80s, when the accident happened. 

William Yeats has been released from Treliske hospital in Truro and Mr Richards is expected to be released tomorrow.

Ian Guy, watch officer at Falmouth Coastguard, said: “The winds had been reasonably light. The tides can have an effect as well as the wind. There weren’t strong weather warnings in force.”

He added that the RNLI lifeboat and an RNAS Culdrose helicopter helped with the rescue.

A man has been rescued after ascending too quickly while diving off the Islands.

An RNAS Culdrose helicopter picked up the diver, who was suffering from the bends, at around noon on Saturday.

He was taken to the decompression unit at Derriford hospital in Plymouth.

Bathers have been warned to be on the look out after potentially deadly Portuguese man-o’-war was spotted off the Islands.

One of the creatures washed up on Porthmeor beach at St Ives on Monday - and marine officers have revealed that more were seen off Scilly earlier this month.

The find at St Ives is only the sixth in British waters since 2003 and is thought to have blown onto the shore after a weekend of strong winds in the region. Experts now believe there could be many others in the area.

Peter Richardson of the Marine Conversation Society said: “Contact with the tentacles results in agonising stings that leave painful lesions, and a few have resulted in fatalities. Victims can suffer intense fever and anaphylactic shock.

“Children in particular are at risk. Beach users should be aware that these animals can present a serious threat.

“A conservative estimate would probably say there are something like tens on the British coast, but there could be more, we don’t know yet. They are quite rare and it’s only when you get strong south-westerly winds like over the weekend that they wash up.

“We are not expecting swarms of them to wash up and start stinging people, so there is no need to panic.”

Anyone spotting a man-o’-war is asked to call the Cornwall Wildlife Trust Marine Strandings Network hotline on 0845 201 2626.

A 25-year-old Sheffield man has been told he will never walk again after injuring his spine running into the sea off St Mary’s.

Darren Fletcher, player for rugby union club Hull Ionians, was airlifted to Treliske hospital after jarring his neck on the sea bed at Hugh Town.

He had spent several hours drinking in the Mermaid Inn at a wake for Adam Mallon, a fellow rugby player who was killed in a car crash on the mainland.

He reportedly ran along Town beach joking that he was going to save friends who were “tombstoning” from the harbour. A friend is quoted as saying: “He was pretending to be David Hasselhoff in Baywatch. He thought the water was deeper than it was.”

A police spokesman said: “It is absolutely tragic. He had been at a funeral all day and had a fair amount to drink. From the pub, you can see local people jumping off the quay into the sea and this man was obviously tempted.

“We think he may have even had a go himself at some point but later that night he ran straight into the water. We don’t know how he hurt himself so badly - it was in such shallow waters. It is particularly sad because it all happened after a funeral.”

Islands PC Tony Kan added: “We can only repeat our advice that this kind of activity often leads to tragic consequences. This has been a terrible tragedy for this young man and his family and friends.”

A body - thought to be that of missing teenager Robert Merton - has been pulled from the sea off St Agnes.

The coastguard and lifeboat recovered the body, which is believed to have been in the water for some time.

There has been no official identification, but police say they may have found the St Martins 17-year-old.

Robert, a well-known gig rower and cricket player, was reported missing after leaving home for a paddle in his canoe on July 26.

His family has been informed of the discovery.

A man attempting to travel from Cornwall to the Islands on a raft made of surfboards has been rescued.

The Sennen Cove lifeboats were launched on Wednesday when the raft was spotted by a fishing boat between Land’s End and Longships.

The man - who is not thought to have been injured - was brought to safety at Sennen Cove.

The RNLI said he was in a “perilous situation” due to worsening sea conditions.

The wreck of the Association off Scilly in 1707 was among the biggest peacetime maritime disasters in British history and led to the offer of a prize for an instrument to measure longitude. Now the Navy diver who found the wreck gives us the inside story about how it was discovered - and debunks some of the myths and legends about what really happened to its famous Admiral.

Shipwrecks have always been an important part of Scillonian history. Although the Islands cover an area of only ten miles square, they have claimed more than a thousand ships of all kinds and nationalities.

One of the most famous wreck occurred on 22 October 1707. A large proportion of the British Navy fleet was returning from Gibraltar when its longitude was misjudged in poor visibility, and the flagship Association along with other ships in the fleet were wrecked on the western approaches. An estimated 1600 men were lost.

Legend states that Sir Cloudisley Shovell, the fleet?s commander and the most respected officer of the time, was washed up on Porth Hellick beach on St Mary’s, where he survived until a local woman killed him to steal his ring. He was buried in a simple grave at Porth Hellick, but later exhumed and buried in Westminster abbey.

THE INSIDE STORY
Engineer-Lieutenant Roy H Graham, 68, who describes himself as a ‘raconteur, wit and well-known villain,’ was in charge of the Naval expedition which found the wreck in 1967.

Graham began his diving career when he was introduced to pot-holing in Gibraltar whilst an Engineer-Lieutenant on HMS Victorious. Whilst pot-holing in the Mendips, he came across a wet cave with a waterfall of 600ft and realised he would have to dive to make further progress. Eventually, by asking - and being refused permission - to borrow a colleagues’ diving equipment, he was put in charge of diving training on the ship and found himself on a shallow water diving course.

Diving course
“There were 24 of us. It was the coldest, most savage January for many years, and we were in an old torpedo range. Some mornings we had to break through ice to get in. The people conducting the course delighted in making sure our suits leaked. They didn’t want too many of us wimps to pass, as they knew one day they might be relying on us for their lives.

24 men started, three got to the last day. One of the men went down with pneumonia - not surprising considering his suit always leaked. That left two - me and a R.A.F. medical officer. I said, “What kept you going?” “Benzedrine,” he replied, “what about you?” “Pure stubborn pride.” I was now the only shore-based Fleet Air Arm officer with a diving qualification.

Sub-aqua club
At this time a group of Chief Petty Officers had an ambition to form a Naval Air Command Sub-aqua Club and put together annual diving expeditions from all clubs which we were hoping to form and amalgamate. I was asked to be the Club’s first chairman and greatly flattered, I accepted. Within a few years we had the finest amateur sub-aqua club the world had ever seen.

1966 The Association - attempt 1
The annual expedition in 1966 was announced as a search for the wreck of the Association in the Isles of Scilly. The fact that it carried lots of treasure was no dampener on our enthusiasm. Little did we know that we didn’t count as private individuals so couldn’t keep the treasure even if we found it. The British Navy doesn’t take kindly to the use of its time and resources in treasure-seeking.

The weather was so bad, all we achieved was the sight of a blur of seaweed, seals and white water as we were swept through the Gilstone Reef and fortunately out the other side.

1967 The Association - attempt 2
The second attempt duly found the remains of the Association on the Gilstone Ledge. The weather was fine. The Royal Navy Auxiliary Services had an in-shore Minesweeper we could use and it rolled through the water like a pig. We had sent the first pair of divers down onto the main Gilstone Rock and they reported nothing. The second pair, closer to the ledge, reported seeing cannon. The third pair reported gold and silver coins underneath the cannon.

So I called them all together. It was hard not to grasp the implications of this. I said: “For god’s sake keep this under your hat, men, because once the paper gets hold of the navy finding a treasure wreck in the Isles of Scilly, all hell will break loose.” I said the same to the crew of the Minesweeper.

So we carried on and raised a bronze cannon, causing a lot of interest. All the newspapers came to photograph it. But no-one had as yet said anything about the gold coins.

The Prime Minister then awarded us an extra week, but a Lieutenant we had with us went to ITV and blew the whole story, including the fact that we had found gold coins. After that, every unemployed salvage diver in the seven seas invaded the Isles of Scilly and we got the blame for it. But it put the islands on the map as the sports diving mecca without any peer at all. Word went around that he water is crystal clear, visibility good, temperature 55?c all year round.

Aftermath
The Association was then plundered for a year or two. Few had much understanding of Marine Archeology or efficient salvage methods, so when the going got technical and difficult, they didn’t bother, because they weren’t professionals. Some were just in it for the fame and glory. Many stories and legends have built up around the Association and were circulated by people who wanted to keep the story going in the newspapers.

Debunking the myths
One story was that the Admiral, with his secretary, nephew and dog, launched the Admiral’s barge in awful conditions to Porth Hellick where he was wrecked on a bar and his body washed ashore and buried in a shallow grave. The truth is that his body was most likely recovered with many of the others who were washed up on St Agnes. But as he was a very famous Admiral, a well-known embalmer was called upon to embalm his body with a view to entombing it in Westminster Abbey.

The body was buried on Porth Hellick because there was no refrigeration in those days and the best place to keep it cool was between high and low water. They couldn’t have buried it on Town Beach because the dogs would have dug it up.

Another part of this legend is that an old lady found his body and cut off his fingers for the sake of his emerald ring. This is a lie. When the embalmer found the body and entombed it, he reported that it was the body of a comely, portly man in full health without any blemishes - hardly likely if he’d had his finger cut off!

There is another persistent legend that when the fleet was within a few leagues of Scilly, a Scillonian cabin boy informed the Admiral that he knew from some sort of sixth sense that they were running into danger, whereupon the Admiral said, “hang him!” This is ridiculous - firstly, Scillonians went to sea as mates or cooks or captains, not cabin boys. And a cabin boy wouldn’t get within three yards of the Admiral, nor would the Admiral behave in such a way in response. All these legends are recorded and displayed in pubs and fed to tourists as if they are gospel.

The truth, which is much more interesting, is barely even mentioned.”

Roy Graham and his wife Joyce now run Carnwethers Country House Holiday Flats on St Mary’s.

The French yacht, Sauveterre, sank off the Islands on 4 July in the early afternoon.

RNAS Culdrose sent a seaking to the scene, 60 miles west of the Islands. St Mary’s Lifeboat and HMS Severn attended. The rescue was coordinated with between Falmouth Coastguard and French counterparts at Corsen and Gris Nez due to the language barrier.

The four crew are safe and well, having been taken to the Islands on the Whiteheads lifeboat.

This incident comes a week after RNAS Culdrose sent a helicopter to rescue the 11 crew of a Spanish fishing vessel, Maria Gallego, which sank off the Islands on 27 June. The crew were rescued from their liferafts and taken to Castledown in Ireland.