Couple found dead in lifeboat after failed Atlantic crossing

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), published July 12.

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.

“Living will not be the same without your wisdom, and your wife was quickly becoming a beacon of knowledge, and kindness. I miss your smiles. I miss your voices. You will be forever missed.”

Clibbery and Packwood described themselves as adventure travelers and documented their trips on a YouTube channel named Theros Adventures.

The ill-fated voyage was part of what the couple called their “Green Odyssey,” which Clibbery said was intended to show that it is possible to travel long distances without burning fossil fuels.

“We have an electric boat,” said Clibbery in a video posted on YouTube on May 13. “We charge the engine with solar panels.”

The couple met by chance at a bus stop in London in 2015 when Clibbery was in Britain to donate a kidney to his sister, they told The Guardian newspaper in an article published in 2020.

The pair met every day for the few weeks after their first encounter, before Clibbery helped Packwood to care for her dying mother and she then looked after him after his kidney operation.

They stayed in touch after Clibbery moved back to Canada and Packwood visited him in Salt Spring Island near Vancouver, where the Theros was docked, in spring 2016.

“He took me on my first ever yacht trip and I loved it,” Packwood told The Guardian. “Brett proposed to me in the main cabin of the boat.”