I'm wondering if they sailed directly into it or at an angle... maybe they
didn't have time to adjust.

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"John Deere" wrote in message
news:bHV0ZWZpc2s=.5738ef93abbe8a494ac6712fcb97b775 @1104868162.nulluser.com...
Three Americans sailing a boat just off a Thai beach could not escape the
30-foot tsunami, they said, so they survived by sailing directly into it.

Julie Sobolewski, 47, her son Casey Sobolewski, 25, and their friend John
Hanke, 42, all experienced sailors from Oceanside, Calif., chartered a 35-
foot sailboat to sailing off Rai Leh Beach in the Krabi region.

On a "gorgeous, sunny, hot day," she said, they were half a mile offshore
and headed toward a sandbar and beach where some 150 people were
sunbathing. Suddenly a 30-foot wall of water appeared and washed over the
island.

"It looked like the top half of the island was falling into the ocean,"
she
said. It swallowed up the people. "They disappeared," she said.

The beautiful blue waters suddenly turned turbulent, and the tsunami then
shattered a half dozen wooden longboats nearby.

"When it hit the five boats, they just exploded, and all of a sudden there
were 35 people floating in the waters," she said.

Then it bore down on them. "We realized we couldn't outrun it and sailed
into it," she said.

The wave had been weakened by the sandbar, and the boat knifed through it.
After that, they spent six hours rescuing people in the water, she said.

"We had no idea it was a tsunami," she said. "We were just doing what we
had to do. We just knew what we had seen."