Emma and Peter Tryon were on a boat five miles off shore when it crashed
Thankfully, their prayers were heard and the boat came to rest on the reef.
But their ordeal was far from over. The lifeboat had gone so half-drowned and clinging to the wreckage, the couple, 12 other tourists, four crew members and the captain’s four cats were stranded overnight.
The shipwrecked group spent 11 hours waiting to be rescued until local fishermen spotted them.
The couple, who are originally from Yorkshire, have been on a seven-year expedition, journeying to untouched corners of the world, meeting indigenous tribes and crossing glaciers. They decided to travel by sea from Colombia to Panama to avoid the Darien Gap, a notorious kidnap area.
The catamaran, the Nacar I, crashed at 3am on Sunday on the second night of a four-day journey which cost £400.
Mrs Tryon, who runs a charity for orphaned children in Cambodia, said the captain of the boat later admitted that he had gone to sleep and left it on autopilot. ‘We were asleep when we heard a huge crash and water started coming out of the hatch above us,’ she said.
‘We quickly ran up a stairway and outside to the dock area which was starting to fill with water. It was up to people’s chests on one side.
‘We realised the boat was sinking. Everyone was panicking. Then the captain started shouting that it was sinking fast. I remember thinking that that was a line from the film The Titanic. It didn’t look good.’
Mr Tryon, 31, a qualified chemistry teacher who runs a blog, said: ‘The captain shouted at us to swim in the direction he pointed, but you couldn’t see shore.’
The Tryons, both committed Christians, prayed out loud as the boat continued to sink in the water. Moments later,it hit the reef and stopped sinking. With the boat stable, but waves still crashing around them, they settled down to wait to be rescued. They estimate they were three to five miles from land.
When the sun came up, they realised that swimming in waves of ten to 15ft would be too dangerous.
‘That was my lowest point,’ Mrs Tryon said. ‘I thought if we swam out in that it would be game over.’
Eventually, they were spotted by local fishermen who risked their lives to swim out to them over the reef. The coastguard followed, but they would not cross the reef so the tourists had to swim to them.
All 14 tourists were brought to shore, together with four crew members and the captain’s cats. They were then taken through the jungle by Jeep to Panama City before their insurance company arranged for them to be flown to Houston, Texas, then back to Britain.
Mrs Tryon had just her bikini while her husband had just his boxer shorts. Luckily, their captain had kept their passports.