Krystel Fovet has lived aboard for years. Her home is Angela, a white Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 45.2 flying the French flag, kept on a mooring off Corossol — the quiet fishing village on the northwest side of St Barthélemy, away from the bustle of Gustavia. On Wednesday, August 12, she came back from work around 5 pm and looked out at the bay. The mooring was empty.
Everything she owned was on that boat. So, she feared, was Archie — her Belgian Malinois, "35 kilograms of pure love," who stays aboard while she works ashore.
No boat, no search
The first calls went nowhere. Maritime rescue services declined to launch a search — no human life was in danger, Fovet was told. A dog alone on a drifting or stolen yacht did not qualify.
She paid for her own. That night a private search boat came over from St Martin — two hours on the water, 6,000 euros, nothing. At dawn a light aircraft from the local aero club flew the surrounding waters. Nothing again. A BOLO alert went out through the Boatwatch network and spread across sailors' groups by the hundreds.
What the cameras showed
Two days in, the gendarmerie pulled footage from harbour cameras in the bay. At 1.36 pm, hours before Fovet returned, Angela slipped her mooring and threaded her way out between the anchored boats. Not adrift. Steered.
"So it was a theft, and not a parted mooring line," Fovet told the German sailing magazine float. Whoever took the yacht took the dog with it.
The discovery changed little in practice. There was still no official search — only reposts, phone calls and waiting.
Found on the rocks
On the evening of Monday, August 17, fishermen from Saba — the Dutch island about 26 nautical miles southwest of St Barth — spotted a sailing yacht smashed against the rocks below the All Too Far Trail, between Sulphur Mine and Diamond Rock. The mast was broken and in the water. The dinghy was gone. There was nobody aboard.
Nobody human. Archie was there — exhausted, injured, five days after he had disappeared, but alive. Saba's Search & Rescue team took him off the wreck; a vet and the Saba SPCA took over from there. "Their quick actions helped bring the situation to a safe conclusion," the Public Entity Saba said in its statement.
The next evening a fellow sailor carried Fovet over from St Barth under sail, and at 6 pm on Tuesday she got her dog back. On Wednesday she inspected what was left of Angela. The yacht is a total loss; she salvaged little more than clothes. From the empty mooring to the reunion — six days.
The open questions
Nobody knows who boarded Angela, why they sailed her 26 miles to Saba, or why they abandoned the wrecked yacht, dog still aboard, and vanished with the dinghy. The Caribbean Safety and Security Net briefly suggested the case was a personal dispute rather than a random theft, and withdrew its alert; Fovet flatly denies any such connection and says police confirmed the theft to her. The mooring gear, she notes, showed no torn lines.
The facts left standing are uncomfortable: a yacht can be stolen from a busy bay in broad daylight, no official body will look for it, and the only survivor who knows the whole story cannot tell it.
Photo: Krystel Fovet / float; Government of Saba. Source: float, Saba News, Loose Cannon.
