CORNER BROOK — The Massachuettes man who drowned off the southwest coast of Newfoundland Saturday was an experienced sailor and adventurer who was completing the final leg of a journey through the North Atlantic.
Dr. Edmund B. (Ned) Cabot, a retired surgeon from the Boston area, presumably drowned when a rogue wave swept him from his yacht Cielita. He was 69 years old.
According to a statement released by his family, after graduating from Harvard Medical School, where he would later teach, Cabot served as a volunteer at the Grenfell Mission in Labrador and spent many years as a surgeon in the Boston area.
“After retirement, Cabot devoted himself to his love of the sea and conservation concerns,” it read.
He served as chair of the Sea Education Association and was an early leader of Sailors For the Sea.
A lifelong sailor, Cabot avidly explored the waters of the North Atlantic. With friends as crew, he circumnavigated Newfoundland at least twice before 2000. Over the course of the past seven summers, he and his friends sailed the Cielita from Nova Scotia to the Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland and eventually to the Baltic, the Norwegian coast and Spitsbergen. He was returning from Iceland, via Greenland and the Newfoundland-Labrador coast, when the accident occurred. He was reportedly sailing with two friends, about 200 miles from the end of their journey.
He is survived by his wife, four children, and three grandchildren.
“Cabot’s family expresses its deepest gratitude to the personnel of the Canadian Coast Guard for their tireless search and rescue efforts on his behalf,” the statement concluded.
The Canadian Coast Guard reported Cabot fell from the 46-foot vessel during thunderstorms. A search and rescue Cormorant helicopter, a Hercules aircraft searched the area, while the HMCS Goose Bay also patrolled the region about 16 kilometres off the coast of Stephenville. The body was found Sunday by the crew of a Cormorant.
