It was the night of the supermoon and Clémence Lapeyre slipped out of the beachside house, where she was staying with relatives, to enjoy the moonlit night from the sea on an old paddle board, reports The Independent.
It was after 10.30pm when she set out from the beach in Morsalines, on the Cherbourg peninsula, on Sunday. Forty hours later, after losing her paddle and her glasses in rough seas and pushed by strong westerly winds, she was found more than 68 miles away, drifting off the cliffs of Etretat, just up the coast from Le Havre.
Rescuers have called her survival a “miracle”. Today the 24-year-old from Paris was in hospital in Fécamp, suffering from dehydration, sunburn and exhaustion.
“It was a beautiful night with a very beautiful moon and she apparently decided to go paddling by moonlight without letting us know,” her uncle, Christophe Rémy-Nérys, said. “It was only late the next day that we realised she had disappeared.”
After a fruitless search on land, the family realised that the board was missing and lifeguards began looking for her in the waters around Morsaline. “We were watching the helicopter circling overhead, we were on the shore trying to find a sign, anything suspicious,” Mr Rémy-Nérys told the BFM TV news channel.
A launch and an inflatable boat assisted the helicopter from the sea, but the search was abandoned before dark on Monday because of bad weather. After a second anxious night with no news, the family began to fear the worst.
Read more of this report from The Independent.