Have you ever studied abroad? The SV Concordia was basically a huge sailboat designed to be a floating classroom. On Thursday, the Concordia was capsized while carrying over 40 high school students. The incident happened about 550km off of the coast of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

Fortunately, no one was killed in the accident and only one person was injured. The Concordia’s captain, William Curry, told reporters that he thought the cause of the shipwreck was a sudden, powerful gust of vertical wind. It took only 20 seconds for this 57 meter sailboat to sink.

After the boat capsized, the students, teachers and crew, were forced into life rafts. They latched the rafts together and were trapped out in the middle of the ocean for almost 20 hours. They were lucky enough to activate an emergency alarm prior to capsizing, which led to their rescue.

The crew from a Brazilian air force plane spotted a life raft with several people aboard. They were finally rescued by two vessels at around 3am local time. A Japanese-flagged merchant ship Hokuetsu Delight was alerted by the navy and picked up the bulk of the people. Later, the rest of the group were rescued by another ship.

The Concordia, from Lunenburg in Canada, was a training vessel belonging to West Island College International. The ship is an academy for young people which gives students secondary and university-level classes. The seafaring program, carrying mainly junior and senior level high school students, costs roughly $42,000 each.

Search Tags: Brazil, Canada, Concordia, Rio De Janeiro, Sailboat, school

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