Captain Kostas Desypris, a seasoned mariner from Syros, has experienced three shipwrecks and six fires over his more than 30 years of service at sea.
“Hardship drove me to the sea. I didn’t want the sea, but I had to go out of necessity. I cried the first day I boarded the OSSA of Orion in Suez in 1960. My room and bed were in a specially designated space under a staircase,” says Captain Kostas. He continues, “When I was on the Christina, we collided with another ship at the ‘Ambrose’ buoy, just outside New York. The lifeboat wouldn’t descend, and I ran to help lower it into the sea. I ended up falling from the top deck. I would have ended up in the water, but somehow I found myself on the first deck and later at Lenox Hospital in New York. Saint Nicholas, my ‘old man,’ saved me,” he emphasizes.
Captain Kostas has many stories to share, like the time in 1990 when “coming to Europe from Chile on the Harmonia, we caught fire 750 miles off Las Palmas. We spent four days in the lifeboat, 20 of us, until a Cypriot radio operator on a Russian ship heard us, and we were rescued.”
Produced and presented by Antonis Karagiannakis