A disabled pirate ship replica was towed into port Tuesday evening in Eliot and will undergo repairs at a boat yard.

United States Coast Guard spokesman Chief Chris Guilmette said the 85-foot tall ship Liana’s Ransom, which had been drifting off the coast of York since it became disabled in a storm early Monday, was towed to Kittery Point Yacht Yard in Eliot.

Guilmette said a fishing vessel towed the ship, which lost its main mast, to the boat yard on the Piscataqua River.

The Coast Guard rescued nine people off Liana’s Ransom, which was on its way from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to St. Maarten in the Caribbean when its engine malfunctioned and its sail got wrapped around its mast in 10-foot seas early Monday.

One of the rescued crew members hit his head while transferring from the disabled ship to a 47-foot Coast Guard lifeboat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and had to be hoisted into a helicopter and flown to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston with a concussion.

Liana’s Ransom left Halifax on Friday. Coast Guard Station South Portland received a distress call from the ship, which was 58 miles off the coast of Gloucester, at 12:35 a.m. Monday and dispatched the Ocracoke. The 110-foot Ocracoke replaced the Jefferson Island last month as the cutter based in Portland Harbor and Monday’s mission was its first since its redeployment.

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Two motor lifeboats from Gloucester arrived first, about an hour after the distress call, and tried to tow the ship to shore, but the lines broke in rough seas.

The ship’s captain, Ryan Tilley, and the Coast Guard made the decision to evacuate, according to the ship’s Facebook page.

There were only eight cold-water immersion suits for nine crew members, so one of them had to jump from Liana’s Ransom to the pitching deck of a lifeboat without the protective gear, but he made it without injury, according to Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Karen Kutkiewicz, based in Boston. The leap was caught on film by one of the Coast Guard crew.

“If he had fallen in, who knows what would have happened,” she said.

Liana’s Ransom was built in 2007 in the Gulf of Mexico and has a shallow draft with a retractable centerboard. The boat has a steel hull, but is rigged like the privateers of the 1700s and early 1800s, according to the website of the company that owns it. When available for up to 70 guests, it is crewed by sailors wearing period costumes, armed with cutlasses and flintlock pistols.


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