By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

A mysterious piece of a lost Edgartown sailboat was recently discovered on a beach in Portugal. Jeremy Ryan-Bell and his wife June were out walking on a favorite beach north of Carrapateira, at extreme low tide, and they found the piece on a sandy beach under the magnificent limestone cliffs. The words on the piece of fiberglass debris were clear: Edgartown and Flyer.

The hull fragment turns out to be the recognizable remains of a 36-foot white trimaran called High Flyer that belongs to Edgartown North Water street seasonal resident Brian Mann. The sailboat was lost in October of 2008.

Word of the discovery took a circuitous route. After the couple had returned home to Worcestershire, England, their curiosity about their find stayed with them. Mr. Ryan-Bell wrote the Edgartown Yacht Club an e-mail, asking if anyone knew anything about the boat. The e-mail was received by Alleyne M. Hughes, office manager, who searched club records and came up empty. But she only had the partial name of the boat. An exchange of e-mails followed. Ms. Hughes shared the information with Bill Roman, club manager, who called the Vineyard Gazette.

This triggered a search of newspaper archives for stories about sailboats lost at sea.

High Flyer was a 36-foot Corsair trimaran registered in Edgartown and built in 2003. The boat’s three-man crew and captain were rescued on Halloween morning, hours after the boat became disabled the night before, more than 250 miles south of the Vineyard, or according to the Coast Guard, 300 miles southeast of New Jersey. The crew and captain were airlifted off the boat by a Coast Guard MH-60J Jayhawk helicopter. There was assistance from the Navy and an additional Coast Guard HC-130J Hercules airplane.

Mr. Mann spoke from the porch of his North Water street home this past week and remembered with detail the troubles that night. He was sailing from Edgartown to Bermuda on a trip that was expected to take two and a half days, the beginning of a winter in a warmer climate. “In passages I average eleven and a half knots,” he said, though the boat is capable of going 20 knots. It was a downwind trip.

“I only sail downwind,” he said. He picked his sailing day carefully, over a span of weeks.

One day into the trip, the rudder broke at the waterline. Mr. Mann said he had just gone below deck, not feeling well, when his crew reported the problem. Sea conditions, he said, were fair; seas were with the wind at eight feet.

After the rudder broke, Mr. Mann said they stopped sailing. “We weren’t in any kind of danger. By then, we had taken down the sail and were drifting, trying to figure out what our options were at that point,” he said. It is possible to sail a boat downwind without a rudder, he added.

But all onboard, including the captain, were suffering from seasickness. “My vote was to continue, but it would have been wrong of me to compel my crew, who thought it was unsafe to continue on,” he said.

Using a satellite phone, Mr. Mann was able to converse with his wife, Catharine, and the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard offered to make the rescue and take those passengers who wanted to go. “My wife made me promise that I would not go off by myself,” he said.

They abandoned ship.

According to the Coast Guard, the crew of the High Flyer were picked up the next morning at 8:45 a.m.

Mr. Mann had the hope that he would return and find his boat. “In retrospect I wish we hadn’t been rescued. In hindsight, I had no experience with this. Two of my crew were experienced. They were opposed to sailing further without a rudder,” he said. He continued:

“It can be done. The thing I didn’t know — I didn’t realize that nobody goes that far out to sea to get a boat. I found it almost impossible to find anyone who would go out there. I did spend some money, I hired a plane and lined up a boat but it was never found. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. It is a big ocean.”

He was not surprised to learn that a part of the boat was found on a beach in Europe. He wonders whether there are more pieces.

“I figured it would wind up on the shore of U.K. We were just north of the Gulf Stream when it happened,” he said. “I wonder how it broke up. Was it run over by a freighter? Did it break up on the beach?”

He said High Flyer cost $110,000. He bought it in the spring of 2008. “I worked out an arrangement where I bought it and was going to trade it up for a newer boat,” he said. “The boat had once had a broken rudder,” he added.

He paused for a moment. “It cost a lot of money and a bruised ego,” he said.

Last fall, on nearly the anniversary of the day he lost High Flyer, Mr. Mann sailed again, this time in 37-foot boat named Allegro, a newer design by Corsair. He made the trip to Bermuda in the planned two and a half days. His seasickness pills helped this time on the trip.

And the rudder worked just fine.