McCarter said the ordeal was worse than looking for “a needle in a haystack” after a crew member went overboard and was missing for 90 minutes in freezing temperatures.

The 32-year-old skipper was on the Derry-Londonderry-Doire boat in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race.

He said his team mate would have been unconscious and possibly dead if he had not been wearing a dry suit.

Andrew Taylor, 46, from London, fell overboard into the Pacific Ocean 2,500 miles from land and was in the ocean for an hour and a half before being rescued.

Watch the dramatic events unfold here:

A former RNLI volunteer, Mr McCarter from Buncrana, Donegal, described the moment he realised Taylor had gone overboard: "The moment he went out of sight the Pacific all of a sudden becomes a very big place.

46-year-old Andrew Taylor after he was rescued from the Pacific Ocean

"We had our man overboard position marked on the chart which gives us a point to start searching from and we start going through the motions, trying to estimate where he might have drifted to with the wind and current.

"We started searching but I mean a needle in a haystack doesn’t even describe what we were looking for."

Mr Taylor has now fully recovered from his dramatic ordeal, which happened a week ago during the amateur yacht race.

It is only the fourth time in the race’s 18 year history that a competitor has fallen overboard.