A COUPLE tucked up in their Chester-le-Street bed came to the rescue of a pair of amateur sailors facing death on the high seas more than 1,000 miles away.

As John and Margaret Moore snoozed in their home, friends Jill and Robert Watson were battling for their lives as their £80,000 yacht was pounded by waves whipped up by a Mediterranean storm.

Grabbing her mobile phone, desperate Jill phoned her friend Margaret who, despite answering the phone bleary-eyed at 5am, managed to alert the Humber coastguard.

In turn they contacted the coastguard in Rome, who scrambled an Italian lifeboat crew that eventually rescued the stricken pair and returned them on dry land.

Margaret, a 47-year-old secretary who lives with her husband in Crichton Avenue, said: "I knew there was something wrong as soon as I heard Jill's voice at that unearthly hour. When I heard the boat was going down it was very worrying."

But she explained that her own experience of boats told her to ask for the boat's co-ordinates - and that the British coastguard could help.

"I was so relieved when Rob called to say they were safe."

The Watsons, from Hexham, Northumberland, who run child day-centres, bought the yacht a week before and collected it from San Raphael in France, intending to sail to Malta for Christmas.

But a Mediterranean storm soon threatened to send them to their watery graves. The boat's engine and steering failed, their VHF radio broke down and distress flares went unnoticed.

As waves began pouring into the vessel, stranded ten miles off the Italian coast, the couple used their mobile to phone the boatyard in France but didn't get anywhere.

In a last-ditch attempt to avert disaster, Jill then thought of her friends back in Chester-le-Street.

Now recovering in a hotel room in Rome, Jill said: "I called up Margaret and John. Like us, they're experienced sailors and Margaret was very calm. She took our co-ordinates and said she would call the local coastguard. Within a few minutes she called to say help was on the way."