Couple's relief after Wilma agony

Claire Stevenson and Dan Sanger arrived home on Thursday

An East Sussex couple who were caught up in Hurricane Wilma arrived home safely on Thursday.

Claire Stevenson and her boyfriend Dan Sanger, both from Uckfield, were among thousands of Britons stranded in the Mexican resort of Cancun.

They returned on a Monarch Airlines flight to Gatwick, organised to airlift people out of the area.

They said they had no water for several days in their hotel and never knew where their next food would come from.

Miss Stevenson said: "The waves were coming right up to the beach hotels, you could see them crashing quite heavily up to the beach.

'Hope for the best'

"We didn't know when there might be food or when there might be power, there was no running water, we were filling up the cistern of the toilet with swimming pool water to be able to flush it."

Mr Sanger said: "It was bit scary not knowing what was going to happen, whether the window would come through or not.

"We could hear things smashing outside, light fittings and the solar panels off the roof, which had been picked up and thrown around.

"It was just lay there and hope for the best."

Miss Stevenson's mother Terri said their return was an obvious relief after an anxious wait during which information about her daughter's whereabouts had been poor at best.

"It was just not knowing. Other than the fact they survived the initial storm, we did not know anything after that," she added.