A 10-year-old British boy is being hailed a hero after he rowed his 8-foot dinghy to the rescue of a couple whose boat had capsized and towed them to safety.

Stuart Crang was fishing when he spotted Richard Brown and his partner, Sue Taffler, in the water last month near Brixham next to their Pico sailing boat, which had filled with water, the BBC reported.

Brown and Taffler, who both wore life jackets, had been in the water for about 45 minutes, the BBC said.

Crang rowed out to them to see if they needed help before towing them for 30 minutes back to safety.

"I was out in my little rowing boat, it's only 8 feet, and there were two people called Richard and Sue and they had capsized and had started to sink," Crang told the BBC. "I just went out to see if they were all right, but they said no, so I put them on a tow and brought them into the harbor."

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Brown and Taffler held on to their towed boat, not wanting to get into Stuart's boat in case that also capsized, the BBC said.

"It took me half an hour to bring them in, it was just me rowing, I was struggling quite a bit, but my dad was coming out and he saw me," he said.

"I was quite far in the harbor and he just said to me, 'Are you all right?' and I said, 'Yeah, I'll be all right in a minute,' and he said, 'Do you want me to take the boat off your hands?' So he took it off my hands and took them in.

"They were far too cold and of course they weren't feeling great when they got out."

Stuart's father, Nigel Crang, 47, is part of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution's lifeboat crew, while his 23-year-old brother, Jonathan, is part of the Torbay coastguard team.

"So I'm used to it, really," Stuart said.

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Brown and Taffler, who live in Brixham, thanked Stuart with a card and boxes of sweets, the BBC said.

Brown told the BBC their rescuer was an "absolute star."

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British female adventurer Sarah Outen sits in the narrow cabin of her rowing boat "Gulliver" in a suburb of Tokyo, April 11, 2012, before heading across the Pacific to Canada.

Updated at 5:50 p.m. ET: A 27-year-old woman trying to row solo across the Pacific Ocean was “holding on” hoping for rescue after her 23-foot boat was hit by a tropical storm.

The storm, named Mawar, rolled Sarah Outen’s boat Gulliver several times, damaging the vessel, according to her blog. A Japanese Coast Guard plane was staying overhead “to keep an eye on Sarah” while a Coast Guard boat went to pick her up. It was expected to arrive Friday.

As the storm hit Wednesday, Outen, from Rutland, England, said on her Twitter account that she had “written ‘SMILE’ on one hand and ‘BREATHE’ on the other. Both will help when I am scared in the storm.”

At about 9:50 a.m. ET Thursday, she wrote her cabin was soaked and she was now “wrapped in Union Jack [British flag] in place of soggy” sleeping bag and “holding on.”

On her blog, London 2 London via the World, her support team wrote they had spoken to her and she was “safe and doing well.”

Outen’s Pacific row was just one leg of a planned round-the-world journey by bicycle, rowing boat, and kayak that started on April 1 last year.

Fellow British Rower Charlie Martell was also awaiting rescue in his boat Blossom, the London 2 London website said in an update Thursday. Martell is approximately 280 miles northeast of Outen. The Japanese Coast Guard was keeping an eye on him, too.

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