Three sailors who were rescued by a cruise ship when their yacht went down in the Pacific Ocean say they are relieved to have made it back to dry land.

Seasoned Newcastle sailors Chris Doran, his cousin Kevin Doran and Ben Johnson, from Vanuatu, had spent months in the South Pacific and were headed back to Queensland when their boat, Liberty, struck a discarded mooring line about 5.30am on Thursday and began to sink.

The men told friends they were leaving Vanuatu for the Gold Coast on Monday. The journey is a popular one with Australian sailors and takes five days of round-the-clock sailing in good weather, longer with stops and day sailing.

The P&O cruise ship Pacific Dawn picked up their emergency beacon and collected the men several hours later near the coast of New Caledonia, without even having to alter its route.

Two Australians and a British man have been rescued by a P&O cruise ship near New Caledonia. https://t.co/mFtCr4ThRN #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/VH26zdUNdG — 7NEWS Australia (@7NewsAustralia) September 26, 2019

“Initially we thought we might have hit a reef but that wasn’t the case,” Chris Doran told reporters in Brisbane after the cruise ship docked on Saturday morning.

“We found quite a large ship’s rope, there was about 50 metres of it and it wrapped around both propellers causing a breach in the hull, the boat started taking on water.”

Realising their boat was going under, the men made a May Day call, grabbed their passports and some water before piling into a life raft.

Doran told reporters he had sailed the Liberty for six years and was sorry to lose it, but knew it could not be saved.

More pressing was the risk the lifeboat would be overturned in rough seas, or float dangerously toward the reef, which was just six nautical miles — 11km — away.

“I wasn’t worried about the boat because we couldn’t save it, there was no way we could’ve saved it,” he told Nine newspapers.

Doran said they maintained constant radio contact with the Pacific Dawn’s captain Alan Dockeray, who picked up the distress call when he was 55 nautical miles from their location. It was a very easy rescue, Dockeray said.

Dockeray had been piloting 2,000 passengers in a seven-day cruise around the South Pacific and said he had rescued sailors from the waters around Vanuatu before.

“The reefs there are unforgiving but these guys didn’t find a reef, they found a mooring line,” Dockeray said.

Johnson told Nine News from aboard the Pacific Dawn on Thursday that the rope “completely ripped through the bottom of the hull”.

“From there it was just panic stations, and we had manual pumps going, bilge pumps going,” he said.

“So we abandoned, we abandoned ship by then because it was already lifting and she was in ... very bad shape.”