Thousands of people have been lost at sea, never to be seen or heard from again, but yet, there are a small handful that survive against every odd. One of the basic rules of survival is three hours without shelter, three days without water and three weeks without food. Could you prove this rule wrong?
10
Brad Cavanagh and Deborah Kiley
On a sunny day in late autumn of 1982, a boat set out on a routine trip from Maine to Florida. There where five people on board, John Lippoth and his girlfriend Meg Moony, Mark Adams, Brad Cavanagh and Deborah Scaling Kiley. Although they would have to endure each other’s company for quite a while on the trip, they were all strangers, accept for John and Meg. From the start of the trip, things were going south, as John and Mark just could not see eye to eye and they were both heavy drinkers. The weather started to deteriorate on the 2nd day at sea, and by that evening the waters where raging with 60 knot winds and 15ft swells. Brad and Debora stood first watch for over 11 hours in the storm, while John, Mark and Meg where all below deck drinking. When John and Mark were sober enough to take their turn watching, Debora and Brad finally got some rest. They were woken in the middle of the night by panicked voices, and stood up to realize the boat was filling up with water fast. It turned out that John and Mark lashed the steering wheel and went back to sleep, instead of staying on watch above deck.
They untied the life raft but it immediately blew away. Luckily they had an inflatable zodiac boat on board, which they inflated and got on the water. Everyone managed to make it to the zodiac, but Meg was caught in the rigging, and when she finally made it, she had deep lacerations, almost to the bone, on her arms and legs. Once they reached the zodiac, they tried flipping it round, but the wind kept blowing it back, so they ended up threading water for the next 18 hours, while waiting for the storm to pass. Meg was exhausted and the others had to constantly support her weight just so that she wouldn’t slip beneath the water.
The next day, the storm had calmed down and they managed to turn the zodiac around and get in. Looking into the water from the boat, they could see hundreds of sharks around them, and they stayed with them for the rest of the trip. By the third day, Meg had severe blood poisoning, and would lie in an almost catatonic state, without movement or speech. Mark and John had started drinking sea water that night and were becoming increasingly incoherent and delusional. John was the first to go, as he thought he could see land. He simply said that he was going to the shop for some cigarettes, slipped over the side and swam a short distance. The people on the zodiac heard a scream and then just silence and John was gone. Around the same time, the delusional Mark said he wanted to cool off and slipped into the shark-infested waters, there was a thud beneath the zodiac, and the water around them turned red as Mark disappeared from view. During the fourth night, Meg died.
The next morning when Brad and Deborah woke up, Meg’s body was stiff and they rolled her into the sea. It was not long after that they saw a boat coming towards them. The boat saw them and hauled them on board to end their tormenting journey.
On 25 April, Josh Long (17) and his best friend, Troy Driscoll (15), decided to go shark fishing. They launched their boat into the sea, near where they lived in South Carolina, without noticing the rip tide warning flags on the beach. The tide swept them out faster than they could dream of paddling back within minutes. In the struggle to paddle back, Josh knocked his brand new fishing rod overboard, and in frustration over losing his rod, he threw their bait over as well.
The boys started their hellish journey without any food or water or means to acquire either. In addition they also did not have any shade, or anything else, besides the clothes on their backs to shelter them from the blazing sun. All they could do to prevent heat stroke was to take short dips in the water, but after a close encounter with a shark, they stopped swimming as well.
They managed to hold on for an incredible six days with no water and only the occasional jellyfish as food. On the 6th day, after scratching dying messages into the boat, for their families, they heard a boat and managed to signal them to stop. After the rescue, both boys were taken to hospital to recover from the severe sunburns and dehydration that they suffered. Troy’s condition was so poor, that doctors said he would only have survived for a few more hours.
8
Amanda Thorns and Dennis White
Amanda Thorns (25), her father Willie (64) and godfather Dennis White (64), set sail from the Cape Cod on the 6th of November. Even though Amanda had sailed around the Cape Cod area with her father many times before, this was to be her initiation into blue water sailing, and they planned to travel to Bermuda.
At about 12pm on the 6th, rough water rolled in and the three were forced into the cabin to try and wait tout the storm. On the 4th night, with the storm still raging, Captain Thorns stood watch on deck while Amanda and White tried to get some sleep. Between the 30ft waves came an even larger monster wave, and rolled the entire boat. The captain, along with the mast and almost all the rigging where swept off the boat and became tangled in a rope mess hanging down the side of the boat. They tried everything to pull the captain back on board when the ship turned around again, but their efforts where useless and they had to cut him loose to be swept away by the waves.
For the next three days Amanda and White grieved the loss of their father and best friend from below deck, constantly bailing out water and trying to keep warm, while the storm raged outside. Having lost all communication equipment and power to the boat, there was not much that they could do. Instead they listened to the anchor and mast (still hanging on the side of the boat)being slammed into the side of the boat over and over again, knowing that is could break the hull completely at any second. They tried to signal passing ships with half of their parachute flares to no avail.
Ten days after they had lost the captain, White managed to pull the anchor on board. As a last desperate survival attempt, white took the 10ft mast from the boats dinghy and tied it to what was left of the main mast. He flipped it open sideways and it caught wind. They managed to sail 50 miles on their first day, and on the second they were shooting off flares again, at a large tanker that was passing nearby. This time luck was on their side and the boat saw them. On 21 November they finally made it to Bermuda, grief stricken by the loss of the captain, but happy and lucky to be alive.
On 23 August, a 10m wooden Thai fishing boat, carrying 20 crew members, broke to pieces and sank in rough water. Most of the crew was forced overboard and where never seen again. Two men hung onto a large icebox, used to store fish, as the boat went down. They managed to climb into the icebox once it started floating, but there was no way for them to help any of the other crew members.
It is believed that the icebox was hounded by 50 knot winds caused by cyclone Charlotte, and it was by pure luck that the icebox did not capsize in the extreme weather conditions. The weather was both a blessing and a curse though, as the men would never have made it without the monsoon rains, which provided them with fresh drinking water almost daily.
They floated like that, with only some old fish that was left in the bottom of the icebox, and the rainwater which the icebox caught, until the 17th of January. They were spotted, by pure luck, by a routine customs search plane, which radioed a rescue chopper. The picture was taken from the customs plane, and shows the two men desperately waving their shirts in the air, in hopes of being spotted.
Following their rescue, they were taken to Thursday Island, where they were treated for severe dehydration, starvation and extreme sunburn. Once they had recovered, they were taken home to their surprised families.
When Samu Perez (15), Filo Filo (15) and Edward Nasau (14) decided to row home from Atafu Atoll, in a small metal dingy, on the 5th October, they could never have known what they were in for.
The dingy was swept off course by strong currents, and they were presumed dead after a 1000km² turned up empty. Their parents, along with 500 family and friends, mourned their deaths and they held a memorial service for them, all the while the three where floating in the vast ocean. Shock and elation where probably some of the words the families used to describe the moment when their children where returned to them, some 50 days later.
While drifting, the boys managed to stay alive by catching and eating raw fish and a seagull that made the mistake of landing on the three starving children’s dingy. Every morning they would drink the rain water that had landed on the tarp and in the boat, which provided them with crucial moisture. About two days before their rescue, death became imminent when they started drinking sea water because of a lack of rain for several days.
Mercifully, the boys where spotted and rescued by a tuna boat, off the coast of Fiji, near the end of November. When they were found they could not even stand up unaided. They had drifted over 1600km (1000 miles) from the Atoll the Fiji, in 50 days. In hospital they were treated for severe dehydration, starvation and sunburn before being returned to their overjoyed parents.
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