76 Days Lost at Sea

[Owly055]

I'm suspect that it's been mentioned here before, but I haven't combed the entire book list.   After striking something at sea on a voyage from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, the boat fills rapidly, and he takes to his 6 man life raft.   

     There are a number of important insights provided by this.    One is that his "unusually large" life raft (6 man), is barely adequate for one man.  Not enough room to stretch out, and as we we already know, of pathetically poor construction.    The cover degrades in the sun to the extent that water draining off it contains particles that render it virtually undrinkable.   The patch kit is nearly useless as it requires the fabric to be dry.   Reading this should be enough to convince anybody that an inflatable emergency life raft is a pathetic option at best unless you are in coastal waters where rescue within a day or so can be expected.   A rigid dinghy designed to double as an emergency life raft, including positive flotation and a weather cover and the ability to step a mast and sail, is really the only sane option for passage makers.    The poorly constructed WWII era solar stills were a godsend that he would not have survived without, but surely there is better technology and better materials available.  It's clear to me that a hand pumped water maker would be a poor option next to a decent solar still, as you would exhaust yourself with the pumping, though due to weather variations, both probably would be ideal.   The other huge asset was the spear gun he had put in his panic bag.  Without it, he would have starved.   like the Rose Noel, his life raft developed it's own ecosystem which provided for his needs....... if just barely.   A group of dorados followed him , feeding on the smaller fish that fed on the barnacles that grew on the bottom of the boat, and these playfully prodded and bumped into his body as it pressed into the fabric floor of the raft.   It was to them he owed his survival, as he was able to kill a number of them, and live on their flesh, which he dried. 
      The real lesson though is that we need to be able to keep our boats afloat so that we can access the resources we have aboard.  While unsinkability is probably not realistic for most sailboats, there are ways we could make it possible to keep them afloat.  The number one method in my opinion is to be able to divide the boat into multiple water tight sections so that flooding can be confined to the damaged section.   Monohulls carry literally tons of ballast, which while necessary to keep them stable, also means they are going to sink unless a lot of floatation can be provided to counter that ballast.     This adds to my conviction that for my purposes a trimaran is probably the best choice.   While they will not right themselves if they capsize, they also do not sink, and due to the two outriggers which usually have enough flotation to keep the entire boat afloat if the main hull is breached or flooded.  This means that you can ventilate the central hull and live in it, with access to your stores.  With a catamaran, you cannot live in an inverted hull as you cannot ventilate it.    However one has to consider the possibility of a collision such as the author experienced.   Will it breach the main hull only, break up the boat, breach one of the outriggers, or what?   There are no perfect solutions, and you can almost definitely bet on Murphy taking a hand and making sure that the disaster that you prepared for is not the one you will face.   ;-(

                                                H.W.

[Capt. Tony]

You have touched on a couple of very key points that made Steve's ordeal a triumph over extreme adversity versus a tragic story.  I read that book years before I ever got the crazy idea to buy a sailboat, and I still recomend it to everyone that asks, "yeah, but what if???"