Survive the Savage Sea

Survive the Savage Sea by Dougal Robertson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Awe, amazement and rapt fascination were my reactions to the trials this family experienced, as told in this true story, written by the father of the family.

During the Robertson family's planned circumnavigation of the earth in 1972, their sailboat was rammed by killer whales a hundred miles off the Galapagos. The boat took one minute to sink.

All six of the crew on board--mother, father, 18-year-old son, 12-year-old twins, and a college-age family friend--made it into the inflatable life raft, with a few provisions and a dinghy tethered behind. There, in that raft, and later in the dinghy itself, those six people spent 38 days surviving at sea.

Lack of water was their most life-threatening problem; capsizing was another. Sharks and large fish constantly struck the floor of their raft and the wear-and-tear of being afloat finally caused so many holes in the raft that they had to abandon it after 17 days (all cramming instead into the diminutive dingy).

Without any maps or compass, they used their knowledge of the local currents to sail their little craft north and east into The Doldrums where they were sure to find rainstorms. Only just in time did they catch some rain to drink, when they were all going delirious from thirst.

Day after day after day, they starved and thirsted, sat cramped and anxious, their clothes disintegrating and hope of rescue disappearing.

After a week, they sighted a ship passing and set off several flares, with no response. Dougal described this moment as a turning point for him, where he suddenly knew that their survival was in their own hands and that they had to try to make it to land without counting on rescue.

Their tiny rations quickly ran out, and they began eating first flying fish which occasionally landed in the raft or dinghy. Then they caught a sea turtle that came to investigate their raft. Eventually Dougal managed to rig up a spear or gaff to catch the fast dorado with. He lost hook after hook trying to fish with a line, but did manage once to catch a small five-foot shark and bring it aboard.

Every last detail of their survival journey is recorded day by day in this amazing book. What they talked about, argued about, dreamed about (food). How they worked together to sun-cure the fish they caught, their method of killing turtles and draining the blood to drink. The watch system they kept, and the amazing things they saw while out in the boundless Pacific.

There is a photograph, grainy and slightly blurred, taken of the castaways by someone on the deck of the Japanese ship that eventually picked them up. If the story isn't gut-wrenching enough, this photograph drives it all home.

There they are, sun-bronzed in tattered rags, hair matted and bleached. Their skeletal arms reach out to grab the rope offered from above. Their legs are tucked under their bodies uselessly after so long in the cramped dinghy. After such severe dehydration, they could not walk.

Also pictured are remnants of their provisions from the raft--drawings on sailcloth, logs that they kept along the way. It would be heartbreaking, but they all survived. Somehow it doesn't feel like the tragedy that perhaps it should--because they lived. Instead of tragedy, it is triumph.

I know I couldn't have done it. Besides not having the necessary knowledge of the sea, the waves and currents and the behavior of boats and of sea creatures, I'm not convinced that I could muster up that much determination to live. Wouldn't it be so much easier to let go, sink, go to the sharks?

Robertson doesn't just end with their rescue--he writes an extensive analysis at the end, looking back on the things that most threatened their survival and commenting on how their own actions or their equipment could have been better. He criticized his own wasting of precious seconds examining the damage done to their sailboat and trying to stop the flood of water, when he should have been preparing to abandon ship.

But mostly, he examines the failures of the survival equipment--raft, knife, hooks and lines, rations--and the way equipment failures could doom someone to death. They were incredibly lucky; rain fell on them when they couldn't live another day without it. Fish threw themselves into their boat.

But without the knowledge that they had, and used effectively, there's no way they could have made it. When they were picked up by the Japanese ship, they had a huge store of dried fish and turtle meat, gallons of fresh water stored away, and they were sailing full speed ahead for Costa Rica. They had travelled 750 miles in the raft/dinghy already; they had 290 miles to go to reach land.

They didn't need rescue at that point! That's the most amazing thing about this story. They saved themselves.

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