People who went to sea and got stuck for a really long time


 

Adrift

Jose Salvador Alvarenga is a Salvadorian fisherman who spent 483 days at sea. Alvarenga set off from Mexico on 17 November 2012, with a fellow fisherman, Ezequiel Córdoba. They intended to spend 30 hours deep-sea fishing, but their boat was blown off course and damaged during a storm that lasted five days. With no sails or oars, and with a dead battery, the fishermen drifted towards open waters. They managed to catch fish, turtles, jellyfish and seabirds, and drank rainwater, as well as their own urine and turtle blood, in order to survive. However, around four months into the journey, Córdoba became sick from eating raw food, and eventually starved to death when he then refused to eat. Alvarenga continued to drift at sea for several more months, until he reached the Marshall Islands on 30 January 2014, following a journey of around 6,000 miles.

Underwater

Harrison Okene was on board the tug-boat AHT Jascon-4, when it capsized off the coast of Nigeria on 26 May 2013. Okene, the crew’s cook, was in the toilet when he realised the boat was sinking, but luckily managed to find his way to an air pocket as the boat sank over 100 feet below the surface. He then remained in the airpocket, in total darkness, for over 60 hours. During his ordeal, Orkene had nothing to eat or drink, and the salt water actually took the skin off his tongue. He was also able to smell the bodies of his dead crew mates, and later could hear the fish eating them. Eventually, Orkene was rescued by divers who had come to collect the bodies; he attracted their attention by grabbing one of them, which understandably gave the diver quite a fright. Orkene then had to spend time in a decompression chamber before being brought to the surface, otherwise he would have likely experienced cardiac arrest or neurological issues. Orkene describes his ordeal as a “miracle”, but understandably still suffers from related nightmares.

Marooned

In June 1965, a group of six boys, aged 13-16, who boarded together at a strict Catholic school, decided to escape by stealing a boat from a local fisherman and attempting to travel to Fiji. The boys took some coconuts, a few sacks of bananas and a gas burner with them and set sail. Unfortunately, the boat’s sail ripped that same night, and the boys drifted at sea for eight days before they reached the rocky island of ‘Ata, where they lived for the next 15 months. The boys arranged a rota for garden, kitchen, and guard duty, and worked in teams of two. By the time they were rescued by an Australian sea captain who noticed the smoke from their fire, the boys had created a food garden, had hollowed out tree trunks to collect water, and had made a gym and badminton court. But the boys’ ordeal didn’t end when they were rescued; upon their return to Tonga, they were arrested for stealing the boat. Luckily the Australian captain who rescued them before was able to rescue them again, this time by paying for the old boat and negotiating their release on the condition that they would star in a Holywood remake of their adventure.

Comments

  1. BridgetOctober 24, 2021 at 9:40 AM

    The underwater one is definitely the worst, even though the shortest!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanieOctober 24, 2021 at 10:29 AM

    Makes you realise how very, very big the sea is!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Obscure Occupations - Greensmen

Everyone knows what a greensman is, right?  Or do they?... ..     Non-obscure greenkeepers care for golf courses and do horticultural things like looking after the grass and the plants.  But that is not the occupation that I am going to look at. My obscure greensmen (aka greenspeople or greens for short) have an interesting job that I didn’t know existed, and I might want to be one when I grow up.  The obscure occupation is ....... greensperson in the film industry.     These professionals are part of a film’s art department and they have a crucial but usually unnoticed specialist role. Greenspeople read the script and note where any vegetation is required. Then they research, source, place, maintain and care for all the trees, plants and vegetation on set, ensuring that every bit of foliage contributes to the visual story and matches the movie’s aesthetic. Think Deliverance, The Hobbit, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, ...
Read more

The Four Idols

Image
  Francis Bacon was an English scholar and philosopher who lived from 1561 To 1626. Amongst other things he wrote and thought about thinking.   I was Googling “idols” and Francis Bacon’s Four Idols kept cropping up, so I read a bit about them and it seemed very difficult and complicated. Then I kept on reading about them and actually it’s not that difficult, in fact I think it’s really interesting.   As I said, Francis Bacon thought about thinking and, long before the birth of modern psychology, he understood that the human mind doesn’t always reason correctly. He argued that this fact needed to be understood before new ideas could be developed.   He advocated using inductive reasoning and experiments to gain insight and to prove or disprove a theory.   He wrote a book called Novum Organum and in it he outlined the Four Idols which (I think) basically described four major errors in mental processing that result in obstacles to new and innovative thinkin...
Read more