Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival (11 page)

Chapter 5 - Survival at Sea

F
OR SOME OF US, THE NOTION OF LIVING AS
FARMERS
IN THE
E
NGLISH COUNTRYSIDE WITH NO PHONE OR ELECTRICITY IS ADVENTURE ENOUGH
. I
T WASN ’T FOR THE
ROBERTSON FAMILY.
A
FTER THEIR YOUNG SON NEIL SUGGESTED ONE MORNING THAT THEY BUY A BOAT AND SAIL AROUND THE
WORLD,
THE FAMILY SPONTANEOUSLY AGREED.
T
WO YEARS LATER, HAVING SOLD ALL THEIR EARTHLY BELONGINGS, THEY HAD ENOUGH MONEY TO MAKE THE
DREAM
A REALITY.
T
HEY NEVER ANTICIPATED THE
NIGHTMARE
THEIR VOYAGE WOULD BECOME.

The Robertsons’ home for the next seventeen months would be the
Lucette,
a forty-three-foot schooner purchased in Malta and sailed back to England by Dougal, the family patriarch, who ruled his house with an iron fist. After two months of acclimatizing to the boat in the English port town of Falmouth, the Robertsons set off on their circumnavigation of the world. It was January 27, 1971.

The voyage took them first to Spain, then Portugal, after which they spent some time in the Canary Islands, where they took on two young Americans hitching a lift across the Atlantic. From there, the journey continued to the Windward Islands of the West Indies, up through the Bahamas, and on into Miami, where they stayed for a while so the kids could catch up on schoolwork. During their time in Florida, Dougal and his wife, Linda (Lyn for short), bought a fiberglass dinghy in Fort Lauderdale. Lyn remarked on how the dinghy—named
Ednamair
after her two sisters, Edna and Mary—might save their lives one day. She couldn’t have known just how prophetic her musings were.

They sailed to the island of Nassau, where the Robertsons’ eldest daughter, Anne, decided to stay and pursue her own fate. Saddened, the family continued on to Jamaica, where eldest son Douglas celebrated his eighteenth birthday.

Next stop was the archipelago of the San Blas Islands, then Panama, where they picked up a new crew member: a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in economics and statistics. Robin Williams was cheerful and adventurous, and Dougal and Lyn hoped that his mathematical prowess would rub off on the children, especially the twelve-year-old twin boys, Neil and Sandy. Robin’s plan was to stay with the family for the seven-thousand-mile voyage across the Pacific to New Zealand. He got more than he bargained for—much more.

The first stop in the Pacific was the Galapagos Islands. After an idyllic time spent island-hopping and reveling in what may still be the purest wildlife refuge on earth, the Robertsons set sail for the Marquesas Islands, a group of volcanic islands that forms part of French Polynesia, more than four thousand miles away. Two days out of the Galapagos, on June 15, 1972, disaster struck. Early that morning, while most of the family was in bed, sleeping or reading, the
Lucette
was struck by a blow of unthinkable proportions. Instantly, the sound of rushing water filled the cabin, as the cry of “Whales!” hurtled from the cockpit. Dougal rushed to the hole to find the blue Pacific pouring into the now-fragile craft. The desperate efforts he and Lyn made to stop the onslaught of water were futile. The
Lucette
was sinking—fast. It had been their home for the previous year and a half, but it wouldn’t take long before the schooner was at the bottom of the Pacific.

There was little time to think. Dougal called, “Abandon ship!” and the others sprung to life. Life jackets were tied on, and a few odd tools were grabbed during the mayhem. The ropes holding the dinghy to the mainmast and foremast were cut and an inflatable life raft was sent into the water. With the
Lucette
rapidly disappearing into the shark-inhabited waters of the Pacific, the Robertsons had no choice but to make for their two small boats. The dinghy was half full of water, so they began to swim to the life raft, now fully inflated. The last thing Dougal did before abandoning the
Lucette
was toss a bag of onions, a bag of oranges, and a bag of lemons into the water. He also grabbed a vegetable knife and threw it into the dinghy.

With everyone safe in the raft, Dougal swam for the dinghy, where he gathered up as many oranges and lemons as he could reach and tossed them back to the life raft. The
Lucette
’s
water containers had either floated away or sunk, as had a box of flares. He swam back to the life raft, grabbing a floating tin of gasoline on the way. As he swam toward the rubber craft that now held everything precious to him in the world, he caught one last glimpse of the
Lucette
as the tops of her sails disappeared into the ocean.

The Robertsons and Robin were all on board, shaken but very much alive. And while they all made it, their folly was that they didn’t have a preset plan (an ultra-efficient way of jumping into action without thinking) of what to do if something went wrong. It is surprising that they didn’t have a survival kit at the ready that they could grab in emergency situations. Luckily, though, they had the raft, which was stocked with its own survival kit.

As the shock of their new reality washed over them, the details of what had just happened started to become clear. Douglas, who had been on watch at the time of the accident, saw a pod of about twenty killer whales (orcas) approach the
Lucette
at top speed. Three of them rammed the ship’s six-thousand-pound lead keel, shattering the elm strakes of the keel on impact.

I was once on a boat during a
Survivorman
shoot in the high Arctic, when we came across nineteen orcas as they chased a few hundred narwhal, which, in turn, were chasing arctic char. In similar fashion to the Robertsons’ experience, three orcas broke off from the pod and sped straight for the side of our twenty-foot steel boat. They came within inches of ramming our craft, but suddenly dove, made a sharp right turn, and resurfaced in front of the boat. It was terrifying, yet exhilarating, and fortunately, I didn’t meet the same fate the Robertsons did that day in 1971.

In those early moments after the disaster, Dougal wrestled with an emotion that affects so many people in survival situations: guilt.
He
had sold all their belongings and brought the family on this voyage.
He
had failed to anticipate this type of disaster.
He
was ultimately responsible for their well-being.

Yet like many who had come before him, Dougal channeled his guilt into motivation to survive. He began almost immediately, first by taking stock of their minimal supplies, beginning with the raft’s survival kit, which was encased in a three-foot-long plastic cylinder. The survival kit contained the following:

vitamin-fortified bread and glucose for 10 people for 2 days

water (18 pints)

flares (8)

bailer (1)

fish hooks (2 large and 2 small)

spinner and trace (1), along with 25-pound test fishing line

patent knife

signal mirror

flashlight

first aid kit

sea anchors (2)

instruction book

bellows

paddles (3)

They also had the bag of onions, a one-pound tin of cookies, a jar containing about half a pound of candies, ten oranges, and six lemons. There were six people—four adults and the twins—in the middle of a rarely traveled section of the Pacific. Things were looking grim, indeed.

I understand the fear they must have been experiencing. It’s one thing to go without food, but the prospect of dehydration must have risen to the front of their collective consciousness very quickly. That’s why it must have been very difficult to sit and watch one of the
Lucette
’s water containers float away on the sea. But these were shark-inhabited waters, and a pod of killer whales had just sunk their forty-three-foot boat. It would have taken a real act of heroism to jump into the water and retrieve the container. Nobody did.

Lyn and Dougal immediately set to the task at hand: surviving. Whether they knew it or not, they jumped to activity with the most important first step in any survival situation: assessment. Lyn wanted to know, brutally and exactly, what their chance of survival was and how they might get back to safety. But first, she provided all the motivation she and Dougal would need in the many weeks to come. She put her hand in Dougal’s and said quietly, “We must get these boys to land. If we do nothing else with our lives, we must get them to land.”

Lyn was very brave (and smart) in asking Dougal for the truth about their situation. It would have been far easier to sugarcoat reality, especially with children on board and the pain of losing the
Lucette
so acute, but there is no room for fantasy in a survival situation. The truth should almost always be told. The only exception would perhaps be when you are dealing with an extremely panicky person who is on the verge of losing control.

Dougal considered the situation as thoroughly and realistically as his seafaring mind would allow. They were more than two hundred miles downwind and
down current from the Galapagos. Rowing back was impossible, even if the two strongest took to the dinghy to seek help while the others stayed behind in the raft. The Marquesas lay thousands of miles in the other direction; reaching them would be a physical and navigational impossibility, especially since all their navigational tools had gone down with the
Lucette.
The coast of Central America, more than a thousand miles to the northeast and on the other side of the Doldrums (also known as the “equatorial calms”), a low-pressure area around the equator renowned for its calm winds, seemed equally unreachable.

Of course, the other option was to stay put and wait for rescue, an important consideration in any survival situation. Yet Dougal knew that it could be as long as five weeks before a search was even initiated. Even then, the chance of being found—a virtual speck in thousands of miles of open ocean—was slim. The chance of being rescued by a passing vessel was equally remote, as the closest shipping routes lay hundreds of miles away. Rain was scarce and wouldn’t come to the region with any kind of regularity for another six months. Their hope of survival beyond ten days was faint, at best.