Lost at sea: a man who vanished for 14 months | Hacker News Reader

Lost at sea: a man who vanished for 14 months

theguardian.com

244 pointsangadsg59 comments

"They ate fish after fish. Alvarenga stuffed raw meat and dried meat into his mouth, hardly noticing or caring about the difference."

Fine detail born out of other survivors of long sea voyages, when eating fish don't skip they "eyes".

"Another unlikely luxury are fish eyes, which are a useful source of liquid and of another vital nutrient. Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, a British couple who survived 117 days on a rubber life raft in the Pacific in 1973, did not initially understand why they sought them, Tipton said: "They found they started to crave fish eyes, which is not something one would normally do. It wasn't until after the voyage they realised these are quite rich in vitamin C, which is something you get depleted in when you're adrift, and can of course cause scurvy." [0]

I remember reading about the how the Baileys who survived 117 days in the pacific in '73. There is a lot more details in Tiptons, "Essentials of Sea Survival". [1] Another detail, was solid boat. Had Alvarenga been in a life raft, he would have been a lot more battered and bruised. The Baileys suffered from sharks regularly bumping the raft throughout their ordeal.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/castaway-jose-s...

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Essentials-Sea-Survival-Frank-Golden...

Interesting how cultural perspectives differ on this.

As a Chinese American, I wouldn't think twice about eating the eyes of a fish. They're tasty!

Yup, a bit like caviar in texture and taste, I find, but sweeter.

Sheep eyes, on the other hand, are disturbing as they balefully glare at you from your bowl of soup.

People make sheeps heads soup?

(They're supposed to be salted and dried then cooked for Sunday dinner (skjelte) or even better smoked over open fire, then cooked (smalahove) and eaten at party with friends.)

Agreed. Fish head curry is very popular in Singapore, and the eyes are in there as part of the sauce. You wouldn't even notice. Tasty stuff.

I wonder if in the past in was major source of VitC for certain fishing subcultures. So, people thinking it gross got sick and failed to reproduce or simply taught others "fish eye a day keeps the rotting gums away".

"As a Chinese American, I wouldn't think twice about eating the eyes of a fish."

The advantage of coming from a strong, older culture. "Head to tail" is a new (old & forgotten) thing in western (I'm thinking Anglo, UK, Aus) ... something SE Asian cultures (and others) haven't forgotten.

> Although he didn’t know it, Alvarenga had washed ashore on Tile Islet, a small island that is part of the Ebon Atoll, on the southern tip of the 1,156 islands that make up the Republic of the Marshall Islands, one of the most remote spots on Earth.

As it took me a little while to find Tile Islet, here's the link on google maps for others' convenience:

https://www.google.com.au/maps/@4.6210188,168.7678056,15z

He got very lucky - as not only was bumping into the Marshalls remarkable, but he didn't end up on Eniwetok/Enewetak or one of the other nuked atolls, where only radiation sickness would have greeted him.

It's been long enough that the most radioactive stuff is gone, the US military also did extensive cleanup 30 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enewetak_Atoll#/media/File:Run...

"The final cost of the cleanup project was $239 million."

"Occasionally, the turtles are very tame. I was lying down and thinking about things and then a turtle would hit my boat and attach itself to it and start chewing at my boat," Alvarenga recounted, according to Reuters. "And since turtles are tame I would pick them up and put them in my boat, this is how I quenched my thirst, from their blood, and it did me good as it was a sort of water and I normally ate the turtle's meat."

Link:

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/marshall-islands-castaway/p...

Life of Pi, chapter 70 http://www.litcharts.com/lit/life-of-pi/chapter-70

I find it incredible that their drifting sent them in the same general direction that Thor Heyerdahl [0] suspected (and verified in the Kon-Tiki expedition) that one would go without any extra power of their own.

The fact that a man who didn't even plan for the trip (or have any provisions) made it out alive even though he was virtually alone for the entire trip (his partner died after 2 months) leads me to believe that Thor was mostly right, and that South Americans did indeed travel to Polynesia and beyond probably more often than we originally thought.

What an amazing story.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl

You have it backwards. Polynesians travelled to South America and back, acquiring sweet potatoes there, possibly some human DNA, and leaving chickens (there is good evidence for each of these, but it's not undeniable). There is a huge amount of evidence of Polynesians travelling long distances by sea, and, as far as I can see, essentially no evidence for South Americans doing this. The fact that it was theoretically possible does not mean it happened.

Last year at the local planetarium I saw a great presentation about how the Polynesians navigated using the stars. It was a tradition that was almost lost, but they found someone in the 70s whose grandfather had taught him how, and now they have a school in Hawaii that teaches it.

http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/index/founder_and_teachers/nainoa_...

Interestingly, part of their motivation in reviving it was that they were offended by Heyerdahl's hypothesis, which in their view basically said "Polynesians were dumb enough to get on a raft and just let it drift." More recently DNA analysis has shown that Polynesians came from Asia, not South America.

FYI his name was Mau Piailug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Piailug

If you enjoy tales of survival against the odds, I highly recommend Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales [1]

It recounts multiple amazing tales of survival against the odds, then goes into the psychology of what's needed to survive such a situation. Finally, it lists the top 10 traits exhibited by survivors of these kinds of situations.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393326152/?tag=roadchoseme-20

Not just psychology but neurochemistry as well, some really deep nature-vs-nurture stuff in there. Great book, as a technical diver and divemaster I got a lot from it.

I don't think it's necessary to include an affiliate link here. Foremost, I would be surprised if it gets enough traffic to matter, and in quite a few forums it's considered quite rude.

I am curious as to how he caught these turtles and birds in the open sea while in his no doubt famished shape.

"shoved his arms into the water up to his shoulders . . . When a fish swam between his hands, he smashed them shut"

Seriously, this needs some mythbusters-style testing.

Birds and turtles are curious about drifting things, like boats. And both are easy to catch (well, relatively).

I haven't caught fish with my hands but at sea been in situations where it didn't seem impossible. And the fishermen I know in the area (I live there on a boat) are magicians.

So sure, everything needs testing but I have a bit of a frame of reference around this one and it raises no red flags for me at all. Plus it's inline with the other lost-at-sea books I've read.

Fair enough, I have no frame of reference for this stuff at all, so it seems like magic to me.

Someone else in this comments section linked to an article that explains how he caught the turtles. Basically (like you mentioned) turtles would get curious about the boat and swim right up to it, so he was able to get them that way. I presume the fish and birds behaved in the same manner, so it really lowers the red flags for me.

I would still love to see a video of someone catching these things the same way the drifter did though.

I once put my hand around an urban squirrel's tail. Could have held it if I'd squeezed a bit. It was sitting on a wall munching some garbage, and I just walked straight up to it. Have you ever seen a squirrel do a double-take?

I guess my point is that even slippery little animals aren't as uncatchable as one would expect, if you can take them by surprise.

That seems like step one of a plan to get rabies.

According to the CDC, squirrels are almost never a source of rabies. http://www.cdc.gov/rabies/pets/ - that is, unless they are acting in an unusual manner, such as letting people walk up to them and grab them....

It was a campus squirrel. They're generally used to people walking by within a few feet. This was just a little slow to shift gears, apparently.

I remember walking the boardwalk of Atlantic City when I was very young. My grandfather (a farmer) asked me if I wanted to "see something". Sure, I said.

The next thing I knew, he had grabbed a seagull by both feet with one hand and it was flapping it's wings wildly and squawking into my terrified face.

So I'd imagine that after a few weeks at sea and actually depending on catching birds/fish by hand for survival that one could do so.

Boats typically need their bottom cleaned regularly if they are kept in the water. Based on the other comment (the turtles came to the boat), I would guess the bottom had thick growth that attracted the turtles. Also fish are attracted to shade (it's common to see fish hanging out in the shade under piers for example).

If I were adrift at sea, I'd spend all that time doing something. Might as well be figuring out how to catch fish.

Tickling trout is illegal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_tickling) - so presumably it's not that difficult.

Based on my scuba diving experiences, at least, giant turtles are pretty slow. They don't have to be fast because I don't think they have any natural predators once they get beyond a certain size (could be wrong about that).

What's fascinating to me is that they start out as tiny little turtles that run like hell from the beach and swim as fast as they can. Most of them get eaten in the first couple days.

I'm curious about the long-term health affects from such an experience. The parasites sound particularly nasty. [edit] It would be nice to know if he is expected to recover his physical health or if he is left with chronic conditions.

raw birds had infected his liver with parasites. Alvarenga believed the parasites might rise up to his head and attack his brain

"23kg (50lb) of sardines for bait, 700 hooks, miles of line"

"Without bait or fish hooks, Alvarenga invented a daring strategy to catch fish. "

I am confused these statements are contradictory, did I miss something.

As mentioned in the article, he tossed almost everything overboard to make the boat more stable in the waves.

Yes the article was being specific though in the things they threw overboard, I guess you can just deduce what the author intended. Good story though.

Hooks and line have got to be the worst choices to throw overboard. I can't imagine it made much of a weight difference on a boat as long as two trucks. But then again he also smashed the engine when he got mad, so maybe it was just one in a series of poor choices.

The article doesn't make clear what sort of hooks and line these were. It's likely to have been a big, heavy, motorized rig from which the line and hooks couldn't be neatly separated, especially while frantically aligning the boat and bailing water in a freak storm.

We should also bear in mind that, at that moment, Alvarenga wasn't anticipating a year at sea. In fact, he was acting to prevent that fate. He believed that his first priority was the right the ship at any cost, because the alternative was capsizing or going adrift. From there, he'd planned to make it back to shore or be rescued in relatively short order.

It's too easy to critique his choices retrospectively. Some of them look bad on paper, out of context. But I've never been placed into that sort of context.

As a general rule, your first priority in any emergency at sea is to stay afloat. This directive overrules all others until you believe your vessel is stable and secure.

"shoved his arms into the water up to his shoulders. With his chest tightly pressed to the side of the boat, he kept his hands steady, a few inches apart. When a fish swam between his hands, he smashed them shut, digging his fingernails into the rough scales"

Can't imagine how long this took. In the middle of the ocean, most of the time you don't even see any fish at the surface. How long do you have to wait for one to swim right between your arms?

Dangling things attract fish. If he was wiggling his fingers, fish might well come to investigate.

Tickling trout is a well-established (though generally highly illegal) freshwater fishing method.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_tickling

Why would that be illegal? You'd think it's the taking that's illegal, not the method?

I think because it's a way of concealing poaching (no artifacts besides your bare hands) so it's extra harshly punished, but it's just my guess.

Possible that it's not considered "fair chase"? In North America, a lot of conservation ethics are hard-codified into law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_chase

During the storm, they threw everything they could overboard to make the boat lighter. They threw away their catch, as well as the hooks and line.

One of the absolutely necessary things you should have on board is solar panels, to keep your radio alive.

Also, the movie All Is Lost comes to mind.

Or some other kind of backup radio or emergency signaling device; solar panels sound awfully expensive / fragile, instead you could have a self-contained wind-up system, bolted onto the ship somewhere secure.

Current practice on first-world vessels sometimes includes solar panels, but even better is an EPIRB [1]. Too expensive for third-world fishermen who anyway did not intend an ocean crossing. You don't need long-term power for it, because you only activate it once, it is more power efficient than talking on a radio, and it doesn't need to run for very long, because there is a high chance you will be rescued straight away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_radiobeacon

This kind of thing makes me wonder if there are dozens or hundreds of other cases where people were lost at sea and survived for many months and thousands of miles, but never made it to land so we'll never know.

If you liked that, you may also like "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Available from fine retailers of books. And Amazon.com.

How would you find others still out there living in similar precarious situations?

Some sort of automatic scanners on all cargo and cruise ships.

A most interesting idea.

I've read several of these "survival at sea" stories and one thing they all have in common is the fact that they end up passing many container ships before they are rescued. Certainly some kind of automated scanning would save lives.

The problem might not be technological. It's possible that the container ships see these people and choose not to save them. The owners and crew of the ship have a monetary incentive not to save people: according to [1] they have to pay a penalty for arriving at a port with people not listed on the crew manifest.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/world/stowaway-crime-scoff...

There's also the question of whether or not people need rescuing. Simply because you see somebody adrift, even if they're waving their arms, doesn't mean it's necessarily a true emergency. And now we would make container ships stop and investigate? That doesn't work.

Still, even if the data was simply collected and logged, perhaps others could sift through it for clues about where rescues might need to take place. With the cost of cameras and bandwidth continuing to go down, it wouldn't be a crazy expensive thing to install.

In my mental model, rescues differ from stowaways in that the rescued would likely be glad to pay for any fines incurred whereas that's almost certainly not true of stowaways.

But, as has been said over and over in these threads: it's one thing to make commentary on the Internet and quite another to be there and have to choose.

Interesting read.

An idea:

Using planet.com's satelite images to find boats at drift seams like a cool use of technology.

If you recall when that airliner went missing tons of people starting scanning satellite images for debris. The resolution is simply not high enough to detect tiny little things like debri or life rafts.

The difference is that planet.com will give a picture per day; every day.

1x1m is what they claim and if you get one image a day i recon one could use some statistical analysis and get better results.

I do recognize that it wont be easy despite that. Image all the shit that is floating around that is not a shipwreck.

The picture per day part is really cool - instead of having to look for a life raft/debris, we can look for patterns of abnormality across time. Given how large the ocean is, we have a good sense of the 'normal' distribution of images every day, so maybe we can find patterns like consistently "abnormal" images along a wind/current vector over 7 days. Individual debris may not be visible, but fields of debris may have some characteristics we can recognize.

When we have continuous scanning of the earth by satellites you could put out some tarp that is easy to scan for with software. Instead of laying out rocks to say HELP you lay them out in something that looks like a QR code.

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