A True Story: The Robertson Family...Surviving The Savage Sea

Three sharp bangs, a violent shudder, and a keel that sounds like a tree snapping across a giant’s knee. That’s how Douglas remembers the moment killer whales hit his family’s wooden yacht in the Pacific Ocean and turned a round-the-world dream into a survival crisis with no SOS, no shipping lanes, and only days of water.

We trace the story from a remote English hill farm to buying the schooner Lucette, learning seamanship on the fly, and roaming from the Caribbean to Miami to the Galapagos. Then everything flips: the yacht sinks fast, six people scramble into a life raft, and every mistake somehow becomes the next piece of luck. Douglas walks us through the real mechanics of ocean survival: rationing and replenishing water, improvising sails, hunting turtles and catching fish, drying meat, managing saltwater injuries, and keeping watch even after a ship passes close enough to haunt them.

What makes this conversation unforgettable is the mindset. Douglas describes the daily ritual of saying “survival,” the navigation decisions made without instruments, reading clouds and currents, and using the North Star as proof they’re moving toward rain. We also talk faith under pressure, the strange beauty of the night sky while death feels inches away, and how the ordeal echoes through the decades, from careers to family to a reunion with the Japanese captain who finally pulled them from the sea.

If you’re drawn to true survival stories, maritime history, and practical resilience, press play, then subscribe, share this with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review so more people can find it.

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Transcript

Orca Impact Cold Open

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Remote from the world that we were, the events of the next few seconds were going to change our lives forever. Bang! Bang! Bang! Like that. The whole boat shuddered and shook. The keel split. It's like if you can imagine a tree being broken by a giant across his knee.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

The tr the split.

Why This Survival Story Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Murders to Music Podcast. My name is Aaron, I'm your host, and thank you guys so much for coming back for another week. Hey, on tonight's episode, we're gonna touch uh we're gonna touch on a story or a type of story that we have never focused on before. And I kinda I teased you guys with this episode here a few weeks ago, and it's finally out. So this episode is worth listening to. In 1971, a family of six set sail across the world on a yacht, only for their ship to be attacked, sunk in the middle of the ocean, and for a family of six to live on a life raft for seven weeks until they were rescued. And tonight we're gonna hear from one of the survivors. At the time, he's a 15-year-old boy who is living on this little life raft, this little dinghy, five foot by two foot by four inches high on the ocean for seven weeks. You're gonna hear the story of survival, the story of hope, and the story of redemption. So, guys, let's meet him, let's hear the story, and without further ado, you're gonna want to stick around to the end because there's gonna be twists and turns that you can't even imagine. So let's get into it.

Meet Douglas In London

SPEAKER_00 2:04

So, Douglas, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show and tell me your story. Um it's I think it's awesome. You know, when I heard it the first time, I was absolutely fascinated. And I uh looked for you and trying to find you was tough, but I finally found you through Facebook of all things. And thank you for responding to my message and being on the show. I really appreciate it. Can you tell me uh tell me about yourself now? We're gonna get into the incident, but tell me about yourself now. Where do you live? What are you doing? What's your family like?

SPEAKER_02 2:34

I live in London in England, and uh I'm retired, supposed to be retired. Uh I'm actually uh an accountant, a qualified accountant, and I've got a small accounting practice in uh in London. And uh they uh I am married to a uh Sikh lady, an Indian lady, and uh we have a large family that we spend a lot of time trying to get around to see. I think we've got 17 grandchildren at the moment, and um they uh uh so in between work and doing uh talks like this, like this one, um that the and and uh talking about what happened to us and uh um you know looking after the the the the the larger family and kept very busy. Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

So let's talk a little bit about you growing up. Did were you born and raised in that area? Uh tell me about your life. What was it like as a child? Tell me about your parents, your siblings, if you have any, and what you guys did growing up.

Rural Childhood And Tough Parents

SPEAKER_02 3:49

Well, um they uh I was b uh born and raised in the middle of England on a hill farm, uh a very rural, isolated uh upbringing. When I think about my mum and dad being professionals, my mum was a special fevers nurse, and my dad was a sea captain in Hong Kong, and they they lived a uh a good life, I think you'd call it a good professional life out there. And um they came home uh and decided for some reason to start farming. I mean, there were they here's a couple of qualified individuals, uh professional individuals who had no idea about farming and yet turned to it as an ideal way to bring a family up. And you know, maybe they're right, but um after 15 years of living with uh no electricity, no running water, uh we we had the telephone installed when I was about eight. Uh we had uh uh the the roads were un unmetled, and uh so we lived in isolation and um we thought everybody lived like that, that was our life. You know, we were not aware of the hardships that we were we were put to. We used to walk to school every day, it was uh three miles to the primary school, and then it was uh five miles to the uh uh the high school. And um one day, Dougle, what we we all used to gather around on Sundays uh in my mum and dad's bed and discuss the week, you know, school for for me, uh what the twins were up to, uh my sister, what her uh college, she was uh going to go to college, and uh what what my mum my mum was working by then, so we sort of had a uh uh a catch-up on Sunday mornings, and then we'd talk about anything that was in the news or something like that.

A Throwaway Idea Becomes A Voyage

SPEAKER_02 5:58

And there was a round the world yacht race going on. This is long before GPS was invented, and and and my dad being a sailor was an authority on it, and and you know, he talked about uh the privations that lone yachtsmen perhaps uh have to go through uh to to to sail around the world. And uh my young brother, so so I had two two twin brothers age uh 11, uh my sister who was uh 16 or 17, and I was just coming up to 16. Uh so we were a young family, uh, and and and then a mum and dad who were looking after us, uh as I say, farmers out in the middle of nowhere. And um Neil said, my younger brother said, Well, my my dad's a sailor, why don't we sail around the world? And of course, it was a throwaway comment for him. But my dad, who unbeknown to us, of course, was farming in in a very tough economic background, and uh the farm was not an economic success. And Dougall just latched onto that thought and he thought, why not? I I've brought the children up in a very rural upbringing where they don't understand what's happening in the world, but we we didn't have a TV because we didn't have electricity. The electricity had not been wired through to the remote part of the country where we lived. And you know, so it was not our fault that we didn't know a lot about the world. Uh we knew a lot about other things, I suppose, you know you know, farming and uh uh uh unbeknown to us survival. We we we we uh we often got snowed in in the winters and had to uh make do until the s the snow was cleared. And so uh an idea was born, and uh two years later we'd sold the farm, bought a yacht, and were actually going to sail around the world.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

Wow. Um so I want to talk about the yacht, but I want to talk about your dad. Describe your dad for me. What kind of man was he, and what impact did he have on you and your life prior to the incident?

SPEAKER_02 9:05

Well, my dad was a wartime sailor. He'd been sunk in the war by a Japanese in Trinkomelee. Uh he'd lost people dear to him then.

Who Dougal Really Was

SPEAKER_02 9:17

And um he'd met my mum after the war uh out in the Far East. He was a tough man. He was only five foot six, little man. And uh I mean this is my dad for you, you know. We you in in England back then you were not allowed to go drinking out to a pub until you were s uh eighteen years old. And when I was sixteen, he said, I'll take you to the pub, Douglas, but sit in the corner and be quiet. And because if the police found you in there, they'd throw you out, you know, maybe even prosecute you. And uh my dad got into a fight while we were in there, and he got thrown out, and I was left inside the pub with a pint of beer that was like bigger than me, you know what I mean? And uh so that was my dad for you, you know. He was uh hot-blooded and uh uh but courageous. He a courageous man, he was a clever man. Uh he always had an anecdote, he always understood the political situation of the day and what was going on around the world. And I suppose that I I always remember when the Soviets sent a Sputnik up and in into the into space, he'd worked out that it would fly over the farm, and he had us all standing outside watching for the Sputnik, and lo and behold, there it was, it flew right over us, you know. Uh with I think it had a monkey or a dog on it. So we are talking back in the late 60s there, and um and we s we we sold the farm in 1970, so it was right on the turn of the decade that uh we acquired the yacht Lisette.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

And uh well, our adventure was about to begin. In in those days, what was this yacht made out of? Is it fiberglass, wood, steel?

SPEAKER_02 11:14

It was made of wood. She was made, you know, back in those

The Wooden Yacht Lucette

SPEAKER_02 11:17

days they knew how to build wooden boats. She had something called grown oak frames. So her boat was made of frames and then planks were nailed to the frames. But these frames were grown oak. That means the oak trees were shaped in that that form as they were growing, so that the grain of the oak went through the length of the frame, made it very strong. Uh, she had pitch pan planking, which is, you know, again the Rolls-Royce of uh building materials of the day, filled with resin. Pitch pan is filled with resin, so it's waterproof for a hundred years. And she was copper fastened, which meant big copper nails, they don't corrode in the in the sea, and so she was she was built to a very high standard, but she was built of wood, which made her heavy, and so therefore, the the the chap who had her built, um Major Newt from uh uh the the Netherlands said that she would go a long way in a very long time.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:25

So she was a robust but slow old lady, you know. But ideal for a family. I mean, we were not racing around the world. We were we were going to cruise around the world and see the world.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

So your brother, your brother Neil makes an off-handed comment. Hey, why don't we sail around the world? Next thing you know, two years later, you guys have a yacht, you've sold the farm, literally. Instead of buying the farm, you sold the farm, and you guys are on the water sailing around the world. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_02 12:51

Well well, it we we hadn't set, we didn't just set off that simply. There were lots of moments of indecision, as you can imagine, you know. Yeah. And I always I always re

Setting Sail With No Training

SPEAKER_02 13:02

remember being down in Falmouth, and we couldn't really live on the boat when it was being repaired, and uh it had repair works being carried out to it. And uh the the man and we stayed in a bed and breakfast, like a sort of an Airbnb, if you like, of today's sort of style. And uh the man who owned it said had said, Oh, it had always been his dream. He was a a currency trader in London, and he'd come out to Falmouth and Cornwall to and and bought this guest house, and uh this had always been his dream. And but I always remember looking at his shirts, and his shirts were starched and ironed, you know. I mean, that we we didn't have iron starch shirts, you know what I mean? We we were living on a boat, and my dad said to him, if only my dream could be that simple. You know, we all have our dreams, and uh, you know, these were little inklings that Dougle was doing this trip more for himself than for us, you know. I mean, we were the excuse. But him and my mum had uh constant debate from when the farm was sold to when we actually set off, which was about six months, where the trip was on, it was off, it was uh we could go to the Mediterranean instead. We did the I mean, why do we have to go around the world? The world's a big place, you know. There was uh the only communication was medium frequency radio in those days, and uh you you you you you couldn't always get it because of the atmospheric conditions. And uh so there was the mail post, and uh, you know, that that that was pretty slow, and um planes hadn't started yet, they're b big jets across the Atlantic didn't fly. If you wanted to go to America by plane, you had to get um uh a a four-prop turboprop uh uh airliner that stopped in Reykjavik to refuel and then made the hop over to to to Maine or and and and then onwards in into America. Um the world was a very different place, you know. And um they and maybe that puts it all into perspective because it sounds a bit rough and ready, but in actual fact their boat was a fine finely built schooner. The schooner's the best sort of brig for s for two-masted for um for cruising, two masted because if what if you lose one you've still got a mast, you know, that to to get you back home. Uh she had six berths, she was had teak decks, and uh she she uh she had a lot of not repairs but reinforcements if you like, done to her when while she was in Falmouth to uh make sure that she was up for for a round-the-world trip. But I will say this, we spent three months in Falmouth before we set sail, and we were farmers, and not once did Dougal actually take us out for a sail, or actually practice sailing, or learn how to sail. When we set sail around the world on January 1971, that was the first time we'd ever sailed a boat, and it's just unbelievable that that Dougal Dougal says, Well, I believe in training, on the job training. That's what he said. But I I literally didn't did not know how to steer the boat when I first took the wheel as we left Falmouth to sail around the world.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

Wow. Tell me about your tell me about your trip sailing around the world. Uh and where were you guys headed to? What were your destinations? And I know Galapagos Islands is going to come into play here in a minute, but kind of walk me through your journey and walk me through what happened to you guys.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Well, we met an Icelandic family in Falmouth, and they had a famous uh yacht that they were sailing. Well, they decided when they met us that they too would sail around the world. And we we joined hands, if you like, and uh they they had a family of uh young children, our age, and we

Caribbean Adventures And Miami Reset

SPEAKER_02 17:57

we all partnered up with different kids from the in our respective age groups, and um they the uh uh Siggy was a the Icelander was a uh a very professional captain and uh sea captain, and uh we decided we would meet up in port to port. So we did actually know where we were going because we would agree with the Icelanders where we would uh meet them. And uh so we'd we we made a plan that we would sail from uh Falmouth to um Lisbon and uh in Portugal onto the Canary Islands and catch the trade winds across to the Caribbean. That was sort of our plan, and we would do it in company with this Icelandic yacht and this this Icelandic family. Um the winds blew from out of the south for two months after that, and we couldn't get out, we were a windlocked, we couldn't get out of Falmouth. And eventually, when the wind did change in in that January day, it was going to be quite strong winds, but we couldn't wait any longer in Falmouth, and we decided to make a run for it. And uh so our our our baptism of fire was that we went straight into a four-stand gale in the Bay of Biscay, and we we we we uh I remember my uh my mum saying to my dad, Dougal, can we send up the rockets please? And Dougal saying to my mum, don't be silly, woman, only a fool would be out in weather like this. And my mum saying to him, exactly, you know, you said it, you know. I mean you you are the fool that's out here in it, you know. And uh so but we made it. We made it through uh very, very bitter storms into Lisbon, and the sun came out, and um and rather than thinking about returning home, we were thinking about our trip around the world, you know, and we were we were fascinated by the the idea that we as a small small farming community from a small farming community uh a family who'd not really done anything other than go to high school in the in the local town, which is five miles away, uh were on this amazing trip. So when when when we eventually got across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, we sailed up through the Caribbean Islands, and we we uh we we we had a few incidents and breakdowns and setbacks, but we had an uh one adventure after another. Life was one adventure after another. We we saved a fishing boat and its crew, uh rescued them, we uh we lost the rudder and had to find it and get it repaired in St. Thomas, uh US Virgin Islands. We uh we uh went up to the Bahamas and we uh we uh sailed through the Coral Islands there and eventually landed in Miami. And uh the uh there wasn't one event that I'll tell you about which was seemingly insignificant, but turned out to be an extremely significant, and that was the Icelanders. They had two life rafts, and Siggy was insistent that we have one, because we didn't actually have a life raft on our boat. We had a dinghy, and Dougal, who was always very sure of his opinions, always said that the best lifeboat you can possibly have is the yacht itself, because it'll never actually sink, so as long as you stay on it and get your SOS out, you'll get picked up on in time. That was our plan A and plan B survival strategy. But Siggy, of course, thought that was a pretty dumb plan, you know, and he said, Look, I insist that you have a life raft and Dougle of course refused, and do uh Siggy, a wise man, said Dougal, I'm not giving it to you, I'm giving it to your wife and children. And so Dougle, of course, had to accept this raft begrudgingly. And well, thank God, you know, because uh that raft was going to figure in our lives tremendously in the days to come. And the other major point was arriving in Miami, because we were young teenagers, and Miami was waking up, if you like, from this sleepy uh holiday retirement city where all the American people from New York and Chicago came down to Miami Beach and retired there. It was becoming a uh a young person's place. And there were the the the I guess I guess drugs were getting into in into Miami then, but nobody knew it at at that time. And uh the the uh we had a blast. We had an absolute blast in Miami. We stayed there six and a half months and we thought that we'd we were actually living there, you know. We we didn't realise we were still on this trip round the world. Until one day Dougal said, We're leaving. But while we were in Miami, we acquired this dinghy. And the dinghy had been built as part of a school project from a college in Fort Lauderdale. And uh they it was well built, and uh we we uh so on our departure from Miami we had the life raft from the Icelanders and we had the dinghy from the from from the Fort Lauderdale, and uh we had the Lusette of course and the Lusette went into dry dock in in Miami, so she'd been completely overhauled, the rigging, the sails, the the the fastenings, and uh the and so our journey continued down past um Jamaica, Windward Passage, onto Panama and the San Blas Islands, through the canal and onto the Galapagos Islands. And you know, for me, uh speaking for myself now, I never wanted it to end. Uh uh it was such a fantastic adventure for a young man to be going on, and um of course my dad, we called him Captain Bly behind his back because he was such a tough tough boot, you know. But for to me, he was my hero. Uh I I loved him and and he he'd given us this great gift, if you like, from of of having the courage to sell the farm. I mean, who does these sorts of things? Sell the farm, buy a yacht, and take his family around the world. And here we were doing it. We were we were meeting tribes of Indians and uh Indian chiefs and um I got judged I worked in Miami. I was uh I used to park cars, I couldn't even have a license. I I worked at the uh valet car parking, you know, in in in Biscayne Bay. And uh uh the uh the the we met the astronauts from the moon landing, you know, and these are these were things that just would never have come our way had we uh had we stayed in in England and and not sort of stepped off the off the tr uh the treadmill, you know. So I take my hat off to my dad for that. Uh no matter what happened or what was to happen, uh that was nobody's fault. But um we set sail from Panama uh early in 19 so sorry in probably May time of 1972, and uh we were on our way to Galapagos and from there on the way to Marquesas across the Pacific. And uh whilst on the way to uh uh Galapagos, we had a large whale, 55 foot long, came up uh alongside and tried to make love to the boat, rubbing itself up the hull. And uh, you know, I mean they smell, people don't appreciate

Galapagos To Marquesas Departure

SPEAKER_02 26:34

that. That blowhole, that stuff that when they blow their blowhole, it smells like concentrated, putrefied Brussels sprouts, you know, and this the smell clings to every bit of cloth for two days, you know, and redlined. But this whale was blowing its blowhole over us and rubbing itself down the side of the boat. And we thought then that the only reason it could be doing that was because it thought we were another whale. And uh, when of course the boat was not interested, off it swam. And uh, well, it it it served as nothing more than a talking point then. And we got on into Galapagos Islands and we cruised the Galapagos Islands for three weeks, and we uh, you know, fascinating. And uh on the thirteenth of June we set sail for the Marquesas. Now my mother didn't want to sail on the thirteenth, she said it was bad luck. But Dougal, who knew everything, said, Well it's not Friday the thirteenth, so therefore it's not bad luck, and we should go. So we set sail on the thirteenth, and uh well we were two days out on our on our voyage. We'd we'd picked up a student in in m Panama who was willing to pay his passage across to New Zealand, so we were headed for Australia and New Zealand on that leg. And uh the uh as I say, we were two days out, it was ten o'clock in the morning. The wind was quite blustery, maybe force five, that sort of above force four, so that the the the waves were breaking around us and uh the boat was rolling. We were in what was what are called the southeastern trades. So we were south of the equator, and the wind was blowing from behind on our port quarter, basically, and uh we were making good progress. And for a for a for a boat that went a long way in a long time, we were fair rolling along, you know. Uh it was ten o'clock in the morning, and we caught a squid on the fishing line. And I'd I'd actually been up all night, but I woke up at about nine o'clock and thought I'd go up on deck and see that uh everything was okay. And um they I checked the fishing line and pulled in this uh this squid on the on the end of the line, and I remember saying to my brother who was on watch, Sandy, that um usually where the squid, there's other big fish around. Uh and um we we th we we just uh in fact there was the the coffee pot was on and we were so I asked Sandy if he wanted coffee and I would go down and get him one when it was made. And um we saw a sort of a dark triangle over on the starboard bow. And I mean I knew it wasn't a bird, because the birds have got a sort of softer background with the with the sea. It was a much more stark, etched, black shape. And then, you know,

Orca Attack And Abandon Ship

SPEAKER_02 29:58

remote from the world that we were, the events of the next few seconds were going to change our lives forever. Bang! bang bang like that. The whole boat shuddered and shook. The keel split. It's like if you can imagine a tree being broken by a giant across his knee. The tr the splintering sound a tree trunk would make, that was the keel snapped. We didn't know what had happened. And um I thought we must have gone aground. And then I thought, well, how could we go aground in the in the Pacific Ocean? It's um and I popped my head down the hatch and and my dad had water round his ankles. And and I I said to him, What are you doing? Because, you know, although my dad knew everything, uh I hit the petulant teenage son was uh also knew everything, you know. And I certainly knew who to blame for things that were going wrong anyway. And uh on this occasion I was blaming my dad yet again, you know, I said, What are you doing, Dougal? With this water. I said, That's dangerous. And he looked up at me and he did say, Where's this water coming from? And then I heard this big slushing sound, and I turned around and there were three killer whales following us a daddy, a baby, and a mummy, if you will, that sort of size. The daddy one was a 30-foot big bull whale, and his head was split wide open, bleeding into the water. And I remember looking at him thinking, well, wild animals don't do things rashly, they don't hurt themselves because they know they can't get better, they might get eaten. And yet here was this whale bleeding, and it was clear to me that that they had hit us. Whether they'd meant by an attack, uh, go back to that whale that tried to make love to the boat beforehand, had they misidentified us as a whale, or did they just run into us because they were not looking where they were going? I I think they attacked us. And certainly if you can imagine a 30-foot, so therefore 30-ton whale hitting us at 25 miles an hour to maybe 25 knots attack speed. I don't know any boat that would withstand that. And uh I looked back down and Dougal was already up to his knees in water. And I said, Dougal, and he looked at me and he said, Douglas, we're sinking. We need to abandon ship. And I uh forever the petulant teenager said, Abandon ship, Dougal. I said, where to? This is not Miami Marina, you know, this isn't this is the Pacific Ocean. As if that could delay it. You know? He said, get the life raft over the side abandon ship. And I looked at him and he looked back at me, and I just I thought he means it. He means it. And the sort of enormity of what had just happened was just sinking on me. And then I decided, and I looked at, and Dugo was up to his waist in water now, and the water was rising, and time was precious. And uh I thought, no, this is a dream. This is not happening. I'm dreaming this. So what I'll do, I'll go forward, take the sails down, and by the time I've taken the sails down, I'll wake up and I won't have to launch the raft. That was my sort of in my head, that's what was going on. And I went forward and started to take the sails down. Unbelievable. I still couldn't believe what was unfolding in front of me. Dougal come up on deck and he said, What the hell are you doing? I said, I'm taking the sails down. He said, get the bloody life raft over the side. Anyway, look, it took that to shake me into it, and I snapped into action from that moment onwards. I got I put the dinghy over the side, I put the the uh uh I tied it to the rail. I took the life raft and threw it, you know that thing's weighs eighty pounds. I picked it up and threw it straight over the side and hauled in the rope. And I was still hauling in the rope when uh when a wave hit me behind the legs and uh it had rolled across the deck and uh off I was carried away. There was some there was a sequence of events that took place that were all wrong, all mistakes. But without them taking place, I don't think we would have been here, we would have survived. I don't think we would have. I threw the raft over but forgot to untie the rope that was tied it to the rail of the of the losette. Well, that sounds like a bad thing. But that was a good thing because that kept the don't forget it was a strong wind blowing. And as the raft inflated, thank God it inflated. They they had pulled the rope in and snatched the uh the pull cord, the inflation cord, it had uh started to inflate. But the wind caught it and blew it away. But the rope held it in place, tied to the loosette. And then Dougal had moved the moved the the the uh dinghy from forward where I'd tied it onto the rail to aft so that my mum and the twins could get on it. They'd got their life jackets on and were standing on the deck of the water, was lapping onto the deck already. And Robin, the student, who had never never um uh sailed much in his life, in fact the only sailing experience he had was with us, and that had been like a month before, you know, the month he'd been on since Panama. He he stepped onto the gunnel of the of the uh dinghy and sank the damn thing. So with the dinghy was sunk, tied to the loosette. And Dougal moved the rope, the painter, of the of the um dinghy and tied it to the life raft, but it was full of water. Then the rail of the loosette broke, and off went the raft, to be carried before the wind. And but it fetched up on the dinghy, which was full of water, it acted like a sea anchor, and held the dinghy in place, the the raft in place, at the wreckside, so everybody could get on it. So there was me and my mum were the last two people to board it, and I was the last one. And they they uh uh if if the dinghy hadn't held it in place, if the Lucette hadn't held it in place, well, we wouldn't have got onto the raft, not all of us. And uh it was being held in that w uh wreck site, I was able to get some what they call flotsam. It was bits of uh kit that was still floating around in the sea. And there was my mother's sewing basket that was uh which was full of a multitude of treasure. And there was the Genoa sale with a rope, a wire loaf wire that we used as a tow rope. And um Well, in what seemed like forever, but could only have been a few minutes. The Lucette had gone. She had she'd sunk beneath the waves, she'd stayed upright all the way to the end, thank God. My mum had been caught in the wire rigging of the Lucette as she went down, and I had been caught by the raft itself. I was trying to repair it because it it it was leaking, and I couldn't understand why it was leaking. But of course, I had I read the user manual, I would have known that um rafts are made to inflate in the cold w uh uh cold weather and the Arctic and the Antarctic. And so they where they need more CO2 to blow them up than they do in the tropics. So if if you inflate them in the tropics, they've got this sort of valve that releases the excess CO2, and that's what was happening, and I was there trying to fix it, you know. And uh the the they so uh we really had not practiced for this, but somehow the six of us got into the life raft and we were looking at each other, yellow people. We were yellow from the canopy above us and we were scared and we were in shock and um and my mum said let's say the Lord's Prayer No I'm not a God-fearing man at all, and and neither is my dad. Neither was my dad. But we said the Lord's Prayer. We thought. And I I remember saying my dad wouldn't say it, you know. He said, I'm an atheist, I'm not gonna say the Lord's Prayer. And I said, Dad, couldn't you just say it? I mean, we might need God very soon. And he said, Well, don't you think that God would know that, Douglas, if there was a God? I mean, the conversations you have, you know, well well getting means sunk on a uh in the middle of the Pacific, you know. And and uh Dougall was later to say that he mouthed the Lord's Prayer. He certainly didn't say it. And uh we we said the Lord's Prayer, and it the enormity of what had happened just sort of settled on us, you know. We were stuck in a life raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where the killer whales were still around, swimming around us. We thought we were gonna be next. And uh but it never came. That never came. And uh it began to dawn on us that we'd survived, that we'd got away, and that uh the Lucette had gone. And that this was a a world that we were not used to, and somehow we had to try and figure out how we were gonna save ourselves. And um it was then that my mum said, Look, Dougal, tell us please the truth. Are we going to die? And Dougal was trying to think how he would tell us that yes, we are going to die. Because he couldn't figure

The First Survival Plan For Water

SPEAKER_02 41:34

out how we would survive this. We needed food, we needed water. We were in the Pacific Ocean, we hadn't got an SOS away. That the boat had sank so quickly. Nobody knew this would happen to us. We were forty on a 45-day voyage. Nobody would even start looking for us for 45 days. We had ten days' supply of water. It just didn't add up. And Dougal started to started to tell us by saying what had happened, you know, summarizing what had happened. Well, look, we were sailing across the Pacific Ocean on our way to the Marquesas 45 days to the west. We were we've been hit by killer whales 200 miles west of Cape Espinosa in the Galapagos Islands. It's only 200 miles away from the Galapagos Islands. Maybe we could row back. Douglas, could you do that? He said to me. I was a fit young man. I was really good at rowing, and um they they uh and I remember you know, as I say, we called him Captain Lyme. My dad was a very hard man, and uh he uh you didn't stand up to him. And uh well, you know, I was eighteen years old, I I I'd become a man suddenly, you know. And uh it was the first time I'd ever said to him, Dad, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna row back to the Galapagos Islands. So I'd rather die out here with you than alone. Because if I don't make it, you don't make it. And he looked at me and I saw his face break for the first time in my life, as he said, Look, Douglas, I'm sorry for asking, I should never have asked you. I should never have put you under that pressure to make that decision. I said, Well, it's not the right decision, Dad. It would take me 20 days to row back to the Galapagos Islands, and that that's if nothing went wrong, if I didn't lose an oar or or um break break some kit. And I'd have to have enough water for 20 days, which means that you would only have water for a week. And uh we decided it was not possible to get back to Galapagos. It was not possible to go on to the Marquesas, which were downwind and downstream. That would have been 70 days away. But it doesn't rain in the trade winds. We were in the trade wind belt. We had enough water for ten days, and that was in the raft. Thank God. Otherwise we wouldn't have had any water. And uh but I because Dougal knows everything, and because I actually was his apprentice, I knew what we had to do to survive. I mean, you know, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. And I said to him, Dad, so water is the key to our survival. We can live for thirty days without food. We can live for three days without water. And for some reason I added, and thirty seconds without air. You know what I mean? But I don't know why I mentioned that. Because the the the relevant fact was the water. Three days. And we thought that was about right. Well, how much water have we got? Well enough for ten days for six of us. Well, when that whale had tried to make love to the boat, the weather, it had rained for ten days, nonstop, in what was called the doldrums. And I said, Dad, it rains in the doldrums. The doldrums lie to the north, about five hundred miles away. We could sail, could we sail five hundred miles in ten days? That's fifty miles a day. That's two knots. The currents take us one knot. The wind will take us another knot. We can do that. We can get to the doldrums in ten days. And it will rain. And we will collect the rain and then decide what to do when we get there. And Dougal said, Well, you know, there is something called the countercurrent. When we get into the doldrums, the current where we were flows from east to west, taking us out across the Pacific. But when you get into the doldrums, the current flows the other way. It flows from west to east. At one knot, 25 miles a day. So if we can get to the doldrums and get water, and then park ourselves in the countercurrent in the doldrums, that and and maybe put sail a little bit, maybe one knot, and maybe row another knot. Suddenly that's 75 miles a day.

SPEAKER_01 46:54

It is just possible that we can get out of this. Well, we had a plan.

SPEAKER_02 47:05

A fail to plan is a plan to fail. And we'd made a plan. We were in business. Okay? That's gonna be our plan then. We're gonna sail north to the dolrums, we're gonna get water, and we're going to then it doesn't matter about food. We can try and live without food. And we'll we'll uh we'll get to America maybe. Maybe we can do that. And it was then that we made some oaths to each other, which were very important. We promised that we would not eat each other, no matter how bad it got, without food. And that if we were going to die of starvation, that we would die together quietly as a family. That we wouldn't resort to eating each other. Because it would be over. Not we couldn't survive individually, we could only survive as a team. And we would look for a rescue ship. We would stand watch and look for a ship, keep a lookout. Try and you we had some hand flares, use them to attract a ship. And that finally we would try and stay alive for the sake of each other. Somehow we would not just give up and die. We had owed it to each other to try and stay alive so that we could help each other get home. Well, we were in business. We used the luff wire off the sail to tie the dinghy. I I bailed the dinghy out, uh, tied the luff wire, my dad did that to the to the raft, and made a tugboat. We cut the genuine sail up, rigged the sail onto the dinghy, towing the raft to the north. We thought we were doing two knots. Two knots. It's fifty miles a day. Where's the doldrums? Well, it's ten days, five hundred miles. How will we know when we get there? Well, these this weather, this lovely weather that we're in, will turn to cloudy weather. And it'll start raining. And the wind will be lose its constant direction and start blowing out of all different directions. There'll be thunderstorms. That's what we're looking for. And within the thunderstorms, there's water. Well, it was about then that a flying fish jumped out of the sea and a frigate bird swooped down and caught it in its beak and flew off. And I said to my dad, you know, they're taking the piss, those birds. You know? They're saying, look what we can do. You know? I said, We they've got a million years on us. And my dad said something very profound. He said, Look, Douglas. He said, They may have a million years on us, but we have brains. And we can with our brains we can make tools. And with tools, we can catch fish and sail this boat, steer it. And we can uh bridge that gap, that million years. We'll bridge it. Well, it's the sort of making yourselves believe that you can do anything, that nothing is a too big an obstacle. And uh it was then that I told my dad a little story, you know. And uh I'd been reading a book when we got shipwrecked, and um it was called South by Java Head by Alistair McLean. It's a fiction story about some people that get cast adrift in a lifeboat on a ship, and they they drink turtle blood. And I said to my dad, a little white lion, I said, You know, dad, I wrote in a book somewhere that you could drink turtle blood. I didn't tell him it was a fiction book. And uh said, maybe we can catch a turtle and uh eat that and drink its blood. Well, it wasn't long before we were catching turtles. The first turtle came along and nudged us, and uh I tried to catch it and failed. And uh the next one that came along, I remember picking his ass at the sea and throwing it into the raft. And uh this turtle, I mean, you don't appreciate they've got very sharp beaks on them and very sharp flippers with claws on the back, you know, and it was flapping away inside a rubber raft, you know. And Dougle, of course, he was everybody was jumping up onto the thwarts, you know, to get away from this turtle. Dougal managed to catch it and threw it out through the entrance. So this turtle had come in from the back, flapped around in the middle and then been thrown into the front, you know, and it swam off again. And I said to Dougal, I said, you know, we're not going to this is the difference between catching and hunting. So we have got to hunt these. We have to, we can't, we're not going to just catch them casually. These animals want to live. We have to take their lives from them. And uh so our mindset was becoming ever more savage as we worked out a plan and started to catch animals. We caught turtles, we caught dorado, we caught flying fish. We dried the meat, we dried the turtle meat s like steak, you know, it's red meat like steak, turtle meat us. We drank the blood. It wasn't salty.

Food, Turtles, And A Ship Passes

SPEAKER_02 53:28

We wondered if we could survive on that if it didn't rain. Can we survive on this alone? On the sixth day, a ship sailed right past us, the straw cook, nearly ran us down. We fired two hand fla two parachute flies, three hand flies. It was our best chance. But she didn't see us. And in a way that cemented in our minds what we needed to do. Can we stop for a minute now, please?

unknown 54:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 54:07

Let's give let's give about ten seconds of silence and then we'll do it.

SPEAKER_02 54:20

Okay, so uh we were talking about the Stark Kook and the the ship that didn't see us, and how that cemented in our lives, in our minds, that we had to try and get home ourselves without the help of uh rescue. Even though one of our oaths was to look for a rescue ship, it never occurred to us that they wouldn't see us, or they wouldn't stop and pick us up. And uh that was our plan A, you know, that was our big plan was that we were going to get rescued. And uh we fired two two parachute flyers and three-hand flyers, and still she didn't see us. And it became apparent after a little while that she wasn't going to see us, and she was sailing past. And uh, you know, it left us all in tears. We were shaken. And Dougal, we still had the raft and the the dinghy uh together at this time, and uh Dougal came back to the the raft and said, Look, we're not going to uh we can't rely on rescue. He says we have to do this ourselves. He says we have to save meat, we have to save water, we have to make the trip to America on our own, with our own resources seventy-five days. And I looked at him in horror and said, Dougal, we can't survive seventy-five days in this raft. We're not going to make it. The bellows are broken. We're having to blow it up by mouth constantly. It's got holes in it from fish. You know the little fish come and hide underneath the raft, and the big fish come and bite them, but they bite the raft as well while they're at it. So we had lots of small pinprick holes in the bottom of the raft from fish bites. And uh and Dougle said, but that that is the only thing that we can do to get out of this. And from now on we're going every day we're going to say together survival. That will be our password. Survival. And what's the password for today? Of course we were all silent. And he said survival. Say it. Oh survival. No, say it properly. And so every day we had this ritual of saying this word survival, you know. And uh that was going to be our our our goal. We uh we looked the snow the on another day the tow rope snapped and and uh Dougal put himself at great risk to swim after the uh uh the dinghy and uh uh collect it. And uh I don't know how he managed to do that, but he did. And um the uh so so it was it wasn't without incident, and eventually the raft was so uh sorry, let's stop for a sec, Stacey. Um I don't have to do the toilet thing, yeah? Sounds good. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 57:53

So right, so hold on one second, let's give a few minutes seconds of silence.

SPEAKER_02 58:06

Right. So um the the the the the the um other incident of note, which was the sinking of the raft. I mean we're up to our chests in seawater. We were covered in boils by this time. We were on to about the twelfth day, something like that, maybe the fourteenth day. We're covered in boils from the the the salt. If you hit if you sit in salt water for too long, you you're erupt in boils. But we found that if you were naked, that you you didn't get boils. So we took we had to dispense with our clothes. And um the uh the the the and it but it still wasn't raining very much. It rained on the sixth day, and it that that was all. We managed to get some water and get some relief and top up the uh the tins of drinking water. But we'd learned how to make uh uh uh dishes out of the turtles. We were catching turtles and eating one every day. We were drinking their blood. We found that you could drink the blood. So that fiction story that I was telling my dad did turn out, thankfully, to be true, you know. And uh they uh you we we found that if you bled it from an artery, you could drink the blood. But if you bled it from a vein, it took so long to fill the cup that it um it's set into a blumange, like a blumange, you couldn't drink it. So we learned how to butcher the turtles, how to get in through that shell. We luckily we'd Dougla thrown a knife into the dinghy, and with that knife we'd been able to um uh we we found that there's a a way in through that hard shell of the dick of the turtle, and we could we we were farmers after all. We used to butcher our own pigs and lambs when we were on the farm, and now we we kind of naturally took to this butchering of turtles and hanging the meat up to dry. So we were preserving food for future. We were we were like farmers, you know, we were farmers. We we we we were gathering it into a little bag, a little bit of sail that I made a bag out of, and um we were uh but the problem with the raft was it was falling apart around us, and as I say, we were we're up to our chests in cold water. We couldn't sleep. As we fell asleep, our heads dropped into the water and woke us up again, and um life on the raft was becoming untenable, and it became apparent that we would have to uh abandon the raft too, if we were going to survive. We had immersion foot. Immersion foot is where the the blood vessels get cut off from your hands and feet. Like when you have a bath, if you have a bath and you stay in the bath for too long, you get crossled hands and feet. And it's like that, but on steroids, it it's so the swelling is so much in your hands and feet that it shuts the blood supply off, and your hands go cold and your feet go cold. And that of course that is dangerous because then you can start getting gangrene and things like that setting in. So uh they they um uh we knew that we couldn't stay much longer, but we did uh we the the thing about having the the dinghy sort of separate was that they they they when it did rain a very very occasionally for very short amounts of time, the dhy actually caught the rain. But because we butchered the turtles in the in the dinghy and not in the raft, the water, the s the the the water that we did catch was uh tainted with blood and fat and and the the the offal from the from the turtles. And uh it was my mum who came up with the plan that we could actually absorb that water. We didn't need to throw it away. But if I could make her an enema tube out of the rung of a ladder, then of a boarding ladder for the raft, then she could use that tube to give us all an enema. And that enema wouldn't, instead of making us go to the toilet, we would just absorb the water, and lo and behold, it worked. And, you know, it was with some pride now, obviously, you know, I'm here today to tell the story, but um that method of absorbing water has been adopted by our special air services uh uh Marines as a method of survival, one of their methods of survival for absorbing water that would otherwise poison you if you were to drink it. Because you can actually take it as a rectal enemy, uh uh and it won't poison you. The water will actually be filtered back into your system. But my mum knew that. She was a special fevers nurse, and she'd come across that in the in the old colonial days in Hong Kong and uh Palestine, as it was then, uh before Israel was formed, you know. I mean, we're going back a bit now, and uh when uh cholera and uh dysentery and things like that were common around the world. And um so we sort of we were constantly innovative and constantly dealing with issues that uh any one of them could have been the end of us. But you know, we we seemed to get the better of them as and when they happened. Well, on the on the 17th day, the raft became the bottom dropped out of the raft, and it um we knew we could no longer stay in it. We had to abandon the raft. And uh we did. Uh we took to the dinghy. We were very worried that six of us wouldn't fit in the three-man dinghy very well, and uh we found a way of overlapping our bodies so that we uh we didn't cut our blood supplies off, but uh we could actually uh

Raft Fails And The Dinghy Takes Over

SPEAKER_02 1:04:45

uh fit. We had four inches of freeboard, that's the bit that sticks out above the sea, four inches. So we're fully loaded, but we're we were in the Pacific Ocean. We're out at sea. We managed to save a bit of the raft to keep as a lack of flotation chamber to keep the uh to keep the dinghy afloat. We had the oars and we made a mast and uh we we had the sail. And uh we abandoned the raft. We were very sorry to see it go. But for that we would never have made it, we would never have got off the Lusette. And now we were abandoning that. It had been our home for the Lusette had been our home for two years, and the raft had been our home for 17 days, but it had kept us alive and kept the sun off us, the hot sun of the trademark. And uh but now we would have to survive in an open boat, and if we sank, there'd be no second chance. We had to be careful. And so it was on the 17th day that we we were just in the dinghy. That was just the dinghy in us, and we were still sailing to the north, and uh we were still hoping for rain. And uh we were still in the trades, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The southeasterly trades were still blowing, the waves, the big swell waves were coming out of the southeast still. We knew we weren't at the doldrums yet. And how much longer could we keep going for? Now we just had the dinghy alone. And um, well the days passed, day followed day, and it was on one particular evening. Now my dad didn't stand watch because he did day work, he kept preparing the food and stuff like that and catching fish, and we stood watch, and the I was on watch in the open beneath the open sky, you know, the firmament. And I recognized a star in the sky. It was five degrees above the horizon. It was Polaris, the North Star. You can You can only see Polaris when you're five degrees north of the equator. I knew that. And I woke my dad up. I said, Dad, Dad, look, come and look. Said there's Polaris. The North Star. So that must mean we are five degrees north. We set off from two degrees south. We've covered seven degrees of latitude. 420 miles to the north. That's proof that we're on our way to the doldrums. We'll be there soon. The doldrums lie at about seven degrees. Another two degrees, a hundred and twenty miles. We might be there tomorrow or the day after. The enormity of this disc you know of what we'd just seen was not lost on us. And I also noticed that the clouds had started to change. High up in the in the sky, high up in the atmosphere, there was a there were fingers of cloud reaching out into the trades. And Duda looked at me and he said, Well, Douglas, a change in the wind is a change in the weather, he says. And the the w if the wind changes tonight with these clouds, we can be sure there'll be rain very soon. And uh so we we we we you know we shared this great discovery together. It didn't rain the next day, and we thought we'd been very stupid in predicting that it was going to rain, you know. And uh and then that didn't rain the next day either. And suddenly we were thinking, well, whose idea was this that we sail to the doldrooms, you know? There's no way back, we can't go back. We've lost the raft. It's just the dinghy. The six of us. What happens if it doesn't rain? I mean it was a great plan on paper. Well we began to be fearful again about what the future would hold. But you know that night it rained. It rained heavily and we were so happy to feel

Navigation By Stars And First Rain

SPEAKER_02 1:09:57

the cold water on our bare backs because we knew that this meant that we would survive. If we could now just stock up the water again, we would have enough water to get back to land and it and the the sea had changed colour from that beautiful translucent blue to a sort of a grey colour. And uh the first leg of our trip was over. We had made it to the doldrums, we had collected rain water, and the second leg was just beginning. And uh we figured, well, we'd sailed northwest. If we'd gone five hundred miles to the north, we must have gone a hundred miles to the west. Put that on three hundred miles west of Galapagos, six hundred miles to the mainland, thousand miles, nine hundred miles. Nine hundred miles, we can make a hundred miles a day. Bloody hell, is that only nine days?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:01

No, Dougle, that can't be right. Yes it is. Okay, we won't make a hundred miles a day. That's a hundred miles a day, that's four knots.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:13

We're not gonna do four knots. We do two knots, it's fifty miles a day, it's eighteen days, twenty, call it twenty days. Can we survive another twenty days? Yes, we can. We're still alive, we're still relatively mobile, we're still catching fish, we're still catching turtles. So this had been a great sort of pivotal moment in our trip when we'd caught, we'd reached the doldrums and we were now headed east towards the coast of the Americas. We got caught in a thunderstorm that night, that next night, and the lightning was just so bad, and it was landing in the sea around us. You could smell the sort of cordite smell of electrical burning where the where the lightning, we said I mean, at one point it a lightning landed in the sea just um about a hundred meters away from us. And I I said, Dad, you know, we that bloody lightning's gonna hit us very soon. I said, we'll all be killed and nobody will know how. They'll think we were eaten by a shark or something, but in actual fact, it was these the the thunderstorms, because out in the dolrums, the cumulonimbus clouds go right up to the top of the atmosphere, and the rain that comes out of them is so heavy and so cold, but we didn't dare complain. It was water, and with water was life. And uh we made clothes, capes for ourselves out of what was left of the raft. We we we rigged a sea anchor to keep the bow up until the waves. And uh we survived two storms like that. A bit later on in a freak accident we lost all the water that we had collected, that hard-earned water. That was Robin's fault. We blamed him for it for not tying the knot properly, but really it was our fault for not checking. We knew he wasn't a seasoned sailor, but it's day twenty three, and the days followed day. And uh well six weeks we'd been at sea now, we were still alive. We'd lost a lot of weight, and uh movement was very sluggish. We were very thirsty. Even though we had water, we we didn't have a lot of water, we didn't have a lot of food. We had sips of water, mouthful of food three times a day of of tea the turtle meat or we caught a shark one day. Sharks followed us all the time. But one day we caught one by accident. The fish hoop caught it in its eye, and we managed to haul him on board, snapping away, cut his head off. And uh Dougal handed me the head of the shark because it was it was my sort of planning that had led to the the capture of the shark, and he said, Here's your head, Douglas. And the damn thing bit me right across my hand, you know, just the head. So uh we we were still learning and still surviving, and uh we were increasing our reserves, our food, our water, and uh and we were making mileage to the east every day, and we didn't dare think how close we might be to the mainland. You know, but they they they yeah, not yet. We were going to start rowing. I was a great rower, as I said. Said, you know, I can put on twenty miles a day rowing, and uh that's that's an extra knot, you know, and um and we can make sure that we're headed east into the sunrise. Well, the thirty eighth day dawned, and it rained heavily that morning, and we topped up the last of our water reserves. We had full water reserves, we had some food in a bag that uh that was edible, because it went rotten, you know, when it got damp, it went rotten, and um and at some point when we got to the doldrums, we we decided that we would open a cafe when we got home. Because we never wanted to be far away from food ever again. I mean, you can always tell true survivors, but true survivors are people who can imagine food, even though you can't eat it, you can imagine it with a clarity, and the taste and the smell is all linked together of the food you're gonna eat when you get home, you know? And uh so we invented this cafe and we served ever more exotic meals to each other, and we would have to describe these meals and how we would cook them and how we would serve them. And uh, well, this was the 38th day, and we were we were discussing the another yet another dish that we would serve up in the in the cafe when we got home. And Dougal said, Yeah, there's a ship over there. I said, Dad, did you say there's a ship over there? He said, Yeah. She says, a ship. Oh bloody hell, a ship. It's almost like we'd forgotten that we were waiting for a rescue ship. It was a ship.

Rescue By A Japanese Fishing Boat

SPEAKER_02 1:17:06

It was a small fishing boat. Japanese fishing boat. Well, remember what happened the last time from my mother. My mum said, It sailed right past us, don't get your hopes up too high. We've got two hand flares left. Can we use them to attract attention? I got forward just to to trim the boat because that as I said, there wasn't a great deal of freeboard. And um we took the mast down, took the sail down. No, maybe that the mast was still up, we took the sail down, and Dougal hung onto the mast and held the flare aloft, a red flare. See it, see it, he said. See it. We didn't know whether they'd seen it or not. Dougal threw the flare, it was it was the the wax was dropping, the flux was dropping onto his hands, burning them, and he couldn't hold them any more, and he threw the flare away. And uh we had one flare left. Get it, open it, pass it to me. It didn't light. Had they seen the flare, we didn't know. And the uh the the the ship altered course slightly. Was she moving in a seaway or was she s you know she altered course? You certainly wasn't coming towards us, but she'd altered and uh I started to blow on the whistle. And we looked on like sort of anxious, anxiously. Will she sail straight past us, like the last one? Or will she pick us up? Well, she altered course another twenty degrees, but still not towards us, but closer. And we thought she must be coming, she must be coming to get us. In what seemed like no time, she was on us, and so it was. We beheld this white ship coming towards us, you know, and we thought this must be the moment of rescue, it must be. And then suddenly the boat was upon us, and she'd stopped, and there were people lining the rail, and a rope came out a dirty, smelly, oily rope, and I grabbed hold of it and I held it in my hands, and I thought this rope with all the dirt of civilization is not of our world. This has come from another world, a world that we want to get back to. Do you know what I mean? It was we'd been living in nature for the last six and a half weeks. We'd been uh we we we had been totally disconnected from life as we knew it. And now suddenly I was holding this rope that had come from another world. It was a surreal feeling, you know. I wasn't gonna let it go. I hauled in on the rope, you know. And uh well, suddenly we were alongside. Eager hands hold us on board. They reached down and pulled us on board. As I told you before, we didn't have clothes on, but my mum, God bless her, saved our t-shirts. Only a mum could save your t-shirts on a bloody life raft, you know what I mean? You didn't know that you she had them, you know, and she says, get dressed for the rescue. She says, get dressed for the rescue. And so we put our shirts on. No trousers on underneath, you know, but we did have shirts on, at least, you know, to be rescued. And uh, well, fantastic. A pinnacle of contentment that we would never reach again. Uh our lives had been handed back to us. They were Japanese, a Japanese fishing boat on its way to Panama. And uh they were later to tell us that they thought we were pirates and that uh they didn't dare come too close to us because who who else would be out here? In this part of the Pacific Ocean, we're outside the shipping lanes, and and that flare, that trick with the flare, was just to attract their attention and make them go closer. But lookout had said that uh I can see a woman and two children. And the captain said, Well, I knew when he said that that you couldn't be pirates. He says, I came full speed ahead to get you. You know, I mean, as if that few minutes would have made much difference after we'd been there for so long, you know. And he did say, you know, I looked at you, I looked at your clothes, I could see that you'd been at sea for a very long time.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:43

And uh, well, we insisted he pulled the dinghy on board.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:50

We weren't going to lose that. And he said, No, why do you want the dinghy? And something in his nature appealed, and he he ordered the men to haul the dinghy on board. And uh we explained to him that our food was on that dinghy. And he said, Yeah, but we've got food here on the ship. You can have some of our food. Like, our minds had become so tortured and so savage, we couldn't even give up a little bit of turtle meat, dry turtle meat and a few cans of water, you know. And uh, well, coffee.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:35

He gave us a cup of coffee.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:39

And uh I did say right at the beginning that uh we had the coffee put on. We never got to drink the coffee that we were making on board Lucette that morning 38 days ago. But we did get to drink this cup of coffee that the captain gave us, and uh well, we were back amongst civilization. We'd been rescued, and we'd completed an amazing trip across the Pacific. We'd sailed 750 miles across the Pacific Ocean. We were only 260 miles away from land. Another six days we would have hit the Met Coast. An incredible voyage. It was an incredible voyage that had been made possible because we never gave up. We kept finding solutions and we sailed. We made a determined effort to try and get out of that situation. We didn't just sit there and wait. We actually sailed, we knew where we were. We were 25 miles out in latitude when we got picked up with no instruments and no no uh navigational aids at all, no compass. Just using nature's signposts, you know.

unknown 1:25:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:04

Four days later, four days later we landed in Panama City, and the world press were there to meet us, and so started well, the end of one life and the start of another life, and uh, but our our ordeal was over, and somehow we'd we'd pulled through. We'd all survived, and

Aftermath, Fame, And Lifelong Meaning

SPEAKER_02 1:25:27

uh the uh the story was to become a world-famous story. The dinghy ended up in the National Maritime Museum, the uh the the books were written, two books have been written about there. One of them was a worldwide bestseller, Survive the Savage Sea, written by my dad. And uh two films have been made of those books. And the story, the story has become one famous because my parents didn't try and survive for themselves. Even Dougal said, look, if it wasn't for my family, I would have quite easily given up longer long ago and just died. Because it's it was such hard work trying to stay alive. He said, But I could not see my own children die in front of me. He said, We owed it to them to get them home. And so their effort was in keeping their children alive, so surviving for a different reason. Whatever, whatever, we we went back to Britain, we went back to England, and uh Dougal pursued his writing career. He wrote a couple more books after that, after his survive the South Sea, and uh I joined the Merchant Navy, would you believe? And uh I was in there for ten years. Uh I was in the Merchant Navy for ten years after that, and I I finished off as a chief officer in Merskline, and uh came ashore to study accountancy, became an accountant in uh 1992, and I've run a small practice ever since. And the family's very close. Uh my two brothers, uh they're grown up, and hell with it, we're all retiring now. You know, we're we've we've lived a life that we would was a bonus. And in April 24, we were reunited with the captain of the ship that saved us over in Japan. They flew us over to Japan. And um I was able to say to him, thank you for what you did that afternoon, July 23rd, 1972. Said, thank you from me, and thank you from forty-five other people who are alive today because of what you did that afternoon. And we had a great reunion where he he remembered what he'd fed us when he'd picked us out of the water, and uh he he ordered it up from this cafe we met in a really old-fashioned Japanese cafe, and uh they served up this sort of uh meat stew, noodle stew, that they'd served us on the on the tokamaru when she'd uh when she'd picked us up. And uh of course he'd remembered all those years, you know. Wow. And the story's lived, the story's lived for till now. I mean, you know, it still has human instead of human endeavor and of human interest, and what you can do when you decide you're gonna do something instead of do nothing. You know, it's a story of of uh of human of humans uh beating the elves, I suppose. Family.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:00

You know, it's a story. What I hear is a story of hope. And you said something the other day that really resonated with me when we were talking, and you're I I put it in quotes, and it said, you said, never give up. Where there is life, there is hope. And hearing your story, it that just continues to resonate around every turn. Whether it's the turtles or the sharks or the fish or the enemas,

Faith, Visions, And The Night Sky

SPEAKER_00 1:29:24

or you know, you mentioned sucking uh water out of fish eyes and spines of the of the fish. Just that failure to quit, that failure to give up, that hope. Um, and I know you said you're not a God-fearing man. I uh I I have faith. And I don't, you know, even here in your story, God was somewhere in there. Those things don't happen. You know, we're not praying to God and saying the Lord's Prayer uh if there's not some inclination that there's a you know a higher power. And I think he was obviously involved in all of that. That would be my perspective. But man, your guys' tenacity in 1972 as six people stranded on a boat or on a dinghy, unbelievable, man. Unbelievable. Let me ask you this. Um couple things. Have you eaten turtles since?

SPEAKER_02 1:30:22

I haven't.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:24

Tell me about those stars.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:26

Not even the soup. Not even the soup. Not even the soup.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:30

Not even the soup, man. Tell me about those stars. Um, what were the stars like when you're laying there on that boat looking up into the sky on watch? What were this what was that environment like? What were those stars like?

SPEAKER_02 1:30:47

Well, I'd like to say something before that, answering that.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:51

I am a man of faith. My dad was not a man of faith. I am a man of faith. Got it. Okay. I my mum is a woman of great faith. And one night when we nearly lost the dinghy in that storm with the thunderstorm with the lightning coming down around us. My mum counted seven people on the raft. On the dinghy. Wow. She said the Lord was behind Dougal guiding him, and she could see it. You know?

SPEAKER_00 1:31:25

So yeah, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:29

Who knows? Who knows? We we had a workman who used to work for us on the Metis farm when we were kids. He was a survivor of the First World War at Mons. He he'd seen the Angel of Mons, which was a night when the the Germans and the British were fighting each other, it was such terrible fighting. And a vision appeared in the sky. They called it the Angel of Mons, and they stopped fighting. And um Albert, who was our workman, said he had seen that vision. And now here was my mum seeing a vision. And I just think that when you get so stressed out and so fearful for your own life that visions come to you, you know, and it's part of faith. It's part of faith, something that is there to help you. So that's one thing. And the other thing, the question you asked, which was a good question, what was God's firmament like? You know, the irony was that it was beautiful. The sea, we were part of the sea, we were so low down in this water, the big fish were swimming in there, the sharks were chasing the fish, the fish were chasing the little fish, the turtles were swimming along in this deep blue, clear water. And then up above was the stars clear, filling the sky, the wonder of the world that we were living in. But we could die at any moment. It was just a a juxtaposition, uh standing in different corners, diametrically opposed to each other, you know, that we were we were living in in this great beauty, but in this great danger.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:34

Yeah, I think you and I agree. God had his hand in this entire thing. Um, and your days were already planned, you know. You your end time wasn't then. And uh I'm so thankful that you guys survived. I'm thankful that you were willing to tell your story and allow this to live on. Even beyond your years, this story is going to live on. So thank you so much for that.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:00

Well, let me just finish by saying, yeah, you know, Callahan, he was an American guy who sailed across the Atlantic and he was shipwrecked. It something hit his boat in the in the nighttime, and he he managed to get off. And he'd read Douglas's book, Survive the Savage Sea. He survived 62 days adrift in a raft, and uh they they uh and he said something that I truly identify with was that he felt that it wasn't his time yet. And that the Dorado, the Dorado are big game fish, they're fast, they're quick, right? And yet he was able to put his hand in the sea and catch them. And I felt the same thing. You try and catch a fish by hand, have a go. You've got no chance. And yet some and I I had this vision, this feeling that those fish were sent to us to to like we weren't on the list. And and God had the God had oh well you're not on the list, you know, I better send a fish over there to you for you. It felt like that. It felt like we were part of a bigger thing. A bigger thing was at work. It wasn't just us trying to save ourselves. It did that's how it felt. And uh whether that's true or not, I don't know. But Steve Callahan had exact and he wrote about it in his book, and I it resonated with me because I felt exactly the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:41

Wow, that's pretty awesome. Did did you guys ever connect with the Icelandic oat that you started the journey with?

SPEAKER_02 1:35:49

Yeah, yeah. They live in Seattle. We we we uh we've been over to see them, we've been to Reykjavik several times to see them. They are our lifelong friends. Without them, without the action of Siggy, we would never we would never have made it. So that's connections with people, uh, the wisdom of people, maybe wiser than you are on the day when Dougle wouldn't take the wouldn't take the raft and Siggy found a way of making him take it that uh that saved our life. Yep, we we we we we you you can't break a friendship like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:29

Yeah. I've got I've got two questions for you when we wrap this up. And the first one, how had did this incident impact you and change you as a man?

SPEAKER_02 1:36:42

Well, my sister says Douglas is fearless, right? So maybe that way, maybe realizing that you can go a lot further than you think you can

How Survival Rewires A Life

SPEAKER_02 1:36:54

when you are solving problems and finding solutions to uh life's problems. It's it's don't give up. It's not the end. You can and and you know, I've told you about my son. He he had an accident in Australia in 2004. It helped me, no end. This was my survive the service. I had to go and save my son's life in Australia on Christmas Eve 2004. I did it. I never stopped for a minute. And the the the and I thought to myself then, this is my survive the savvy sea. I have got to save my son. I don't know how I'm gonna save him, but I'm going to save him. And I I had no visa, I got on that plane, I there was no seats, I sat in the stewardess's seat to Singapore, I got to Australia that night, I was in Melbourne sitting next to him, he was icy cold, I thought he was dead, you know. But but and I was able not only to save my own son, but to talk to other couples whose children were in that hospital who had had similar incidents, who had no idea how to handle. And the the hospital said, Will you talk to this couple, will you talk to that couple, will you explain to them what's happened and and how how how they met their children are not dead? It feels like they are, you know. And and uh so I think it's given me a wider view of the world. Wow. That can only come from having an experience like that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:38

Yeah. You know, a lot of our listeners, this is my final question for you. A lot of our listeners uh experience, well, we all do, we experience challenges in life. And it may be a drift on the ocean, it may be an incident like your sons, it, you know, who knows what that what that is. But all too often in life, people quit and they give up and they commit suicide, or you know, their life falls apart. If any of our listeners are out there listening right now, maybe facing one of those uh triumphs, or not triumphs, sorry, let me say that over. If one of our listeners out there right now, maybe find uh hold on. If one of our listeners are out there right now, maybe facing one of those trials or tribulations, um, what is a piece of advice you would give them to give them hope?

SPEAKER_02 1:39:36

Well, the this is it, you know. They they when you are faced with the worst possible brick wall in front of you, and there is no hope, and there is no advancement, just think on about that family that were hit by killer whales in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no hope, and yet here we are today. We we we've had a life, we've had fifty-five years of extra life that we should never have had, and we've had a good life. And at one point it looked like we had no life. We couldn't understand how we could survive. So, what I say to you, in those depths of despair, turn around. Where there's life, there's hope. Turn around and find a way out of the situation. It may not, you may not, you don't have to know what it is. All you have to do is be willing to work towards it, and the solutions will come. And that's my advice. Never give up hope. Thank you, Douglas, for that.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:43

And again, just thank you for sharing your story. Um, ladies and gentlemen, Douglas, can you please tell everybody one more time about the books, where the museums are, and how uh just how they can find more information about you and your story?

SPEAKER_02 1:41:00

Well, you can search on on Google for a start. That's a good starting off

Books, Museum, And Final Thanks

SPEAKER_02 1:41:05

point. Uh, but my dad wrote a book uh called Survive the Savage Sea. He wrote that in 1973. That became a worldwide bestseller. He he um I mean it was pre-internet. It's not so easy to write a worldwide bestseller now because um people that the uh podcasts are the new books, aren't they? You know, it's uh and um the dinghy that we managed to persuade the Japanese captain to save is in the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth in Cornwall in England. Uh and uh you can actually I mean it's it's on exhibit there, it's the it's in the centre of the Central Hall. It's their it's their most famous exhibit, they say, their most valuable exhibit. And uh the uh but there are artifacts there, and you can ask the museum. They if you make an appointment, they will take you through the artifacts that they have, the things that we managed to save and were so significant to to our lives. Uh they you can get my own book. I wrote a book called Last Voyage of the Rosette that describes our voyage around the world as well as our time adrift on the ocean, on the Pacific. Uh that's available on Amazon. And uh if you ever come to England, then you're most welcome. Our American cousins are always the most welcome. And uh I certainly grew an affinity for America by our trip, I must say that, you know, when we we uh I I loved my time in America. And uh uh they they um then you can actually touch and look at the dinghy and feel the dinghy and wonder, just wonder how six people could have even fitted in that dinghy. Never mind sailed 750 miles in it. It's just astonishing, you know. Well, thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:03

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you guys for listening to this uh episode. You know, everything on murders to music is either educational, entertaining, or provides value. And I am hoping that today we hit all three of those boxes. So I know this was a little bit longer than normal, but this is a story that we're so lucky to have and couldn't be told by anybody else. So thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I really appreciate you guys continuing the support. If you want to reach out to me, you can do that at my email address, murdersumber2music at gmail.com. Murdersumber2music at gmail.com. And uh if you want to send up something should my email address, I will forget. You guys thank you so much.