Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea

by Steven Callahan

  At least things are drying out and at night I can sleep. I escape through dreams. Each hour I awake to my prison, my hair pulled out by the chafing rubber, my joints aching for the chance to stretch out.

  FEBRUARY 10

  DAY 6

  On February 10, my sixth day in the raft, the wind blows hard as the Atlantic continues “the shuffle,” a term sailors use for the commonly confused wave patterns of the Atlantic. Ridges of waves approach from the northeast, east, and southeast. They break on three sides of the raft, tumbling it about in a nonstop rock-and-roll dance. At least we are headed more westerly, more directly toward the West Indies.

  But with each good thing comes the bad. The repair to the

  floor has come up, and after hesitating to use some of the last patching equipment, I manage to seal it. I feel weak. The still produces only salt-ridden water, and I argue with myself not to drink more than one-half pint of my reserve each day. The dorados are beautiful but tease me by staying just out of range with quick evasive maneuvers. One passes close by and I fire. The spear jerks my arm straight. It’s hit! The raft twists around. Then the fish is gone. The silver arrow lies limp, dangling from the end of its rope, too weak to drive through these fish. Hunger is eating my fat, then it will eat my muscles, then my mind.

  THE SOLAR STILL. The stills that I use are military surplus models. They are no longer manufactured, but other stills work on similar principles. My stills are rated to produce a maximum of thirty-two ounces of fresh water per day, a two-day survival ration. I get thirty ounces on the best days and often as little as sixteen.

  A cloth bottom (i) allows excess seawater to seep through. When wet, it is airtight and allows the plastic balloon (2) to be inflated. Seawater is poured into the reservoir (3) on the top. The first half gallon drains down a tube into the salt water ballast ring (4). Additional seawater drips from the reservoir through a tiny valve. A jiggle string (5) keeps the valve free and helps regulate flow. From the valve, the seawater drops onto a black cloth wick (6). The wick is suspended from the sides of the balloon by attachment loops (7), which keep the wick away from the balloon; otherwise salt water from the wick will drain onto the balloon’s inner surface and pollute the distillate. The black wick becomes saturated with seawater. Some of the seawater evaporates. The vapor, shown by squiggly arrows, collects as small drops of fresh water (8) on the inside of the balloon. The drops trickle down to the fresh water, or distillate, reservoir (9). From here the water drains down a tube (10) into the distillate collection bag (11). The tube is equipped with a fitting that allows removal of the bag for emptying. The bag is weighted with a piece of lead for proper drainage. A skirt and lanyard (12) pass around the middle of the still. Although the still is designed to be used in the water, I must use mine aboard the raft.

  I bend over the tubes and look down deep into the sea. There are no fish, no weeds, only empty blue. Have I missed my only chance to catch food? Have they gone? Suddenly a shape appears forty yards to the side, gliding with incredible speed right for the raft. A ten-foot beige body with an unmistakable broad hammerhead tells me all I need to know. Man-eater. No dorsal fin rips through the water. Its long, sleek torso needs hardly move to thrust itself ahead. My heart pounds. I hold my spear tightly. If I shoot I will lose the arrow. I gaze at the shark sliding under me just below the surface. Making a smooth, tight corner, it circles back, faster now. As if accelerated by centrifugal force, it closes in on the raft. My mouth is dry, my arms shake; cold sweat streams from my skin. A complete circle executed, the beast thrusts into the wind and melts into the blue as quickly as it came. The vision will last forever. How often will they come? I will never dare to swim from the raft.

  I wonder about God. Do I believe in Him? Somehow I cannot accept a vision of a super humanoid, but I believe in the miraculous and spiritual way of things—existence, nature, the universe. I do not know the true workings of that way. I can only guess and hope that it includes me.

  Nothing seems to hold a future. The horseshoe preserver chafes on the raft tubes. I am already pumping air into them four times a day to keep them properly inflated. Additional wear can mean disaster. I decide to use the float to make “bottles” and to write messages for my bottles. I cut the float in half, spewing snowy styrofoam nubs all around the raft, wrap my desperate letters in plastic bags, and tape them to the styrofoam blocks. “Situation poor, prognosis worse, approximate position … direction and speed of drift … please notify and give my love to…” I cast them out upon the waters and watch them tumble southward. Perhaps someone will see them. If Solo lives, there are four remnants of me that can be found.

  FEBRUARY 15

  DAY 11

  It is my eleventh day in the raft. Each day passes as an endless age of despair. I spend hours evaluating my chances, my strength, and my distance to the lanes. The raft’s condition seems generally good, although the tent leaks through the observation port when nearby waves break. One night we shot down the front of a big roller, for several seconds sliding upon its tumbling foam as if we had fallen over a waterfall. Then last night we nearly capsized again. Everything is soaked. Today, though, a flat, hot sea surrounds me. The sun beats down on the wide expanse of this liquid frying pan and things begin to dry out once more. The sun and sedate sea are welcome.

  My scabs are torn off or wiped away when my skin is wet. With the sun they will heal, eventually. Most of the salt water boils have vanished. There is a great emptiness in my stomach, a cramped, incessant yearning. It visits me each night in my dreams. Fantasies of hot-fudge sundaes with numerous varieties of ice cream dance through my head. Last night I nearly got to taste hot buttered whole-wheat biscuits, but they were snatched away from me when I woke up. And how many hours have I spent back on Solo, collecting the dried fruit, the fruit juices, the nuts? Hunger is a witch from whom there is no escape. Her spells conjure these visions of food and deepen the pain. I look at my stock. The can of beans is blown. I dare not eat them for fear of botulism. Then again, maybe they’re all right. Quickly now, pitch them! Do it, I tell you! The can lands with a sickening kerplunk. I’m left with two cabbage stems and wet, fermented raisins in a plastic bag. The stems are slimy and bitter. I eat them anyway.

  A smaller variety of fish has appeared. About twelve inches long, they have tiny, tight round mouths and little flippers like hands waving on the top and bottom of their bodies. Their big round eyes roll as they dart under the raft and peck at the bottom with their strong jaws. Are they trying to eat it? They must be the tough-skinned triggerfish. Reef triggers eat corals and are considered poisonous, but survivors have often eaten triggers from the open ocean with no ill effects. Anything would be good to eat, anything to stop the gnawing in my gut. I may soon go mad, eat paper, drink the sea.

  Often when I have gone offshore, I have found myself to be somewhat schizophrenic, though not dysfunctional. I see myself divide into three basic parts; physical, emotional, and rational. It’s common for solo sailors to talk to themselves, to ask for a second opinion about how to deal with a problem. You try to think as another person, to get a new outlook and to talk yourself into positive action. When I am in danger or injured, my emotional self feels fear and my physical self feels pain. I instinctively rely on my rational self to take command over the fear and pain. This tendency is increasing as my voyage lengthens. The lines that stretch between my commanding rational self and my frightened emotional and vulnerable physical selves is getting tighter and tighter. My rational commander relies on hope, dreams, and cynical jokes to relieve the tension in the rest of me.

  In my log I write: “The dorados remain, beautiful, alluring. I ask one to marry me. But her parents will not hear of it. I am not colorful enough. Imagine, bigotry even here! However, they also point out that I do not have a very bright future. It is a reasonable objection.”

  Watching the fish makes my stomach ache more. I continue to fail at fishing. I manage to spear a triggerfish but it jerks free. I make a lure by t
ying together hooks, white nylon webbing, and aluminum foil, then stuffing it with a precious morsel of corned beef. A dorado strikes hard and bites effortlessly through the heavy codline. This fish is now easy to recognize, with the long line trailing from his mouth. I have no wire leader to catch these fish by hook and line so I must rely on the spear.

  Finally my aim is true. The spear strikes home. A dorado erupts with resistance and thrashes wildly. I fumble for the spear, try to keep the tip away from the raft, and haul the fish aboard. Just as I get it to the edge, a final convulsion turns fury to escape. Perhaps I can live twenty more days without food.

  If hunger is the witch, thirst is her curse. It is nagging, screaming thirst that causes me to watch each minute pass, to wait for the next sip. I’ve had only one cup of water for each of the first nine days. Daytime temperatures are in the eighties or nineties. Hours pass between single swallows of water. To keep cool and reduce sweating, I pour seawater over myself. Dry wind bites my lips. A light rain fell one evening, but its mist quickly dried. The winds here have come from America in a long and roundabout route. They first travel north and east until they reach Europe. Then they sweep south, depositing rain along the way. By the time they have reached this latitude, they are headed back west and have had most of the moisture wrung out of them. Some of the air is as dry as the Sahara over which it has recently passed. Rainfall will be rare until the winds cross enough sea to be fed by its evaporation, which will be well to the west of where I am now.

  The second solar still deflates after being torn by the waves. It had never worked properly. What is wrong with them? I begin thinking of an onboard still—the Tupperware box, with cans inside. If I can get water to evaporate from the cans, water vapor might collect on a tentlike cover and drip down into the box. To draw more heat and increase evaporative surface area in the cans, I decide to fill them with crumpled black cloth from one of the solar stills. If I take a still apart, I may be able to find out what the problem is. I’ll lose a still, but they are no good as they are. So I cut one up. I find that salt water contamination is coming from the black cloth’s hitting the plastic balloon’s sides when the still is not fully inflated. Excessive shaking in rough seas may also be spraying salt water from the black cloth wick into the distilled fresh water. So it is not a single problem; it requires multiple solutions. I must find and plug any holes in the balloons and stabilize the stills.

  My onboard still is a dismal failure. The evaporation rate is much too slow and the system too ventilated to allow condensation on the box lid. At least I get the last still to work by tying it close to the raft so that it isn’t flung about by waves; however, it chafes there. Why not try it aboard the raft? I pull it up onto the edge of the top tube and tie it in place. The balloon sags a little, but it stays put and the wick isn’t touching the plastic. Drainage of the distilled water is also improved, because the distillate collection bag hangs down rather than trailing out horizontally. I watch as pure, clear, unsalted drops begin to collect and drain into the bag. I have her working! And I have three pints of reserve … possibly I can make it! After eleven days, I have renewed hope. As long as the raft holds together and the still functions, I can last another twenty days. The raft … Please, no sharks. I am not only worried about their rows of jagged teeth. Their skins are like coarse sandpaper; they can rip my raft apart just by rubbing against it.

  I attempt to make an onboard solar still. Perspective view, right. Section, left: (A) The Tuppeware box. (B) I place three empty water cans in the box. In each I crumple black cloth from the solar still that I cut up and wet it with seawater. The cloth should soak up more heat and give more surface area for evaporation than seawater simply floating in the cans. Theoretically, fresh water vapor should rise and collect on the plastic tent that I’ve taped over the front and ends (C) as well as the box lid (D), and then drip down the sides and collect in the box bottom around the outside of the cans. The experiment is a depressing failure. I don’t have enough tape to seal the tent to the box thoroughly, and the tape does not stick well to the slippery box. Therefore, excessive ventilation on the inside of the tent prevents moisture from collecting.

  I lie back in the healing heat of the sun. There is an abundance of time, a bumper crop of it, in which to think. Dorados and triggerfish nudge the rafts bottom. Baby gooseneck barnacles have begun to flourish on it. The triggers feed on them. I don’t know why the dorados are bumping. They begin in the evenings, at about dusk, firmly nudging wherever I or my equipment push into the floor. It is as if they were dogs pushing their begging heads under a human hand for a piece of meat, a scratch behind the ear, or a playmate. I call them my little doggies or doggie heads. The triggers I call butlers. They have that starched-collar look.

  The sea lies flat. Clouds sit motionless in the sky as if glued there. The sun beats down, roasting my arid body. The working still may provide just enough water to carry me the three hundred miles to the shipping lanes. The wind has turned. The lanes somehow always seem to be three hundred miles away. As I succumb to drowsiness, fantasies of being picked up by a ship and lying in the cool green grass by the pond at my parents’ house race through my head.

  The shaking of the raft jerks me from my stupor. I look down. A flat, gray, round-headed beast scrapes its hide across the bottom as it lazily swings around for another bite. It’s incredible that the dorados and triggers have not fled the shark at all! Instead, they collect closely around it. I think they have invited him for tea. “Come over to our place and have a taste of this big black crumpet.” He slowly swims around to the stern and slides under. Rolling over, belly up, he bites one of the ballast pockets, quaking the raft with his convulsive ten-foot torso. Bless the pockets. He might tear a hole in the floor, but that shouldn’t damage the tubes, at least not yet. Should I take a shot and risk losing the spear? He cruises out in front of me just below the surface. I thrust, and the steel strikes his back. It is like hitting stone. With one quick stroke he slithers away, not in any particular hurry. I watch for a long time before collapsing, craving water more than ever.

  I thought that the fish would scatter and give me notice of a shark’s approach, but now I know that I cannot trust them to warn me of danger. I worry about the gas bottle and line that inflated the raft and that lie under the bottom tube. If that line is bitten through, will the whole raft deflate? Will the bottle lure the sharks to bite into the tube from which it hangs? Worry, worry, worry. It is apprehension that beds with me each night and apprehension that awakens me each day. As darkness comes and I drift off to sleep, I long to be in a place with no anxieties. How repetitious and simple my desires have become.

  The raft is lifted and thrown to the side as if kicked by a giant’s boot. A shark’s raking skin scrapes a squeak from it as I leap from slumber. “Keep off the bottom!” I yell at myself as I pull the cushion and sleeping bag close to the opening. I perch as lightly as possible upon it. Peering into the night, I grasp the spear gun. He’s on the other side. I must wait until he comes to the opening. A fin breaks the water in a quick swirl of phosphorescent fire and darts behind the raft, circling in to strike again. A flicker of light in the black sea shows me he is below, and I jab with a splash. Nothing. Damn! The splash may entice him to attack more viciously. Again the fin cuts the surface. The shark smashes into the raft with a rasping blow. I strike at the flicker. Hit! The water erupts, the dark fin shoots out and around and then is gone. Where is he? My heart’s pounding breaks the silence. It beats across the still black waters to the stars. I wait.

  Gulping a half pint of water, I rearrange my bed so that at the first bump I can be ready at the entrance. Hours pass before I drift again into uneasy sleep.

  For two days the going is slow under the baking sky. I go fourteen or fifteen miles each twenty-four hours. Hunger wrenches my insides. My mouth burns. But the still produces twenty ounces of water a day. I begin to rebuild my stock while drinking one pint for each arc of the sun. The calm is also good for vis
ibility. Should a ship pass, the glowing orange canopy will be more easily spotted. However, sharks also visit more frequently in calm weather. The shipping lanes lie over two weeks to the west at this pace. For hours I pore over the chart, estimating minimum and maximum time and distance to rescue.

  My heart’s pounding beats across the still black waters to the stars.

  In my thirteen days adrift, I have eaten only three pounds of food. My stomach is in knots, but starvation is more subtle than simply increasing pain. My movements are slower, more fatiguing. The fat is gone. Now my muscles feed on themselves. Visions of food snap at me like whips. I feel little else.

  Several triggerfish swim up from astern as the breeze builds. They come up broadside. Once again I aim and fire. The spear strikes and drives through. I yank the impaled fish aboard. Its tight round mouth belches a clicking croak. Its eyes roll wildly. The stiff, rough body can only flap its fins in protest. Food! Lowering my head I chant, “Food, I have food.” Shrinkage of the codline around the cutting board has warped a trough into it. I wedge the trigger under the line in the trough and try to strike it unconscious with my flare gun. It’s like clubbing concrete. Powerful thrusts with my knife finally penetrate the trigger’s armored skin. Its eyes flash, its fins frantically wave about, its throat cracks, and finally it is dead. My eyes fill with tears. I weep for my fish, for me, for the state of my desperation. Then I feed on its bitter meat.