The Dangerous Voyage, Epsiode 8: The End

Author’s Note: The following story covers the first three months of 1999. On the 1st of January of that year, we set sail from Colombia aboard the 65 foot balsa raft, Manteño II. We had spent the previous months on land, rebuilding the raft after parasites, called “shipworms,” had badly damaged the vessel’s logs.

We set out for Panama, expecting to continue on to Mexico. For eighteen days we tried to stay near land—near the Central American coast—but were driven out to sea by erratic winds and currents. After sailing to within five miles of shore, we were sucked into The Gyre, a naturally occurring whirlpool, 600 miles in diameter. Inside The Gyre, there is no wind.

Aboard the raft were four men: Alejandro and Cesar, the two Colombians who had volunteered to sail with us while we were rebuilding the raft, Martin, the cinematographer, and myself.

The Dangerous Voyage, Epsiode 8: The End


On the deck there was no longer any sign of a shelter. The Manteño II now looked like a simple wooden platform. The deck stretched, unbroken, for 50 feet. The feeling of wide-open space was immense. We stood on the ocean and looked in all directions at a flat, mirror-like surface. As far as the eye could see there was nothingness, no mountains in the distance, no trees, no waves, no boats, no motion of any kind; a vacuum extended to the horizon in every direction. We were the loneliest people on Earth—four haggard, weakened men, marooned on an island measuring 61 feet by 20 feet; an island that had never existed on a nautical chart.

But still there was no escape. The days continued to pass and we continued to drift in the vacuum. The ropes were rotting and the raft was not only sinking, but more and more it was beginning to disintegrate. Manteño II was reaching its limit. Disaster was coming. It was just a matter of time before the raft would begin to badly list, just a matter of time before one side began to sink faster than the other, and then the mammoth vessel would simply roll over and die like a great animal that can go no further.

The clock was ticking, and on the 5th of March, in the afternoon, I began calling the Costa Rican naval base at Golfito. When I made contact, the radioman on duty told me to stand by for the Comandante. I heard him come on the frequency, and then he asked: “What is your situation?”

“We can hold out for a while, but we are definitely sinking.”

“We want to come right now,” he said.

“All right. All right. OK.” I hesitated for a moment. We would never escape The Gyre, and we were as close to land as we would ever be. “OK,” I said. “We’ll go now.”

“We can make your position in 15 hours.”

“Roger that. I’ll fire aerial flares to help guide you in.”

I hung up the radio microphone and simply began to give orders. It was all very automated. For the 12 hours we suspended freedom of choice and simply did the next thing in a row of obvious actions: Pack your personal gear, then pack the community gear, and on and on. As soon as we were ready we would dismantle the raft, remove everything except the last layer—the logs and the main lashings—so that in the morning when the Costa Ricans arrived we would be able to finish the raft off completely. We didn’t want Manteño II to be a hazard to other boats.

And so we began our final night in The Gyre. We would go on to build another raft, and we would endure other weird adventures, and we would continue our dogged pursuit of the ancient Manteño, but as the sun set on that last night, something in us turned off. Martin said later that it was “all very disturbing.”

Indeed.

I cannot possibly estimate how many of the Manteño disappeared into The Gyre, but those few who survived it must have brought back legends of a dreadful place, just over the horizon where slow death was eternally waiting, an immense, silent pool of water, a wasteland.

As that last night began, we became like trolls in a mine. Soon we had a fire going in the center of the raft, made of plastic and other refuse, and long slender orange and yellow flames began to lick the black air. An unearthly light flickered all around us now. Our hands were filled with satanic instruments of destruction—axes, hatchets, machetes—and we were methodically destroying our precious raft. Hours passed and there were no sounds around us but those of our own labor, pulling, hauling, loading, chopping solid thumps with our blades, pummeling the bones and sinews of Manteño II.

Around midnight we cut down our own masts—beautiful poles made of fine blond wood—and then we watched in silence as they fell, staring blankly, our faces reflecting the orange flame, our features distorting and elongating and being made ugly by black shadows. And as our destruction deepened we became even more automated, and the fire and the darkness and the silence seemed to merge. The smoke coming off the plastic fire was so thick that you could not see through it. More than that, it was just as black as the night. As a cloud of it passed a person, that person would disappear, or parts of them would, leaving only a head or an arm floating weightlessly against a black backdrop. Alejandro Martinez, a soft-spoken man with black eyes, was now vanishing for brief seconds and then reappearing suddenly in an eerie orange glow. You could hear him in the dark, murmuring Spanish phrases—a muffled, disembodied voice in The Gyre—and in the burning light you could see him suspended in space, yellow and flickering, robotically dismembering the ancient ship that had come from Ecuador, afloat, adrift, and now afire, on a shining plate of water.

The End

Photo caption: The Gyre, by day.



Hope you enjoyed "The Dangerous Voyage." Join us next month for a new adventure. Until then, Cheers.


John Haslett's memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called Voyage of the Manteño, The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner (St. Martin's Press, Dec.'06). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Film Director Annie Biggs.

To read the first chapter of Voyage of the Manteño just click: Chapter 1 The Worst Day ...and The Best

"You won't be able to put it down." National Geographic Adventure

links always help

The Dangerous Voyage: Epsiode 7, Marooned

Author’s Note: The following story covers the first three months of 1999. On the 1st of January of that year, we set sail from Colombia aboard the 65 foot balsa raft, Manteño II. We had spent the previous months on land, rebuilding the raft after parasites, called “shipworms,” had badly damaged the vessel’s logs.

We set out for Panama, expecting to continue on to Mexico. For eighteen days we tried to stay near land—near the Central American coast—but were driven out to sea by erratic winds and currents. After sailing to within five miles of shore, we were sucked into The Gyre, a naturally occurring whirlpool, 600 miles in diameter. Inside The Gyre, there is no wind.

Aboard the raft were four men: Alejandro and Cesar, the two Colombians who had volunteered to sail with us while we were rebuilding the raft, Martin, the cinematographer, and myself.


The Dangerous Voyage, Episode 7: Marooned

When the sun came up on the 14th, it was good sailing weather. We had a light breeze and moderate seas. We surveyed the damage from the storm and found that it was minimal. But we were seeing the signs of a greater problem: The rope rot was advancing rapidly.

We sailed throughout the day, even though we were partly submerged. The Colombians dutifully went back to work repairing the deck. As night approached, the wind and seas increased again. We still held out hope of sailing out of the top of The Gyre, and into the main current to Hawaii.

18, February 1999
“Night after night we are hit by storms. Waves inside the hut so big that men are floating away. Chances are ebbing away. Raft sinking. 16th and 17th we put all floating objects under the raft. Noises inside the hut at night are incredible. All surrounded by sharks, and sharks are larger. Storms at night are destroying deck. Deck on port side is gone. We all have severe saltwater rash. We reach Lat. 5”53 North, Long 87”46 West … wind dies completely—raft drifting back into Gyre. Martin weakening. Cesar and Alejandro have the ‘thousand mile stare.’ All heroic.
“I will fight, but inside, I am beyond anything. My God, my poor wife.”

The wind died in the afternoon of the 18th, and we began to drift once again. The Manteño Expedition had been in the field for over 30 weeks now, and the four of us had been at sea for 49 days. At night, in the vast blackness, we picked up an American radio station broadcasting on short-wave. In between the newscasts came a song of no importance—except that it was from our former life in the modern world. Had I been at home I would have passed over it without a second thought, but out there, lost in the vacuum, it was pure honey. Inside the hut, Martin and I sat in the dark, motionless, not saying a word, not wanting to interfere with one second of that short musical remembrance of home. It made me feel as though my body was floating. It sounded so good, like seeing someone you love come back from the dead for just a few minutes. I remember each change of key being like that of a symphony. I remember thinking of the genius of American Rock and Roll. When it was over, we were so let down. I know that I was, and I didn’t want to look at Martin, there in the dark.

19, February 1999
“Now, inside the hut it is wet all the time. It is true: I am tired and miserable; but, I have 30 - 40 days left in me. Why not make this my finest hours (sic).

“More and more the starboard quarter is going down. We have three pontoons under it, and it is still under water.”

We lived in the ocean, rather than above it. We worked in seawater up to our knees while small waves brought sharks on deck. There were hundreds of them, and they loved to rub their bellies on the balsa logs. It was a bizarre phenomenon. The sharks would come cruising in, their scraggly teeth sticking out of their mouths, and then turn sharply at the logs to rub the white underside of their bodies. Catching them with our bare hands was quite easy now. As they’d come by we’d lift them out of the water by the tale fin. They’d wiggle and squirm so violently in our hands that our bodies would turn to rubber, wobbling in ten directions. Then we’d throw them away from the raft. They’d scurry away for a few minutes, then come back. There were so many hundreds of them that the waters around the raft now seemed to squirm with gray bodies.

At noon on the 19th Alejandro pointed to the horizon, off the starboard beam. “Cocos Island,” he said, and then was silent. We couldn’t actually make out any land, just the jagged silver outline of a mountain, glimmering faintly on the horizon. It was more than twenty miles away. We stood and looked out across the vast Pacific Ocean. It wouldn’t have mattered if the island had been two miles away or two hundred yards away, we couldn’t move so much as 100 feet without wind. We stared blankly, hopelessly. Our mouths hung open, making us look hungry, tired, despondent. We just stood, looking at a faint outline of land, not saying a word.

20, February 1999
“After 50 days of drift to the east—this day we drift to the west—away from Isla del Coco. Drift away from Isla del Coco.”

On the 20th, shortly after breakfast, we disassembled the raft. We had to get rid of any and all excess weight, and quickly. The raft had become an airship. The only way to gain altitude in a balloon is to release ballast, and so it was with us. Every piece of non-essential gear had to be thrown overboard so that our ship would float higher.

There was no break between the ocean and the deck now, the water’s surface simply continued unabated across the raft. It was as though we were going through life in a shallow pool of water. All daily actions—walking, working, cooking—could only be accomplished by an enormous amount of sloshing and splashing. It was extremely hot and the air was still. We had worked in the saltwater for days and were never dry. The saltwater sores on our feet split open, widened, deepened, and burned. At that point, the main thing was to get our legs up out of the water.

As hard as it was for me to part with it, the library had to go. Alejandro knew what was biodegradable and what was not. If it was biodegradable, then it was committed to the sea; if it wasn’t, then it would be burned. Alejandro handed books to me and I threw them out the window. The Last Days of Socrates, We, The Navigators, The Raft Book, Cosmos, The Perfect Storm, and 15 - 20 others all went over. The only ones we saved were those having to do with Central America. We already knew that if we didn’t make it out of The Gyre, we’d probably end up somewhere in Central America.

We stored all of the small items, like diving gear, personal belongings, and tools, in the blue barrels, and then threw the walls of the hut over the side, sometimes one bamboo cane at a time and sometimes by cutting out whole sections and hurling them into the ocean. Cutting and untying the hundreds of tiny knots that held the little bamboo hut together took most of the day. When we were finished with the walls, the roof went over. We kept the hut’s frame and floor though; they were made of sturdy, whole canes, and would be needed for a new structure. Debris from the raft now rested on the surface of the sea in a mile-wide circle around us, making it look as though we had exploded.

The wooden storage boxes went over next. We put a message-in-a-bottle in one of them, saying that they were from the good ship Manteño II, and that we had been trapped in The Gyre for 50 days now. We did this because we feared that if a boat happened upon the debris, a captain might assume that a ship had broken up in the area, and set in motion all those things that accompany such a terrible event. The storage boxes drifted away from the raft, floating well, like small boats.

On the second floor platform, where the hut had been, we set up Martin’s yellow tent, which we had kept since leaving Colombia seven weeks ago, and then passed the night in total peace.

On the morning of the 21st, we disassembled the hut’s second floor. This elevated platform, which of course had been the sleeping compartment, had been built on top of six, very small balsa logs. These were now forced under the raft so that they could work as fresh pontoons. Slowly, the raft was coming up; it was working.

On the deck, there was no longer any sign of a shelter. The raft now looked like a simple, wooden platform. The deck stretched, unbroken, for 50 feet. The feeling of wide open space was immense. We stood on the ocean and looked in all directions at a flat, mirror-like surface. As far as the eye could see there was stillness, nothingness —no mountains in the distance, no trees, no waves, no boats, no motion of any kind whatsoever —a vacuum extending in every direction to every horizon. We were the loneliest people on earth—four, haggard, weakened men, marooned on an island measuring 61 feet by 20 feet; an island that had never existed on a nautical chart.

For the rest of the 21st and 22nd we worked on lightening the load. At around 10:00pm on the night of the 22nd it began to blow. By 2:00am the sea had become stirred up and waves broke over the deck until dawn.

In the morning, we searched for the diving equipment and realized that it had been swept overboard in the dark. The fins, snorkels, and most importantly, the masks, were gone. Working under the raft, where hundreds of lashings held our ship together, would now have to be done blindly. This would require diving under the raft and feeling around in a hundred different places for one small tear in one rope. This was highly impractical. Now that the masks were gone there was simply no way of knowing if our vessel was seaworthy. A main lashing could break and we wouldn’t know it until the raft split in half. If that happened in the middle of the night, or in heavy weather, the giant raft would become a 40,000-pound vice, much like a nutcracker, opening and closing at random.

During the day of the 23rd we built a platform on stilts, five feet off the deck, to sleep on. It was a skeleton structure that Cesar devised and built. It stood on six bamboo legs and had only one wall. It was immediately nicknamed “The Birdhouse.”

25 February 1999
“Alejandro is greatly affected by the loss of the scuba eq. I am weakening. We are going back into The Gyre. All weakening. Mizzen stays break—ropes rotting. Everything wet and rotting.”

The rope rot was becoming serious. Mold, which grows only in fresh water, causes rot in manila rope. During our two month stay in Colombia, the raft’s ropes had been soaked by more than 150 inches of rain. We had been on the open sea for two months now and the intense heat of The Gyre had incubated the mold until it was in full bloom. We had run out of synthetic rope to reinforce or replace the rotting manila, and the manila was the only thing holding the raft together. Now, even just small amounts of strain caused the manila rope to break.

On the 23rd the rope holding the main crossbeam finally gave out. I had to use a twenty-foot length of the nylon anchor line to tie it back in place. Two days later we found that the stay for the mizzenmast on the starboard quarter had rotted completely through. We checked the other three stays that held up the mizzenmast and found that they were all on the verge of breaking. That really scared me. The mizzenmast would have fallen within the next 24 hours, maybe sooner if we had had heavy weather. Our little skeleton of a shelter was five feet from the mast. If 900-pound pole fell on the Bird House it would probably cause a fatality.

I tried not to show alarm; nevertheless, I worked frantically to splice the lines. I demonstrated splicing to Cesar, and he completed one of the stays himself. He was a natural mariner, with a good feeling for the work and the lifestyle.

On March 1st, Martin and I, using the leftovers from our library, began searching our maps of Costa Rica for a place to build a new vessel. We had a couple of travel books, a motley assortment of land maps and nautical charts, and our hard-won knowledge.

1 March 1999
“We are moving back into The Gyre again. Our course is 140 deg. (South west). There is no wind.

We sat in silence sometimes, all four of us, at the edge of our open-air shelter, and just thought. We just stared, stupefied for moments at a time by a vast pool of water: The Gyre. It was not a bad place; on the contrary, The Gyre burst with beauty. But you couldn’t escape. You were allowed to enter there, but you would never get out. You would eventually wither, and then disappear into it.


Tomorrow: Episode 8, The End


John Haslett's memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called Voyage of the Manteño, The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner (St. Martin's Press, Dec.'06). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Film Director Annie Biggs.

To read the first chapter of Voyage of the Manteño just click: Chapter 1 The Worst Day ...and The Best

"You won't be able to put it down." National Geographic Adventure

links always help

The Dangerous Voyage: Episode 6, Tropical Cyclone

Author’s Note: The following story covers the first three months of 1999. On the 1st of January of that year, we set sail from Colombia aboard the 65 foot balsa raft, Manteño II. We had spent the previous months on land, rebuilding the raft after parasites, called “shipworms,” had badly damaged the vessel’s logs.

We set out for Panama, expecting to continue on to Mexico. For eighteen days we tried to stay near land—near the Central American coast—but were driven out to sea by erratic winds and currents. After sailing to within five miles of shore, we were sucked into The Gyre, a naturally occurring whirlpool, 600 miles in diameter. Inside The Gyre, there is no wind.

Aboard the raft were four men: Alejandro and Cesar, the two Colombians who had volunteered to sail with us while we were rebuilding the raft, Martin, the cinematographer, and myself.


The Dangerous Voyage, Episode 6: Tropical Cyclone

I remember, vividly, watching the raft sail away and being astonished that it could still sail. I talked to Cesar about this later and he had had the same feeling the moment the raft took off. We had thought the raft dead, unable to carry on. Shortly after calculating how to reach Hawaii, I had begun privately working out the details of the best way to abandon the raft. But Manteño II was definitely alive, and with a wind it could still make way.

Three days later the wind started, and I noticed that the raft was sinking at an alarming rate, faster than I had expected. If the raft met disaster because of the Teredo navalis shipworms, it would happen this way: One side would sink more rapidly than the other, causing a list. The list would start small, but would rapidly increase until it reached a point of no return. The super-heavy masts, whether carrying sails or not, would lean over and crank the raft around like tremendously powerful levers. Once that started the raft would simply lay down and die. The time it would take for the raft to go from a small list to no return might be as little as twelve hours. It probably wouldn’t be a violent action, simply a great animal that has struggled for as long as she can and now, at the end, simply refuses to go on. The entire scenario scared me and I was constantly on guard against it. If Manteño II was allowed to list too far to one to side, we’d lose her for sure.

During the morning of the 13th the seas increased. The ocean was now surging up through the deck. When the raft pitched down the whole deck disappeared and you had the feeling of standing on the surface of the water. When it would recover, it would barely just come back out of the water.

13 February 1999
“Very heavy weather. Raft not holding up well. Logs underneath (the surface of the) water, and not coming up. Seas very violent. Port beam log has broken free—fixed it with a tourniquet. Raft listing heavily to port. We’ve moved much weight to starboard. Men holding up well. Water is entering the back wall of the hut like the first puddle of flood water. I miss my wife terribly. I love you Annie.”

Massive amounts of water are coming on board now. It’s a pathetic scene of weary men trying to save a dying ship: We’re losing items overboard. Men go into the water to retrieve guaras washed into the sea. We get them back and tie them down. We are scurrying around the deck under a gray, dismal sky. Another surge comes over the bow and a balsa stump slides off like it’s riding a waterfall. Get it! Tie it down! Hours pass; we are tiring. We have heavy flooding in the hut. Then the binnacle, the enormous stump we have used as our compass holder since we started the voyage, slides across the deck, almost taking the ship’s compass overboard. Cesar tackles it as it slides past him and is swept of his feet. The four of us grab it and then wrestle and heave it back to the center of the deck. A tank breaks loose from its lashing on the side of the hut. Grab that thing! Tie it down! Then another tank breaks loose. I look at my watch; five hours have gone by now. It’s getting worse. Alejandro and Cesar despair. I tell them to collect all the tools and items that are loose and store them. “Is this normal?” Alejandro asks.

“No,” I say.

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

“We’ll be all right.”

I duck into the hut to change into dry clothing. Martin is rigging the camera for filming. Suddenly there comes from outside a gigantic growling noise. We look out the door and see nothing but white. A low, satanic moan thunders all around us, and the masts lean over 45 degrees. “Is that real?” Martin asks.

“That’s the real McCoy,” I say, and I rush out on deck.

It is a tropical cyclone. Cesar and Alejandro stare at the atmosphere all around the raft. Looks of stunned fascination sprawl across their faces. Only a few seconds ago we could see the great Pacific Ocean stretching to the horizon, a vast, open place; but now there is nothing. The ocean is gone; the feeling of open space is gone; everything is gone. It’s like a blizzard out here—total white-out conditions. The raft has been completely covered, enveloped, surrounded by high walls of white mist. We are inside a large room now, like a gymnasium or a warehouse. A white barrier, as thick as milk, now arches up to a roof above us.

The manila lines are thrumming a deep vibration, a low, bass, hummmmmmmm. The wind blast is hitting us directly on the starboard beam. The masts bend over to an unnatural angle. They are like palm trees on land, when hit by hurricane winds: The ground that they are planted in remains level while the trunks lay over as though they are going to touch the earth. It seems impossible that the masts can lean over that far and not break out of their stays. They’re past 45 degrees, relative to the deck. The raft heels over. I stand for a moment, crouched against the wind, drops flying from my beard, and just watch: Are we going to capsize? I force a smile on my face. Alejandro is slightly nervous; Cesar is ready for action. It’s best to keep the men busy, rather than let them stand around with their minds wandering, so I shout to them: “Help—me—with—the—pontoons!”

The masts are prying the port side upward. It has caused the pontoons to spring out and float up. The pontoons on the starboard side have broken free too, which scares me—there’s no apparent reason for that to happen. Are the lashings starting to break? Will the raft disintegrate? Are we being pried apart by the pressure of a 40-foot crowbar? I jump into the ocean so that I can force the pontoons back under with my feet. The work, and the fact that I am in the water, seem to reassure the Colombians, as well as Martin, who is now shooting. Everyone acts fast and performs well.

The wind accelerates and I swim out from the raft to recover a piece of lumber that has gone overboard. The swimming is easy. I go out only twenty feet—any farther and I’ll lose the raft in the white mist—and return. I pull myself up on the deck and shout into Alejandro’s ear, “I’m going to go under to look at everything to make sure it’s O.K!”

I dive under the raft and cruise silently through crystal blue sea. There are no signs of life. There is nothing but a blank blue emptiness. The storm is raging just three feet above my head but down below the ocean is completely calm, vacant. The raft seems to be holding up well, better than in the minor storms near Colombia when the sea had been confused.

When I surface and climb aboard it seems as though there’s nothing to do. We’ve been tying and retying everything down for eight hours now. Nevertheless, I don’t want the men to be idle, so I tell them that we’ll tie some stays to the hut to keep it from being blown flat.

We work our way to the back of the raft. We’re climbing across the port side and the wind is blasting the raft. We start and stop, moving slowly, hand over hand. Our backs are to the wind now. The wind blast sounds like a wall of radio static. The spray needles us; the drops are solid now. Whether or not it is raining, I cannot tell. There is nothing but horizontal motion. All is wind.

Cesar is smiling; he has a very strong sense of ‘The Game.’ I drop over the side. He follows me with a big grin on his face. Alejandro is still alarmed, but by now I know him: He is a person who becomes nervous in a dangerous situation, but he never breaks down into panic or indecision. The wind is flattening out his face. His entire head is wavering back and forth like that of an old man.

We retie the stays of the hut. Cesar and I are in the water and Alejandro is on the deck, feeding us line. Martin is behind him, braced against the wall of the hut, trying to keep the camera rig steady. He goes back into the hut to work on the camera; he’s having trouble with it. As soon as we’re finished working on the port side, I come aboard and tell Alejandro and Cesar that we’ll do the same to the starboard.

We step down off of the deck, onto the balsa logs, and wade across the sunken stern. We are trying to reach the other side of the raft. We are methodically placing our bare feet on each log, like stepping from rock to rock in a raging river. Masses of ocean are surging in on us, swirling around our waists and trying to suck us out. The static noise of the wind is blasting in our ears. We are three bearded men, dressed in rags, clinging to the back of a little bamboo hut, awash in a white, foamy sea.

There is heavy flooding inside the hut now. Masses of deep blue seawater surge in through the bamboo walls. The seawater fouls everything. There is no way to stop the ocean; there is simply too much of it.

After three hours of growling, the wind begins to decelerate. In a 30-minute period, it goes from storm to bluster. The fighting has exhausted us. Men stumble in and out of the hut; their faces hang. All is well for the time being. In a quiet voice, Martin says to me, “We did pretty damn good today.”

Photo caption: The hut, tied down.





Tomorrow: Episode 7: Marooned


John Haslett's memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called Voyage of the Manteño, The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner (St. Martin's Press, Dec.'06). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Film Director Annie Biggs.

To read the first chapter of Voyage of the Manteño just click: Chapter 1 The Worst Day ...and The Best

"You won't be able to put it down." National Geographic Adventure

links always help

The Dangerous Voyage: Epsiode 5, The Famous Swim

Author’s Note: The following story covers the first three months of 1999. On the 1st of January of that year, we set sail from Colombia aboard the 65 foot balsa raft, Manteño II. We had spent the previous months on land, rebuilding the raft after parasites, called “shipworms,” had badly damaged the vessel’s logs.

We set out for Panama, expecting to continue on to Mexico. For eighteen days we tried to stay near land—near the Central American coast—but were driven out to sea by erratic winds and currents. After sailing to within five miles of shore, we were sucked into The Gyre, a naturally occurring whirlpool, 600 miles in diameter. Inside The Gyre, there is no wind.

Aboard the raft were four men: Alejandro and Cesar, the two Colombians who had volunteered to sail with us while we were rebuilding the raft, Martin, the cinematographer, and myself.


The Dangerous Voyage, Episode 5: The Famous Swim

On the 8th, at dawn, we thought we felt a puff of wind and raised sail quickly, more out of fantasy than fact. The wind wasn’t real; it had only been a puff that piqued our optimism. When the little breeze died in the oppressive heat, we just left the sails to hang. The canvas was starting to mold from sitting on the deck in the heat. This had been a serious problem on Illa-Tiki, and I could now clearly smell that foul odor of baking mildew in the sails of Manteño II; it was good to let them dry out.

Shortly after noon, on the forward deck, I smoked my last cigar. The smoke rose in a straight line, streaming up until a cloud formed above me. The air around me felt like that of a small room. As far as could be seen, from horizon to horizon, the air had become completely still. I had never experienced such calm in any other place I had been on the earth. The atmosphere hung over us like a block. For approximately four weeks there had not been enough wind to keep the sail inflated. Now, for the last ten days, there had been no wind at all.

In the afternoon I took a nap, and at around 4:00 Alejandro called to me, saying that he had spotted a snarl of debris off the port side. I was still inside the hut lying down and I could hear his voice bouncing off of the ocean’s smooth surface like a shout trapped in a small tunnel. I got up immediately and came out into the brilliant sunlight and saw a tangled blue mess, half-submerged, about 30 yards out. Rope! We couldn’t believe our luck! Good polypropylene rope! Looking at Alejandro, I asked: “Would you go out there and get that?”

“No problem.”

He put on a mask and flippers and was in the water in one minute. But then he got about 50 feet out and called back to me, alarmed by a sudden swarm of sharks. “John! The sharks—are acting—very aggressively!”

I looked at Cesar and said: “Let’s do this one in the dinghy.”

“Good idea,” he said, and we launched the dinghy with Martin aboard. By the time we got out to Alejandro he had reached the floating rope. Cesar went into the water to chase off the sharks, and I examined the mass of debris. Some sort of wooden boat must have lost about 200 feet of 3/8 inch line. It was tangled up in five or six water-logged planks. When Cesar surfaced from fighting the sharks, he called out, “Capitan, son grande!” (they’re big!) I went over the side and dove down. The sharks were larger than normal, but many had already been dispersed by Cesar’s harpoon. When I surfaced, Martin said that he wanted to go back to the raft and get the video camera. He and I returned to Manteño II, leaving Alejandro and Cesar to get the snag ready for towing. We were back in ten minutes, and I returned to the sharks, this time with Martin shooting.

I swam with the sharks, poking them occasionally to keep them back while Martin got several sequences, and then we surfaced to talk. The moment my head came out of the water I felt a strong intuitive alarm go off. I got into the dinghy and realized that the raft was in the wrong place. It had moved. Not far enough to measure, but far enough for me to realize, subconsciously, that a huge barge like that didn’t move a foot, unless pushed. Alejandro and Cesar got into the dinghy instinctively, I think, sensing a problem by the look on my face. I told Martin to get aboard “right now,” and within thirty seconds of that warning, we went from normality to terror: The raft had sailed away without us.

We frantically grabbed paddles. “We should send Alejandro swimming!” Martin said, already beginning to huff and puff from paddling. Why not? He can probably make better time than we can, and he adds weight to the dinghy without having access to a paddle.

“Go!” I yelled. He didn’t need an explanation; he took off, kicking with his black fins.

The situation was unbelievable. We were all taken aback by the sense of non-reality. A sudden thunderstorm, small and concentrated, had developed just on the other side of the horizon. It had begun sucking in the atmosphere around it, generating a sudden, localized wind. We all knew it was life-or-death. I reached back and pulled the rope snarl to the dinghy and undid the tow line. Forget the bloody rope!!

Manteño II sailed away to the distant horizon. The raft’s details faded; it became a small gray box with two triangles above it. We had been left behind, alone on the ocean in the dinghy.

“How can this happen?!” Martin blurted out uncontrollably. He was saying what we were all thinking: There hadn’t been any real wind for over 30 days, and even if there was wind, the raft couldn’t sail unattended. It was too bizarre to be true. Five minutes ago all was well, now we were dead. I was immediately stunned by a wave of fear. This is all my fault. I put these men in this position. How could I have been so stupid!?

Why didn’t the raft steer itself into the wind and stop? The wind’s pressure on the sails should have forced it to turn up into the wind; but the wind, being sucked into a small disturbance that was now on the horizon, was changing direction roughly as fast as the raft could turn, unattended. Manteño II was sailing in a wide arc, and the fast moving little storm was maintaining a perfect right angle to her sails. By freak accident the sails stayed inflated just enough, and in just the right position, for the raft to sail on its own.

We paddled fanatically. The dinghy had been deflated 30% because we didn’t want it to expand in the hot afternoon and explode. Now it was like trying to paddle a pile of wet laundry, and it was obvious that we’d never catch the raft. I had terrible visions: Alone in The Gyre with nothing but our swimsuits. My God! We don’t even have shirts on! We’ll die of exposure in a few days! In The Gyre, there would be no way of ever getting to land; we’d be lost, going in circles until we starved, orbiting forever in the vast wasteland. I knew immediately what was going to happen over the next few minutes and hours: We would begin to lose sight of the raft after it traveled just a few miles. Once the raft disappeared over the curvature of the earth it would be impossible to track, especially when it was running in the freakish arc of the turning wind. Sunset was only an hour away and it would be all over by then: Four men in the dark, alone on the ocean, lost, hopeless. There would be an explosion of anger by one or all of the men, and then, the horrible realization that there is nothing to do— there are no odds—it is the end of everything.

The raft gained speed. We could tell by the way it was sailing away that it had picked up momentum. Martin had fins on and went over the side to kick while Cesar and I paddled. For some unexplainable reason my adrenaline went out on me and I was immediately fatigued. That had never happened to me before, and I had to drive myself maniacally to paddle at my maximum. Cesar and Martin were relatively cool-headed at that point. We couldn’t afford a panic and we knew it.

Martin quickly switched with Cesar. Cesar was a stronger swimmer, Martin a stronger paddler. Keeping my mind fixated on paddling, I asked, desperately, “Where’s Alejandro?!”

“He’s still a hundred yards back!” Martin gasped.

Looking up for a split second, I caught a glimpse of a disturbance in the water where Alejandro was swimming like a man caught in an epileptic convulsion. There’s no way he’ll make it …he was a hundred yards back when he started …he’s going to tire eventually. The raft was, in fact, pulling away from us as well. We were paddling and kicking as hard as we could and it was still shrinking on the horizon. Fatigue was already starting to set in. Another vision came to me: That point when we realize that we can’t go on paddling. I’d have nothing to say—nothing.

Manteño II got smaller and smaller. In my field of vision it was now only half an inch tall on the horizon. For the only time in my life, I knew what hopelessness really felt like. I prepared myself for the horrible feeling of seeing the raft disappear forever over the horizon.

But then the mizzen sail deflated. Even with my blurred vision I distinctly saw canvas luffing! I couldn’t help but yell out, “YEAAAA!!!!!!” The other men were silent. I think the utter heart-stopping fright of the moment had paralyzed their ability to talk. The wind had picked up in intensity and that had overturned the perfect little balance that the atmosphere had used to make the raft sail on its own, but it was still making good speed under the mainsail.

Alejandro swam to within fifteen feet of the logs and seemed to stop. We could see him out there on the open sea, swimming across The Gyre, swimming for his life, crawling, throwing arm over arm, pitching his palms overhand and drawing air out of the side of his mouth. But he wasn’t closing the gap. He just seemed to hang there, suspended, right behind the raft, reaching out for the logs, minute after agonizing minute. Oh God, he can’t keep that up for very long. He was becoming desperate. The big, powerful mainsail was still full and pulling the raft well and Alejandro just hung there behind it. We held our breath in that moment; our hopes were suspended, like Alejandro, swimming, struggling, behind the raft, and then he reached out again … He made it! I don’t believe it! … I don’t believe it.

It was unspeakable relief. He pulled himself slowly onto the back ends of the logs and lay there forever. The raft continued to pull away from us and yet he just lay there. Why doesn’t he douse the mainsail?! It half-occurred to me that he was too exhausted to walk; but if he had had enough left in him to make that grab, he should have enough to get up and stop the raft. I found out later that the last reach he made was indeed probably his last reach.

We weren’t out of trouble yet. “I’m going to paddle until we get there,” Martin said, with the conviction of a man who would never again rely on hope to save his life.

Alejandro got up, half-crawling, half-stumbling. We could see that he was moving with his mind and that his body was being dragged along as an afterthought. The storm came toward us from the horizon, and quickly we had a deluge. It poured rain on us as we continued to paddle frantically. If that had happened ten minutes beforehand it would have been enough to obscure the raft from our visibility.

We continued to paddle with every ounce of strength we had. We didn’t know it, but Alejandro was doing battle with the super-powerful mainsail. How do you fight a thing like that when everything in you is gone? He was beyond any exhaustion he’d ever felt before. Finally, we saw the sheet let out on the mainsail, and it luffed in the wind. We cheered! There was an ugly, disorganized sigh of relief from the three of us in the dinghy. I can’t believe it. I cannot believe it. I laughed loudly with utter relief; I couldn’t help it.

Still paddling for our lives, we closed in on the raft. Alejandro wobbled to the back of the stern, and then collapsed on the back ends of the logs. His legs had been shaking badly, and when he dropped, we could see that it was against his will. As we pulled up to the stern I could see that he was crying; not just a few tears but really sobbing. He had been as terrified as is possible for a human being, and I was overcome with sympathy and shame at the sight of him. I had caused this good man—who had just saved my life—to come within a few seconds of dying. As he gasped for air, his whole body shaking and trembling, he looked into my eyes and said, “I told myself: ‘I will swim forever. I will swim forever. I will swim forever. I will swim forever…’ ” His voice trailed off and he was just looking at me, aghast with fear, mouthing his words but making no sound. I knew at that moment, from my experiences, that a lesser man would have given up.

We went aboard the raft and Martin began to shed a few tears, then broke down completely. Cesar just stood there looking at the raft in shock and bewilderment: A dead elephant had suddenly awakened and sprinted out of sight. I knew that my face must show the fright too. I went to the forward deck to make sure everything was all right. Of course everything was, but I was overwhelmed by the instinct to do something.

I couldn’t cry out loud—I didn’t react like that. But I felt the same way as the others: We hadn’t triumphed over a great challenge; we had escaped an unfair death. That was what hurt us: We cried over our lives, which had just been taken from us and then given back in the span of 30 minutes. Our lives—which we had just discovered we liked a lot—would have been wasted. We cried over the injustice. We would have died for nothing.

8 February 1999
“It is one in a million that a sailor sees his boat sail away, and then lives to tell about it…”

Photo caption: Alejandro Martinez, in The Gyre.

Tomorrow: Episode 6: Tropical cyclone


John Haslett's memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called Voyage of the Manteño, The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner (St. Martin's Press, Dec.'06). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Film Director Annie Biggs.

To read the first chapter of Voyage of the Manteño just click: Chapter 1 The Worst Day ...and The Best

"You won't be able to put it down." National Geographic Adventure

links always help

The Dangerous Voyage: Epsiode 4, The Rising Water

Author’s Note: The following story covers the first three months of 1999. On the 1st of January of that year, we set sail from Colombia aboard the 65 foot balsa raft, Manteño II. We had spent the previous months on land, rebuilding the raft after parasites, called “shipworms,” had badly damaged the vessel’s logs.

We set out for Panama, expecting to continue on to Mexico. For eighteen days we tried to stay near land—near the Central American coast—but were driven out to sea by erratic winds and currents. After sailing to within five miles of shore, we were sucked into The Gyre, a naturally occurring whirlpool, 600 miles in diameter. Inside The Gyre, there is no wind.

Aboard the raft were four men: Alejandro and Cesar, the two Colombians who had volunteered to sail with us while we were rebuilding the raft, Martin, the cinematographer, and myself.


The Dagerous Voyage, Episode 4: The Rising Water


During these days of waiting it was intensely hot. The hut offered some protection, but working in the heat was oppressive. Nevertheless, the calm was a welcomed respite because it gave us time to make repairs on the raft and to reinforce the areas that were weakening. Slowly, the raft began to list. The Teredo navalis had started, and the individual logs were losing their buoyancy at an uneven rate. We righted the depressing list by moving the small balsa log pontoons from port to starboard, but after a couple of days the raft began to tilt back the other way, which began a pattern: Every 48 hours we had to shift the pontoons to compensate for a new list. We were also back to the hellish tourniquet work. The hut was beginning to lean to the port side, so we ran a tourniquet-line from a wall crossbeam down to the starboard-most deck bamboo. Cranking the tourniquet pole around, we put an enormous tension on the line and slowly the hut stood upright. The bamboo deck was in bad shape too, and in some cases, detaching completely from the raft. We repaired it by using a hodgepodge of spare bamboo and string made from our reserve rope supply.

We were, in fact, getting desperate for rope. Each day we unlayed another major line. If a rope was made of three strands, we unwound it and made it into three, smaller lines. Then, soon, this smaller line was unlayed too. Everyday our lines shrank in size and strength. In some places whole structures were held together with the remnants of a single manila rope that we had been broken down to strands, then yarns, then fibers.

The foremast was righted and reinforced through the backbreaking work of untying and tightening the long heavy manila stays. The rear centerboards, all eighteen of them, had become a tangled mess that took a Herculean effort to untangle. We spent eight hours under the raft, holding our bursting lungs so that we could stay down just a few more seconds each time, pulling and jerking and wrestling with the ten-foot centerboards until our limbs ached intensely from oxygen starvation and the ocean sucked all of the heat out of our bodies.

Photo caption: The side deck of the raft, in healthier days.
Photo caption: The side deck of the raft, as the raft is sinking.

Still, things remained depressingly disheveled. Everyday, something else more urgent or more important than cleaning and arranging was on the agenda.

As we drifted on the glassy surface, we constantly saw debris floating in the sea. Frequently the heart of the debris was a giant log that had once been a tree on some distant shore and now had become a floating micro-city of life at sea. Here you had the entire food chain: Barnacles, sea weed, and Teredo navalis, all clinging to the sides of the log. These smaller life forms were eaten by crabs scurrying back and forth on the log, and by tiny fish, picking at the log’s sides. The tiny fish were eaten by small and medium fish, measuring from six to eighteen inches in length, swarming around the colony. These medium sized fish were eaten by large dorados and sharks, who orbited elliptically around the colony, swinging out fifty feet or so and then coming in swiftly to attack. Perched on top of the colony were white and gray sea birds, taking off and landing like airplanes on a tiny aircraft carrier. They went up to about fifty feet, collapsed their wings, put their heads down, and then shot straight into the water, catching the small and medium fish. The area around this micro-city was as busy as a downtown street. I wondered, privately, how long each little city had been trapped, circling endlessly in The Gyre, destined to sink there.

On the 26th of January we received news of a massive earthquake in Alejandro’s hometown of Pereira. A ham radio operator in Bogota came on the frequency to deliver the bad news. “The destruction is massive,” he said. “We have thousands of casualties. The center of the quake was in Pereira.”

At the news, Alejandro withered. He sank back on his sleeping bag and put his hands over his face. Sitting just feet away from him at the table, I asked the radio operator to find out if my friend’s family was alive. Alejandro had once told me, during one of our many philosophical conversations: “I love my parents very, very much. They are the most beautiful people I know.”

The wait was dreadful. The vision of having to tell my newfound friend that his beloved mother and father were gone was unbearable.

On the 27th and 28th we discovered more Teredo navalis in our balsa logs. Thankfully, we received news that day that Alejandro’s parents were indeed alive, which diverted my terrible feelings of sinking in The Gyre.

Increasingly, the raft was going down in the water. Our feet and ankles were wet all the time now. Saltwater sores boiled up on our legs. They burned and ached 24 hours a day. We had on board some tubes of strong, steroid-based cream left over from the beginning of The Expedition, when we had been well-supplied. It worked well, but we used up the entire supply within a few days. Between the eight exposed legs there were at least forty open sores festering at any one time. I had to all but order the Colombians to use their share of the cream. “Yours are worse than mine,” they’d each insist, “you use it.”

We were all physically declining. Alejandro had fallen down on the deck a few days before, and when he did he came up trembling, holding his hand. I said to him: “Let me look at it.”

“No,” he said, and turned away, huddling over the injured hand. Right before he turned I noticed that one of his fingers was grotesquely bent. It appeared to me to be a dislocation.

“Alejo,” I said, “just let me look at it for a minute, OK?”

“No, I—I’m OK,” he said, and then reached up with his good hand, grabbing the finger, his face quivering: “Urrgghh!” Crick!—he reset it in the joint.

“What the hell are you doing!?”

“I—I’m OK,” he grunted, then shuffled off down the catwalk like an animal that wanted to lick its wounds in peace. Cesar signaled me to leave him alone for a moment, so I backed off. A week later he went down again and tore the nail out of the same finger.

On the 7th of February we held an informal meeting in the hut. “I feel we can make it another 20 days with the raft in the state it’s in,” I said. “After that, everything’s got to go over the side to lighten the load. In 20 days we’re going to have water up to our ankles all of the time. We’ll have to throw all non-essential material overboard.”

“You’re sure we’re sinking,” Martin said in a confirming tone.

“I’m sure. We will throw overboard everything we can: Excess drinking water, the bicycle-generator, the center crossbeam, extra books, extra clothes, the storage boxes—even the hut. I figure we can get rid of something like 3000 pounds. We’re going to strip down to the bare bones, that’ll buy us another 20 days. We’re still going to need 20 days or more after that to make land—Hawaii—and we’re just going to have to figure out how to stay afloat.”

That’s the way I estimated it on the 7th of February. Our quest for Acapulco and the far end of The Manteño Trading Route was ruined; we’d never make it back to Central America, and even if we did the raft had deteriorated too much to navigate the intricacies of a coastline. If we got into a tight maneuvering situation now we’d be helpless. The most Manteño II could possibly do was run in a straight line, across the open ocean, with the wind and current at her back. That meant that the only land we’d ever be able to make was possibly Hawaii, 4000 nautical miles away. But that goal was only possible if we escaped The Gyre. If we could escape and then make 55 miles a day across the open sea, that put us 75 days away from Hawaii. Technically, we could make it—if we didn’t sit becalmed for days on end, if my rudimentary calculations about the raft’s rate of sink were accurate, and if there were no propulsion disasters, like a broken mast, or six broken yard arms, or a wind-demolished sail. If we could escape The Gyre we still had a chance to limp into port at Hawaii.

The dismal idea of a high-sea rescue was so awful for me that I couldn’t think about it. Not only would The Expedition ‘fail,’ but more importantly we’d have to call for help from the middle of the ocean, inconveniencing the professional mariners like a bunch of helpless amateurs. The Expedition that we had worked so hard to see through, and the knowledge of raft navigation that was so hard-won, would appear like some sort of idiotic publicity stunt.


Tomorrow, Episode 5: The "Famous Swim"


John Haslett's memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called Voyage of the Manteño, The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner (St. Martin's Press, Dec.'06). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Film Director Annie Biggs.

To read the first chapter of Voyage of the Manteño just click: Chapter 1 The Worst Day ...and The Best

"You won't be able to put it down." National Geographic Adventure

links always help

The Dangerous Voyage: Episode 3, The Sea Snakes and the Sharks

Author’s Note: The following story covers the first three months of 1999. On the 1st of January of that year, we set sail from Colombia aboard the 65 foot balsa raft, Manteño II. We had spent the previous months on land, rebuilding the raft after parasites, called “shipworms,” had badly damaged the vessel’s logs.

We set out for Panama, expecting to continue on to Mexico. For eighteen days we tried to stay near land—near the Central American coast—but were driven out to sea by erratic winds and currents. After sailing to within five miles of shore, we were sucked into The Gyre, a naturally occurring whirlpool, 600 miles in diameter. Inside The Gyre, there is no wind.

Aboard the raft were four men: Alejandro and Cesar, the two Colombians who had volunteered to sail with us while we were rebuilding the raft, Martin, the cinematographer, and myself.

The Dangerous Voyage, Episode 3: The Sea Snakes and the Sharks

On one calm evening in The Gyre, Alejandro went out on watch, and while making the rounds, stepped on a sea snake. Miraculously, it didn’t strike him, but it was now clear to us that the snakes would be coming on board at night. It was no surprise; The Gyre was infested with them.

Sea snakes are exceedingly poisonous. Their venom is a neuro-toxin, stronger than that of the king cobra, which paralyzes the victim that has been bitten so that, slowly, respiration becomes impossible. There is only one company in the world that makes an anti-venom, and it is in Australia. Thankfully, they are not usually aggressive. Most human deaths come from fishermen accidentally running across them in fishing nets. Occasionally, however, there are sightings of “thousands” swarming in one area.

Bright green and yellow, the sea snakes around Manteño II averaged about three feet in length, were very slender, and had a flattened tail, like a rudder, perfectly developed for swimming in the ocean. They usually swam on the surface of the water, slithering along in the same motion as a snake would move across the land, wiggling in a serpentine fashion to propel themselves, but when startled, they could kick with their tails and shoot through the water like a spear.

A few days before Alejandro’s encounter, I had sent Martin over the side to reset the starboard stays on the foremast. He went through the usual, arduous, surfacing and diving, pulling and fighting, and then a sea snake suddenly shot forward from the stern. It stopped and hovered on the surface above Martin, who was below and about to come up. In a split second I envisioned Martin surfacing right under the snake, it hanging off his head like moss, Martin convulsing in fear, and the snake reacting by striking him. With nothing else to do, I grabbed my boot off the top of a water barrel and threw it, and instead of scaring the snake, the boot hit it. For a moment the creature was stunned, but then it came-to and so I threw the other boot and it took off, swimming away from the raft right at the same time Martin’s head broke the surface. “Martin!” I screamed, “Dive! Dive down! Go back under!” It took him a second to realize what was going on, then he pushed off the logs in a sudden panic and dove back under the surface. By that time the snake was ten feet away and the danger was gone, but Martin seemed to cling to this incident, and convinced himself that I had “saved his life.”

“I just threw a boot.”

“Were those your last shoes?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I’ll buy you another pair of shoes, if we ever get to land.”

I was now barefoot. Soon, my feet began to bruise and swell painfully from walking on the bamboo deck, just as they had during the voyage of the Illa-Tiki.

We began wearing our rubber jungle boots or other foot gear on watch at night. Nevertheless, using the bathroom off the back logs was especially unnerving, because it usually required taking the boots or shoes off: In the darkness, if the sea was up, you felt masses of warm seawater flood up to your hips as waves came in, then the sudden sucking of the water receding away, like a beach surf. After the water was gone you stood there in the darkness, motionless, waiting to detect the clammy slither of a sea snake across your ankles.

Each day, during this time, Cesar maintained a sharp lookout for sea snakes. He yearned, always, to catch one. As one of The Inventors he had fabricated a personal snake tender: a stick, about three feet long, with a loop of string at one end that could be tightened around the snake’s head. Once the tender had been made, Martin wanted to get Cesar on film, catching a sea snake, and it didn’t take long to spot one. At 3:30 one afternoon a snake came along the port beam, glanced off the logs, and then started swimming away from the raft. Launching the inflatable dinghy, we paddled out after it. Cesar sat up on the bow while Martin and I paddled. We pursued the snake for a hundred yards, seeing it and losing it several times. After losing it for the last time, we turned back, and when we did we were amazed by what we saw. The sky had changed since we had left the raft, fifteen minutes ago. A vast rain shower was coming over the horizon, and we were taken aback by its beauty. The sun, which was on the opposite horizon, gleamed a brilliant silver reflection on the wall of falling water in the eastern sky. It was the greatest demonstration of the color silver that I have ever seen. It was a gleaming waterfall of nature, twenty miles wide, reaching from the sky down to the surface of the ocean, curving over us like an enormous band shell. It seemed to emanate light—to produce light—rather than to reflect it. We could see its entire size and shape because it was so far from us, but we could also see the tiny, individual drops, floating down to earth. It was twenty square miles of cool, trickling, silver leaf, but alive, and moving. It was the most beautiful vista of my life.

“What does it mean?” Martin asked.

It was not a question, but something he pondered. What did it mean? If the ancients saw this as a sign, then I must sympathize. I am a man of reason, but this moment shook me. This immense beauty, this silver utopian vision, had no reason. Only a meteorological phenomenon? Perhaps. If a logical explanation can be found for how it occurs, which it can, then I am still forced to ask, as Martin did, What does it mean? Why would such beauty exist? I assign no religious implications to this moment, but I do ask, Why?

Photo caption: Colombian herpetologist Cesar Alarcon, with sea snake.


On the 27th and 28th we discovered Teredo navalis shipworms in our balsa logs. It was such a dark subject inside my mind that it was hard to accept that we were, once again, going to sink. Many options lay before us, of which the most attractive was the construction of a new raft, while on the high sea. By the 30th of January we had drifted 400 nautical miles from Montuosa Island, our last sighting of land. As we went farther out to high sea, the size and abundance of marine life increased. We sighted more sharks, although they were still skittish.

At 2:00 am on the morning of the 2nd of February, we were hit by our first Chubasco. A Chubasco is an exceedingly concentrated rainstorm, indigenous to Costa Rican waters. Water poured into the hole in the roof where the mizzenmast jutted through, and in a three-hour period we collected 80 gallons of fresh water. I made a note in my diary that everyone on board was calm during the intense downpour. On the next day, I wrote in my diary:

3, February, 1999
“I find colonies of Teredo navalis. (I) am plagued by dark fears again. Can’t tell if the raft is sinking (quickly) or not.
“The course is starting to change for the worse - more north than west. Martin is a fanatic about fishing. My admiration for Alejandro and Cesar continues to grow.”

4, February 1999
“Moving east now - (trapped in The) Gyre.”

We were rounding our third orbit of The Gyre. The mast stays were beginning to chafe and wear. They would have to be changed and reworked. Also, about this time, large sharks appeared around the raft.

Shark attacks on the fish we caught were a frequent occurrence now. Martin would go into the water and spear a fish, only to have the sharks swoop down and bite it in half. The smell of blood and the frantic flapping of fins at the end of the spear were like setting off an alarm. The sharks sensed that the killing was easier near the raft and homed-in. The moment the harpoon would penetrate a fish the sharks would bolt through the water like bullets, sometimes two or three at a time, and gobble it up so fast that it seemed as though it had disintegrated. It chilled Martin. “Man!” he said one day, after clambering aboard the raft for safety, “They attack the second the harpoon goes in! You should see them!”

The sharks were becoming an issue, and we could no longer ignore them. We worked under the raft everyday, setting and resetting the pontoons, reworking the tourniquets, and tightening and resetting the mast stays. The sharks liked to examined us while we worked by passing close to our faces: You’d be working underneath the raft with your hands over your head, holding your breath, struggling to untie a knot, focusing all of your attention on a small area, when a gray shark—its mouth open and its eyes twisted in an evil and uncoordinated fashion—would cruise by just inches from your mask. It startled you, like turning on the light in a dark closet and discovering an intruder staring at you with a knife in his hand. Just this problem alone was a serious hindrance because it broke down our ability to concentrate on repairing the raft, but we faced a more serious problem than just our natural human fear of sharks.

The problem that we faced was not the size of the individual animals but the number of animals. We rarely saw any sharks that were larger than eight feet and never any that were over 100 pounds, so we didn’t fear an outright killing, where a large animal would come in and make such a horrific attack that one of us died quickly from massive tissue loss and trauma. That scenario was highly unlikely. What we feared was their behavior as a group. When there is blood in the water, combined with the flapping sounds of wounded fish, sharks tend to be far more aggressive than is normally the case. If these two conditions, blood and sounds, occur where sharks are schooling in great numbers, their behavior becomes highly reckless, and hundreds upon hundreds of sharks now orbited the raft, singly and in packs, randomly attacking anything they could.

We separated into two camps, the Shark Police and the Worker Bees. Alejandro and Martin, both of whom were quite understandably nervous about sharks, would work on whatever was needed, while Cesar and I, who couldn’t help but be fascinated by the sharks, would police the waters by patrolling with spear guns and hand harpoons. Typically, when there was a lot of work to do, Cesar and I went in first, to clear the area. Upon entering the water we’d immediately make a quick scan of the water, spinning our bodies around, squinting through our masks at the community of sharks. Invariably, several groups of five or six cruised together, slowly swimming circuitous routes around the raft. Whenever a pack was nearby we could see every detail of their muscular gray bodies and triangular tales waving lazily in the clear water. Occasionally there would be a large one, swimming alone and waiting for its chance. Then there would be the packs several hundred feet away, cruising at the far periphery of our underwater vision like languid phantoms in a blue, opaque fog.

We developed a method for chasing sharks away from the raft that was crude but effective: Cesar and I would speed toward the nearest school, motoring through the water on our fins. We’d hold our harpoons in one hand, pressurize our ears with the other hand, and then dive. We’d come in fast, fins flailing, our masks compressing around our faces, and then, at the last second, we’d widen our mouths, push on our diaphragm, and scream psychotically while jabbing a shark sharply with the harpoon. Even though we rarely pierced their tough skin, they always went scurrying away. Occasionally they’d turn and snap at the harpoon, but that was clearly out of panic, not because they wished to fight with us. After a while we learned to attack the sharks when they were in their most vulnerable positions: We’d come in from above and behind them and jab them sharply in the back, an area that they could not easily defend. This was highly useful because the sharks seemed to possess a somewhat communal nature about them: Generally speaking, each individual shark kept an eye on everything that was going on in the community. Whenever we made an attack on one of them, most of the others seemed to take notice—they would jump as though startled, or would suddenly begin swimming much faster than normal. This made dispersal much easier because most of the other sharks nearby would clearly register the fact that something had attacked one of their own, and would begin to clear out, leaving for better grounds. They were ‘dumb animals’ and we were, essentially, bluffing them—making them believe that we were in charge of this area and that they had to leave. They seemed to have a short memory though. A pack would scurry away after an attack, disappear into the ocean, then slowly reemerge a few minutes later, materializing out of the infinite blue, looking for new opportunities to eat. It frequently took repeated attacks on one particular school to drive it away permanently.

Meanwhile Alejandro and Martin would work on the raft. Now, with all four of us in the water, all of the action would be going on under the surface. If you’d have come upon Manteño II during this time you’d have thought the raft abandoned. But underneath, looking through the glass of my mask, I’d see two men, working underneath the raft, their arms and hands over their heads, struggling and pulling on the thick manila lines, holding their breath and treading water with their legs. Their black flippers would stab at the water in slow motion and the black, rectangular shape of Manteño II would hover motionless above them while sharks circled all around in the rich blue infinity. Cesar, muscular and compact, would be off to one side, scanning the water, working his arms furiously, spinning his body round and round, watching for sharks. We’d hand-signal each other and then suddenly surface into the air and the clattering, splashing noises. He’d spit out his snorkel and yell, “How are we doing John?”
“I… I think we’re OK. What happened to that big one in the back?”

“I got him. He left.”

“OK. Let’s go around front.”

Then we’d be back under, breathing through our snorkels, sucking down little drops of brackish saltwater, scanning the silent world for streamlined gray forms, cruising smoothly in the blue. I’d sight one coming in too close, signal Cesar, surface, blurt out instructions for attacking it over the splashing noises, and then we’d go to work. What irony: Cesar and I liked the sharks, yet we were assigned the unfortunate task of attacking them. In all the time we fought the sharks, neither Cesar nor I were ever convinced that they were mean, predatory villains; they impressed us more as dim-witted scavengers. Nevertheless, we maintained a healthy respect for them. We had seen them bite clean through the same fish that it had taken us a full minute to cut through with a sharp machete. If a shark bit one of our crew in this way it would probably sever a major artery in one of our limbs. We stood almost no chance of saving a man with that kind of wound.



Tomorrow: Episode 4, The Rising Water


John Haslett's memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called Voyage of the Manteño, The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner (St. Martin's Press, Dec.'06). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Film Director Annie Biggs.

To read the first chapter of Voyage of the Manteño just click: Chapter 1 The Worst Day ...and The Best

"You won't be able to put it down." National Geographic Adventure

links always help

The Dangerous Voyage: Episode 2, The Arrival of the Dolphins

Author’s Note: The following story covers the first three months of 1999. On the 1st of January of that year, we set sail from Colombia aboard the 65 foot balsa raft, Manteño II. We had spent the previous months on land, rebuilding the raft after parasites, called “shipworms,” had badly damaged the vessel’s logs.

We set out for Panama, expecting to continue on to Mexico. For eighteen days we tried to stay near land—near the Central American coast—but were driven out to sea by erratic winds and currents. After sailing to within five miles of shore, we were sucked into The Gyre, a naturally occurring whirlpool, 600 miles in diameter. Inside The Gyre, there is no wind.

Aboard the raft were four men: Alejandro and Cesar, the two Colombians who had volunteered to sail with us while we were rebuilding the raft, Martin, the cinematographer, and myself.


The Dangerous Voyage: Episode 2, The Arrival of the Dolphins


On the 22nd, we spotted a school of dolphins directly astern. There were about twenty in all, traveling in what appeared to be two separate families. They came right toward the raft, driving thousands of fish before them. We noticed this phenomenon repeatedly: Whenever large numbers of dolphins were around they were always preceded by schools of frightened fish.

As these two groups came by we geared-up for snorkeling, and went over the side. Diving down, holding my breath, I pressurized my ears and then began kicking steadily with my heavy fins. The ocean was a pale turquoise, with streaks of white highlights made by shafts of sun rays. The water was as clear as that in a swimming pool, and visibility seemed to be unlimited. From one hundred feet behind the raft I could see them coming: a family of the dolphins. Pumping along at about five miles an hour, their muscular bodies bulged, thick and taught under their rubbery skins. They hovered at ten feet below the surface and soon I was paralleling them, cruising along at the same depth—me looking at them, and them looking at me. I immediately recognized a difference in the way the dolphins behaved in comparison to other types of sea creatures. All the other types of fish I had swum with simply took a momentary glance at me and then scurried off; but the dolphin family examined me.

Their family stayed tightly grouped, like a disciplined unit, and maintained a distance of eight to ten feet from me. I could easily distinguish the parts of the family: The young ones sprang happily along and the old ones labored in the rear. The older ones fascinated me the most: The years and the sea had weathered them in the extreme. Old scratches, nicks, cuts, and gouges, had scarred their gray skin. They examined me carefully while I cruised alongside, and I watched them form an opinion of me over twenty minutes of traveling together. The young ones were playful and open and uncritical, but not the old; there was a calm carefulness about them. Clearly, they worried that I was in their domain. I wondered if they had ever seen a human being before. How often would a human suddenly appear in the water out here in the middle of The Gyre? Each time I swam with dolphins I was overcome with the incredible urge to want to talk to them. I emerged from the ocean each time wishing to know their life’s story. What had their life in the sea been about? What had they seen throughout the years? What enlightenment had they accumulated?

Photo caption: Dolphins in The Gyre

But the days continued to pass in The Gyre, and then the weeks, and still there was no respite from the calm.

At night, we had extreme calm and a brilliant moon. There were no sounds of any kind; all was silent. The Gyre lit up fantastically, like the reflection of a full moon on a field of freshly fallen snow. You had all the characteristics of night—except that you could see perfectly. As the days passed, the water of The Gyre calmed even more and now at night it was like a mirror. As far as you could see in any direction the ocean had become a shining plate. The horizon line, the edge of this plate, was now distinctly visible, 360 degrees around the raft. It was now easy to see the moon, crisp and clear, shining on the face of the vast Pacific. Not knowing what was to come, we believed that this was as calm as the ocean, the atmosphere, indeed the world could get. How could any vast place become more calm, more still, more stopped than this? But what we did not know was that The Gyre was the calmest place on the earth, and in those early days of drifting there must have been some imperfections in the surface of the water, because more nights passed, and as they did The Gyre calmed and calmed until it settled at a state of perfection. Now it was no longer a calm ocean, nor lit brightly as if by snow, nor like a mirror. In its stillness and in its perfection the surface of The Gyre reproduced an exact image of the moon and clouds above it. But it was something greater than a mirror image, something more incredible, more difficult to comprehend, indeed— something vastly more difficult to believe. Alejandro and I talked about this in passing and it was agreed among us that staring at The Gyre while on night watch was unhealthy and should be avoided. I think we both knew that it could cause the contemplation of madness because it seemed to make your mind run off into terror. Nevertheless, all of us stared at it. Each one of us stood alone at the edge of the deck during our night watch, while the other three slept, and stared. Here, standing on the hard cane poles in the brilliant glaring moonlight, with no sounds to keep you company, nothing but a silent vacuum and the sound of your own respiration, of your own wispy breath drawing in and out, you stared at thirty square miles of ocean and you saw every ridge and every contour and every shaded area of every puffy cumulus cloud above, and every scar and every mountain and every detail of every single crater on the moon’s surface. And when you searched for imperfections in the water, for ripples, you became even more hypnotized by the precise image before you, a precise image that started at your feet and stretched out to every horizon. In the surface of the water you saw a frozen thing, still, captured, a thing that did not move and did not ripple. You stared at the ocean and yet you saw no sign of it. You stood in silence for moment after ticking moment, looking out over what was once an ocean and you saw instead the black and white image of a night sky superimposed on the water like a still photograph —an immense, glossy photograph of a tropical night—sharp in its reflection on the water, complete, and perfectly focused.

Photo caption: The Gyre, on a wild day. This is not calm day in The Gyre...

And whereas the darkness had been the enemy up to this time, these moonlit nights were a relief. While the other three slept peacefully in their beds, I strolled around on the deck, watching for ships on the glassy horizon, talking to myself sometimes, and sometimes thinking about my former life in the modern world, which was harder and harder to remember.

And finally, I had time to read a book. I read The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz’s eyewitness account of how the Conquistadors destroyed the Aztecs. Occasionally I sat at the radio table inside the hut, straining to read by the flickering flame of an oil lamp that lit up no more than two feet of space. The Inventors had fabricated the lamp out of a baking powder tin, filled it with cooking oil, and then inserted a canvas wick in a slit in the top. There were of course no sounds in The Gyre and so many times it was impossible to tell that I was on the water—I may very well have been in the jungle headquarters of a Latin American revolutionary group, surrounded on all sides by bamboo and a bushy thatch. Around the radio table lay the equipment of a group that was undoubtedly cut off from the world: Machetes, axes, knives, tools, spear guns, compasses, batteries of every size, maps, charts, structural drawings of the raft, and a bicycle-driven generator. As the light of the oil lantern flickered, and as bright gray moonlight shot into the hut, I read of the Conquistador’s bloody attack on the Aztec capital, the assassination of King Montezuma, and the human-sacrifice methods of the Aztecs. The author, Diaz, a Conquistador himself, described the interior of the Aztecs’ human-sacrifice death chamber like this:

“…they were burning the hearts of three Indians whom they had sacrificed that day; and all the walls of that shrine were so splashed and caked with blood that they and the floor were black too. Indeed, the whole place stank abominably. …the floor was so bathed (in blood) that the stench was worse than that of any slaughter house of Spain.
“…the stench was so that we could hardly wait to get out. They kept a large drum there, and when they beat it the sound was dismal, like some music from the infernal regions (hell) …and it could be heard six miles away. The drum was said to be covered with the skins of huge serpents. In that small platform were many diabolical objects, trumpets great and small, knives, and many hearts that had been burnt… we could scarcely stay in the place.”

And on one such calm evening in The Gyre, Alejandro went out on watch, and while making the rounds, stepped on a sea snake. Miraculously, it didn’t strike him, but it was now clear to us that the snakes would be coming on board at night. It was no surprise; The Gyre was infested with them.

Tomorrow: Episode 3, The Sea Snakes, and The Sharks

John Haslett's memoir of survival on the open sea aboard a wooden raft is called Voyage of the Manteño, The Education of a Modern-Day Expeditioner (St. Martin's Press, Dec.'06). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Film Director Annie Biggs.

To read the first chapter of Voyage of the Manteño just click: Chapter 1 The Worst Day ...and The Best

"You won't be able to put it down." National Geographic Adventure

links always help