Escapist Cafe

The Dangerous Voyage, Epsiode 8: The End

2007-11-29T14:19:00.000-08:00

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.

The Dangerous Voyage: Epsiode 7, Marooned

2007-11-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-28T10:35:00.000-08:00

The Dangerous Voyage: Epsiode 5, The Famous Swim

2007-11-26T21:49:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-25T20:56:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-24T12:21:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-23T12:15:00.000-08:00

The Dangerous Voyage: Episode 1, The Inventors

2007-11-20T19:26:00.000-08:00

The Most Dangerous Personality Type on an Expedition, and How to Avoid It

2007-11-18T18:01:00.000-08:00

I was aboard a wooden raft with an unstable man once, just a few years ago, and as we drifted and sailed on the open sea this strange man began to radiate a mania, a dark, venal paranoia, a malaise that today terrorizes me sometimes, in my nightmares.

There were five men on this expedition, living in a little bamboo house on top of the raft, and as the days passed this hideous man, whom I will here call "Frederick," began to obsess over what he called a "rare tropical disease." He believed that something unseen—some aggressive microbe—had crawled under his skin and was now eating his flesh. Each day, during this time, he would try to eradicate this crawling thing by tearing his own tissues out with a pair of surgical pliers (hemostats). For example, if he got a cut or a scrape on the back of his hand he would declare that the disease had made "a hole" in him, and then spend hours picking and pulling and jerking little bits of his own flesh out, slowly extracting the phantom microbe from his own meat until there was, indeed, a gaping hole. These holes were horrific, roughly the size of a coin—like, say, a quarter—and sometimes half an inch deep.

All things threatened Frederick. He believed that any course we sailed on was the course of doom, and so he felt his duty to always change it …without telling us. Each night when we'd put this frenetic man on watch, he would apparently change the course of the raft, so that in the morning when we looked at the GPS we would find ourselves in a completely unexpected part of the Pacific Ocean. As the weeks passed on the barren sea Frederick's mania incubated and mutated. Anything, no matter how small, could send him into raging fits of blood-faced, vein-bulging chaos. He would sometimes scream and shriek and appear to be trying to claw his own face off. And the very smallest of things were the very greatest threats. When he became obsessed with our little rubber dinghy, which we towed behind our raft, and when that obsession could not be satisfied, he simply cut the dinghy free and let it drift away in a rainstorm, an act of sabotage.

Broadly speaking, these are the effects Isolation and Confinement on an unstable personality. The term Isolation and Confinement applies to the types of environments found inside submarines, remote polar stations, and spacecraft. The data on this phenomenon is still scanty and of course mainly anecdotal, but after a good deal of study most scientists agree on one basic idea: If the person is not unstable before they go out there, then being out there probably won't destabilize him, or her. I believe this to be true. I have made other long voyages aboard rafts, like the horrific one that I was just describing, where I drifted on the open sea for months sometimes, and recently a friend of mine asked me, "Wouldn't you go mad out there?"

No. You wouldn't.

There's nothing out there to make you go mad. Yes, people will decline emotionally —their morale will go down—but that is not instability. Isolation and Confinement alone should not cause a person to destabilize or to adopt abnormal, pathological behavior.

The best way to avoid this catastrophe is to trust your intuition during the selection process. This was the genius of the legendary English explorer, Sir Earnest Shackelton. Shackelton selected his expedition team by considering the type of person they were first, much more than worrying about their credentials, and he never took anyone with him that violated his intuition. Trust your intuition completely. The moment I met Frederick I knew there was something wrong with him, but I ignored my conscience. This was the beginning of disaster: You simply cannot go on an expedition with someone who violates your intuition. Many people can have friends of that sort for years, perhaps even live with them and sleep with them—and that's fine—but don't ever take them with you on an expedition.

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

"When describing Voyage of the Manteño, the word riveting works best."
WEND

2007-11-18T17:46:00.000-08:00

Four Things You Should Know If You Find Yourself in a Life Raft:

You might find yourself suddenly stranded and traumatized in an inflatable raft someday, with a barren sea all around you and with the plastic walls of the little boat crinkling and crackling in your ears, and you should:

1. Be prepared for an emotional explosion from one or more of the group in the raft. It can come sometimes in the form of an unadulterated panic, but it is much more likely to manifest itself in recrimination, blame, indignation at being put in this situation, and it is going to come in the form of a volcanic rage. A friend of mine once stalled a boat's outboard motor on the open sea, and instead of working to solve the problem calmly, his two companions exploded into a childish shoving match that knocked the motor overboard. The three men spent another nine days adrift and survived only by sucking the blood out of a turtle. This happens a lot. Try to let the person who's 'losing it' blow off their steam in the most benign way—let them vent, but keep it under control.

2. Know that you can sink your only hope in two seconds. All modern inflatables boast tremendous resistance to tearing and puncturing, and this is no doubt true, but I have seen rafts, hard ones, sliced-through like butter. My cinematographer and I once glanced an inflatable boat off a sharp metal edge and then found ourselves suddenly treading water in towering seas, with our raft deflated underneath us like a dead animal. When you are in your raft you must quickly probe for sharp objects or protrusions among your fellows: Check for purses with metal latches or ornaments, belt buckles, earrings, snaps with jagged edges, even ballpoint pens.

3. Know that it is exceptionally difficult for anyone to see your little raft. Objects that shine are now your life. Don't use flashlights for simple tasks; you must conserve them exclusively for signaling. Anything, cosmetic mirrors, belt buckles, even the plastic laminate on the cover of a book, if polished, can be of help. CDs are excellent; they are like beacons on the sea. But be advised: In certain seas, tiny wavelets can twinkle just like your mirror or CD, so you must signal in a pattern. Be consistent. People will see your pattern and realize that someone is signaling. And always be persistent. Never assume that they've spotted you. An aircraft or sea vessel may appear to be coming for you when in fact they've simply made a course correction. Continue signaling until you're dead sure they've indeed come for you. Take nothing for granted, brothers and sisters, KEEP SIGNALING.

4. Know that people will give up quickly, and therefore you must make up your mind to stay alive. All experts agree that attitude is usually the deciding factor. I have seen strong men lay down and give up on the sea. I have seen this. If there are others in your raft who are determined to stay alive, make a quick alliance with them, even if they don't appear to be "the strongest." Always keep in mind that human beings decline at an uneven rate, and that you, the one who is not declining, will have to give those others a little spark—a little push, for FREE. Every single human being, without exception, has a reserve that exists deep down, stored in a place that they've never been to. It is real, but it has to be brought out. It has to be encouraged, coaxed, cajoled, pushed, and basically convinced of its own existence, to come up. But everybody's got it.

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

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2007-11-18T16:22:00.000-08:00