yacht lost at sea

Boat is found off Mexico in search for missing Baltimore sailor as wife says 'we remain hopeful'

The vessel of the missing Baltimore sailor , who set out to sea with hopes of breaking multiple world records, has been located, according to Mexican authorities, as his wife says she's holding out "hope" that he is found safe after having been missing at sea for two weeks.

Donald Lawson, 41, an experienced sailor, had planned to travel from Acapulco, Mexico, to Central America’s west coast, through the Panama Canal and on to Baltimore in his a 60-foot racing trimaran called “Defiant,” but he experienced engine issues and headed back to Mexico, Quentin Lawson Sr., 39, his brother, said Tuesday.

Mexico's marine secretary's office said Tuesday that it started to search for Lawson on Friday and that his vessel was located 275 nautical miles from Acapulco.

However, bad weather amid the Pacific's hurricane season have hindered authorities from reaching it, the spokesperson said.

Three boats from the marine secretary’s office are trying to reach the boat, along with an aircraft. The office said it's unclear whether Lawson is on the boat.

The office said it hopes the weather clears up to allow search and rescue crews to reach the boat.

The U.S. Coast Guard did not immediately reply to a request about whether it could confirm the boat sighting.

Lawson’s wife, Jacqueline Lawson, said in a statement Tuesday evening to NBC affiliate WBAL of Baltimore : “We are aware of unconfirmed reports that Donald’s sailboat, Defiant, may have been spotted by the Mexican Navy.”

“We are not giving up hope and we are remaining hopeful of his return,” she said. “He is an experienced sailor who is well-equipped to expertly handle these types of challenging weather conditions in the Pacific. We are continuing to pray that Donald will be found and will soon return home safely to his family, friends, and sailing supporters.”

Lawson wanted to become the first African American to circumnavigate the globe alone in a sailing vessel no longer than 60 feet, his brother said.

He set off from Acapulco on July 5, and a “storm knocked out one of his engines” on July 9, his brother said.

The U.S. Coast Guard received a report from Lawson’s wife Friday. She told authorities her husband said July 12 that he was “experiencing electrical/mechanical issues with his sail boat and was headed back to Acapulco.”

The last communication was reported to have been about 275 nautical miles off Acapulco on July 12, said Petty Officer Hunter Schnabel of Coast Guard District 11, based in Alumina, California. Quentin Lawson said the family last communicated with him on July 13. 

Quentin Lawson said data from his brother’s vessel showed he drastically reduced speed late July 12, when he was traveling with the wind at around 11 knots. But then he changed course and began traveling against the wind, and his speed reduced to 2.9 knots.

“I believe something happened at that moment,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to turn out of the wind into the wind when you’re on emergency route to turn back.”

Mexico’s Maritime Search and Rescue unit is leading the search and rescue operations, the Coast Guard said.

Marlene Lenthang is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.

Nicole Duarte is an assignment editor in NBC News’ Miami bureau.

Antonio Planas is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.

• Senior Living
• Wedding Experts
• Private Schools
• Home Design Experts
• Real Estate Agents
• Mortgage Professionals
• Find a Private School
• 50 Best Restaurants
• Be Well Boston
• Find a Dentist
• Find a Doctor
• Guides & Advice
• Best of Boston Weddings
• Find a Wedding Expert
• Real Weddings
• Bubbly Brunch Event
• Properties & News
• Find a Home Design Expert
• Find a Real Estate Agent
• Find a Mortgage Professional
• Real Estate
• Home Design
• Best of Boston Home
• Arts & Entertainment
• Boston magazine Events
• Latest Winners
• NEWSLETTERS

If you're a human and see this, please ignore it. If you're a scraper, please click the link below :-) Note that clicking the link below will block access to this site for 24 hours.

Shipwrecked: A Shocking Tale of Love, Loss, and Survival in the Deep Blue Sea

Illustration by Comrade

A drift in the middle of the ocean, no one can hear you scream.

It was a lesson Brad Cavanagh was learning by the second. He had been above deck on the Trashman , a sleek, 58-foot Alden sailing yacht with a pine-green hull and elegant teak trim, battling 100-mile-per-hour winds as sheets of rain fell from the turbulent black sky. The latest news report had mentioned nothing about bad weather, but two days into his voyage a tropical storm formed off of Cape Fear in the Carolinas, whipping up massive, violent waves out of nowhere. Soaked to the skin and too tired to stand, the North Shore native from Byfield sought refuge down below, where he braced himself by pressing his feet and back between the walls of a narrow hallway to keep from being knocked down as 30-foot-tall walls of water tossed the boat around the open seas.

Below deck with Cavanagh were four crewmates: Debbie Scaling, with blond hair and blue eyes, was an experienced sailor. As the first American woman to complete the Whitbread Round the World Race—during which she’d navigated some of the most difficult conditions on the planet—she was already well known in professional sailing circles. Mark Adams, a mid-twenties Englishman who had been Cavanagh’s occasional racing partner; the boat’s captain, John Lippoth; and Lippoth’s girlfriend, Meg Mooney, rounded out the crew, who were moving a Texas tycoon’s yacht from Maine to Florida for the winter season.

As the storm continued, Cavanagh grew increasingly angry. At 21 years old and less experienced than most of the others, he felt as though no one had a plan for how they were going to get out of this mess alive. He knew their situation was dire. The motor was dead for the third time on the trip, and they had already cut off the wind-damaged mainsail. That meant nature was in control. They could only ride it out and hope to survive long enough for the Coast Guard to rescue them. Crewmates had been in contact with authorities nearly every hour since the early morning, and a rescue boat was supposedly on its way. It’s just a matter of time , Cavanagh told himself again and again, just a matter of time.

After a while, the storm settled into a predictable pattern: The boat would ride up a wave, tilt slightly to port-side and then ride down the wave, and right itself for a moment of stillness and quiet, sheltered from the wind in the valley between mountains of water. Cavanagh began to relax, but then the boat rose over another wave, tilted hard, and never righted itself. Watching the dark waters of the Atlantic approach with terrifying speed through the window in front of him, Cavanagh braced for impact. An instant later, water shattered the window and began rushing into the boat. He jumped up from the floor with a single thought: He had to rouse Scaling from her bunkroom. He had to get everyone off the ship. The Trashman was going down.

Three days earlier, the weather had been perfect: The sun sparkled on the water and warmed everything its rays touched, despite bursts of cool breezes. Cavanagh was walking the docks of Annapolis Harbor alongside Adams, both of them hunting for work. A job Adams had previously secured for them aboard a boat had fallen through, and all they had to show for it was a measly $50 each. As they made their way along the water, Cavanagh spotted an attractive woman standing by a bank of pay phones. He looked at her and she stared back at him, a sandy-haired, 6-foot-3-inch former prep school hockey player draped in a letterman jacket. It wasn’t until she called out his name that he realized who she was: Debbie Scaling.

Cavanagh came of age in a boating family. He’d survived his first hurricane at sea in utero, and grew up on 4,300 feet of riverfront property in Byfield, where his father, a trained reconnaissance photographer named Paul, taught him and his siblings how to sail from an early age. From the outside, the elite schools, the sailboat, the new car every five years, the grand house, and the self-made patriarch gave the impression that the Cavanaghs were living the suburban American dream. Inside the home, though, it was a horror show. Always drinking, Cavanagh’s father emotionally abused, insulted, and belittled his wife and children, Cavanagh recalls. Whenever Cavanagh heard the clinking of ice cubes in his father’s glass, his stress meter spiked.

Despite that—or perhaps because of it—all Cavanagh ever wanted was his father’s approval. Sailing, he thought, would earn his respect. Cavanagh’s sister, Sarah, after all, had been a star sailor, and at family dinners his hard-drinking—and hard-to-please—father talked about her with pride and adulation. In fact, it was Cavanagh’s sister who had first met Scaling when they raced across the Atlantic together a year earlier. She had recently introduced Scaling to Cavanagh and her family, and now, standing at that pay phone in Annapolis, Scaling could hardly believe her eyes. At that very moment, she had just called Cavanagh’s household in hopes of convincing Sarah to join the crew of the Trashman , and here was Sarah’s younger brother standing right in front of her.

Scaling was desperately looking for help on the yacht. Already things had been going poorly: The boat’s captain, Lippoth, who was a heavy drinker, was passed out below deck when she first showed up at the Southwest Harbor dock in Maine to report for work. Soon after they set sail, they picked up the captain’s girlfriend, Mooney, because she wanted to come along for the trip. From Maine to Maryland, Lippoth rarely eased the sails and relied on the inboard motor, which consistently sputtered and needed repair. They’d struggled to pick up additional hands as they traveled south, and Scaling knew they needed more-qualified help for the difficult sail along the coast of the Carolinas, exposed at sea to high winds and waves. Scaling didn’t share any of this with Cavanagh or Adams when Lippoth offered them a job, though. Happy to have work, the pair accepted and climbed aboard.

Perhaps Cavanagh should have known something was wrong with the yacht when the captain mentioned that the engine kept burning out.

“Mayday! Mayday!” A crew member was shouting into the radio, trying to summon the Coast Guard as the yacht began taking on water. Cavanagh had just burst into Scaling’s cabin, while Adams roused Lippoth and Mooney. And now they huddled together at the bottom of a flight of stairs watching the salty seawater rise toward the ceiling. Lippoth tried to activate the radio beacon that would have given someone, anyone, their latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, but the water rushing in carried it away before he could reach it.

The crew started making their way up toward the deck to abandon ship. Cavanagh spotted the 11-and-a-half-foot, red-and-black Zodiac Mark II tied to a cleat near the cockpit. The outboard motor sat next to it on the mount, but the yacht was sinking too fast to grab it. As he fumbled with the lines of the Zodiac, one broke, recoiled, and ripped his shirt open. Then he lost his grip on the dinghy, and it floated off. Fortunately, it didn’t go far. Adams wasn’t so lucky. A strong gust of wind ripped the life raft out of his hands, and the sinking yacht started to take the raft and its emergency food, water rations, and first-aid kit down with it. By the time Cavanagh swam off the Trashman , it was nearly submerged.

As Cavanagh made his way toward the dinghy, he kicked off his boots, which belonged to his father. For a moment, all he could think was how angry his dad would be at him for losing them. When he got to the Zodiac, he yelled to the others to grab ahold of the raft before the yacht sucked them down with it. The crew made it onto the dinghy with nothing but the clothing on their backs. As they turned around, the last visible piece of the Trashman disappeared beneath the ocean.

Terrified, the five crew members spent the next four hours in the water, being thrashed about by the waves while holding on to the lines along the sides of the Zodiac, which they had flipped upside down to prevent it from blowing away. During the calmer moments, they ducked underneath for protection from the strong winds, with only their heads occupying a pocket of air underneath the raft. There wasn’t much space to maneuver, but still Cavanagh felt the need to move toward one end of the boat to get some distance from his crewmates while he processed his white-hot anger at Lippoth and Adams. Over the past two days, Adams had often been too drunk to do his job, and Lippoth never did anything about it, leaving him and Scaling to pick up the slack. Cavanagh had spent his childhood on a boat with a drunken father, and now, once again, he’d somehow managed to team up with an alcoholic sailing partner and a captain willing to look the other way.

Perhaps he should have known something was wrong with the yacht when the captain mentioned that the engine kept burning out. Maybe he should have been concerned that Lippoth didn’t even have enough money for supplies. But there was nothing he could do about it now, adrift in the Atlantic and crammed under an inflated dinghy trying to stay alive.

As nighttime approached and the temperature dropped, Cavanagh devised a plan for the crew to seek shelter on the underside of the Zodiac yet remain out of the water. First, he grabbed a wire on the raft and ran it from side to side. He lay his head on the bow of the boat and rested his lower body on the wire. Then the others climbed on top of him, any way they could, to stay under the dinghy’s floor but just out of the water. When the oxygen underneath the Zodiac ran out, they’d exit, lift the boat just long enough to allow new air into the pocket, and go back under again.

Sleep-deprived and dehydrated, Cavanagh’s mind wandered home to Byfield and the endless summer afternoons of his childhood spent under his family’s slimy dock, playing hide-and-seek with friends. Cavanagh had spent a lot of his life hiding from his father and his alcohol-fueled rages. If there was a silver lining to the abuse and the fear he grew up with, it was that he learned how to survive under pressure and to avoid the one fatal strain of seasickness: panic.

The next morning, that skill was suddenly in high demand as Lippoth unexpectedly swam out from under the Zodiac to find fresh air. He said he felt like he was having a heart attack and refused to go back under. The storm had calmed, but a cool autumn breeze was sucking the heat from their wet bodies, and Cavanagh wanted the crew to stay under the boat to keep warm. Disagreeing with him, Cavanagh’s crewmates decided to flip the boat right-side up and climb onboard. It momentarily saved their lives: They soon noticed three tiger sharks circling them.

Mooney had accidentally gotten caught on a coil of lines and wires while abandoning the yacht, leaving a bloody gash behind her knee. Everyone else had their cuts and scrapes, too, and the sharks had followed the scent. The largest shark in the group began banging against the boat, then swam under the craft and picked it up out of the water with its body before letting it drop back down. The crew grabbed onto the sides of the Zodiac while Cavanagh and Scaling tried to fashion a makeshift anchor out of a piece of plywood attached to the raft with the metal wire, hoping that it would help steady the boat. No sooner had they dropped the wood into the water than a shark bit it and began dragging the boat at full speed like some twisted version of a joy ride. When the shark finally spit the makeshift anchor out, Cavanagh reeled it in and Adams, in a rage, grabbed it and tried to smash the shark’s head with it. Cavanagh begged his partner to calm down. “The shark’s reaction to that might be bad,” he said, “so just cool it.”

Cavanagh believed that if they could all just stay calm enough to keep the boat upright, they could make it out alive. “The Coast Guard knows we’re here,” Cavanagh told the others, who had heard a plane roaring overhead before the Trashman sank. It was presumably sent to locate any survivors so a rescue ship could bring them back to shore. Unknown at the time was that a boat had been on the way to rescue the group, when for some reason—a miscommunication of sorts—the search was either forgotten or called off. No one was coming for them.

Brad Cavanagh is still haunted by his fight for survival. / Portrait by Matt Kalinowski

Fighting to survive, Cavanagh knew he needed to keep his mind and body busy. With blistered lips and cracked hands, he pulled seaweed onboard to use as a blanket, and he flipped the boat to clean out the urine and fetid water that had accumulated in it. First, he scanned the water to make sure the sharks had left. Then, with Adams’s help, he leaned back and tugged on the wire to flip the boat, rinsed it out, and flipped it back over again so everyone could climb back in. He had a job and a purpose, and it kept him sane.

The others struggled. Adams and Lippoth were severely dehydrated. (Adams from all the scotch he drank and Lippoth from the cigarettes he chain-smoked before the Trashman went down.) Meanwhile, Mooney’s cut was infected and filled with pus; she was getting sicker and weaker. As they lay together in a small pool of water in the bottom of the boat, they all developed body sores, likely from staph infections. Cavanagh’s skin became so tender that even brushing up against another person sent a current of pain through his body. After three days without food and water and using their energy to hold on to the Zodiac during the storm, they were all completely spent.

Realizing that the Coast Guard may not be coming after all, some crew members began to believe their only hope for survival was to eventually wash up on shore. What they weren’t aware of was that a current was pulling them even farther out to sea.

That night, Cavanagh dreamt of home. He was on a boat, sailing, and talking to the men on a fishing vessel riding along next to him as he made his way from Newburyport to Buzzards Bay. It was the route his family took when moving their boat every summer.

The day after he had that dream, the situation descended into a nightmare: Lippoth and Adams began drinking seawater. It slaked their thirst momentarily, but Cavanagh knew it would only be a matter of time before it sent them deeper into madness. Soon enough, the delusions began. First, Lippoth started reaching around the bottom of the boat looking for supplies that didn’t exist. “We bought cigarettes. Where are they?” Lippoth asked. Then Lippoth began trying to convince Mooney that they were going to take a plane to Maine, where his mother worked at a hospital. “We’re going to Portland,” he told her. “I’m going to get the car. I want you guys to pick up the boat and I’ll come back out and get you,” Lippoth said before sliding over the edge of the Zodiac and into the water.

“Brad, you’ve got to get John,” Scaling said to Cavanagh in a panic. But Cavanagh was so weak, he could barely muster the energy to coax Lippoth back onboard. “If you go away and die, then I might die, too. I don’t want to die,” Cavanagh pleaded.

It was too late. The wind pulled the Zodiac away from him. The captain soon drifted out of sight. Across the empty expanse of the ocean, Cavanagh could hear Lippoth’s last howls as the sharks attacked.

An old newspaper clipping of Cavanagh and Scaling, not long before their rescue. / Courtesy photo

Now there were four. Cavanagh, though, noticed Adams was quickly careening into madness, hitting on Mooney, and proposing that sex would cheer her up. Rebuffed, he decided to take his party elsewhere. “Great,” Cavanagh recalls him saying, “if we’re not going to have sex, I’m going back to 7-Eleven to get some beers and cigarettes.”

“You’re not going,” Cavanagh said. “We’re out in the middle of the ocean.”

“I know, I know,” he told Cavanagh. “I’m just going to hang over the side and stretch out a little bit. I’ll get back in the boat.”

Holding onto the side of the raft, Adams slipped into the water. Cavanagh looked away for a moment to say something to Scaling, and when he turned back, Adams was gone. Soon after, the boat began to spin and the water around them started to churn wildly. Cavanagh knew the sharks had gotten Adams, but he was so focused on surviving that it hardly registered that his racing buddy was gone forever.

The three remaining castaways spent the rest of the evening being knocked around as the sharks bumped and prodded the boat. They found something they like , Cavanagh said to himself. And now they want more.

Mooney lay there shivering violently from the cold. In the black of night, she lurched at Cavanagh, scratching at him and screaming. Then she began speaking in tongues. In the morning, Cavanagh woke first and found her lying on her back, her arms outstretched, staring into the sky. “She’s dead,” Cavanagh said when Scaling woke up. “She’s been dead for hours.”

Then a terrifying thought came to his mind: Maybe we could eat her . He was so hungry, so desperately famished, but her body was covered in sores and oozing pus.

Cavanagh and Scaling removed Mooney’s shirt so they would have another layer to keep warm, and her jewelry so they could return it to her family. They still hoped they would have that chance. Then they pushed her naked body off the raft. She floated like a jellyfish, with her arms and legs straight down, away and over the waves. Neither of them were watching when the sharks came for her, too.

After Mooney died, Scaling was troubled that she was lying in pus-infected water and begged Cavanagh to flip the boat over and clean it out. Weak and unsteady, he agreed to try. Standing on the edge of the Zodiac, he tugged the wire and tried to flip it, but he didn’t have the strength to do it alone. Then he gave another tug, lost his balance, and tumbled backward into the water. He tried to get back in the boat but couldn’t. Panic seized him. Every person who had come off that boat had been eaten by sharks. He needed to get back in fast, and he needed Scaling’s help.

Cavanagh begged her to help him up, but she only sat there sobbing inconsolably on the other side of the raft. With his last bit of strength, Cavanagh willed himself over the side on his own. He sat in the boat, winded and seething with anger. The entire time, from when they were on the Trashman with a drunken crewmate, during the storm, and throughout their harrowing journey on the Zodiac, Scaling and Cavanagh had upheld a pact to look out for each other, to protect each other from the sharks, the madness, the others. How could she have left me there in the water? he thought. How could she have let me down? They were supposed to be a team. Now on their fifth day without food or water, he couldn’t even look at her. There were two of them left, but he felt alone.

They sat in a cold, uncomfortable silence until he had something important to say. “Deb, look,” Cavanagh shouted. A large vessel was approaching them. They’d spotted a couple of ships before in the distance, but none were close enough for them to be seen. As it moved toward them, he could see a man on the deck waving. Shortly after, crew members threw lines with large glass buoys on the end of them. But they all landed short, splashing in the water too far away. Undeterred, the men on deck pulled the rescue buoys back and tried again.

Cavanagh, for his part, couldn’t move. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told Scaling. It felt as if every muscle had gone limp. He had nothing left after spending days balancing the boat, flipping it, pulling it, and watching his crewmates die. The ship made another turn. Closer. The men aboard threw the lines again. Scaling jumped into the water and started swimming.

Seeing his crewmate in the water was all the motivation Cavanagh needed. Fuck it , he told himself. Here I go . He rolled overboard and managed to grab a line, letting the crew reel his weakened body in and hoist him up onto the deck along with Scaling. Aboard the ship, Cavanagh saw women wearing calico dresses with aprons and steel-toed work boots waiting for them. They were speaking Russian. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Coast Guard never came to save them, but ice traders on a Soviet vessel did.

The crew gave Cavanagh and Scaling dry clothes and medical attention, along with warm tea kettles filled with coffee, sugar, and vodka. That night, as the Coast Guard finally arrived and spirited the two survivors to a hospital, the temperature dropped down into the 30s. Cavanagh and Scaling wouldn’t have made it through another night at sea.

As Cavanagh was recuperating in the hospital, his mother flew down to be by his side. Seeing her appear at his bedside felt like the happiest moment of his life. His father, however, never came; he was on a sailing trip.

Cavanagh soon returned home to Massachusetts and once again felt the need to keep busy: He immediately began taking odd jobs in hopes of earning enough cash to begin traveling to sailboat races again. Processing what he’d endured—five days without food or water and man-eating sharks—was next to impossible. The Southern Ocean Racing Conference season in Florida started in January, and he was determined to be there, but not necessarily to race. He needed to talk to the only other person who had made it off that Zodiac alive. He had something important he needed to tell Scaling.

A few months later, Cavanagh boarded a flight to Fort Lauderdale for the event. With no place to stay, he slept in an empty boat parked in a field. Walking around the next day, he caught a glimpse of the latest issue of Sail magazine and stopped dead in his tracks: Staring back at him was a photo of him and Adams, plastered across the cover. A photographer had snapped a shot of the two racing buddies just before they’d joined the Trashman . It was like seeing a ghost.

Cavanagh paced the docks searching for Scaling—then there she stood, looking as beautiful as ever. His whole body was pumping with adrenaline at the sight of his former crewmate. He needed to tell her he was in love with her. They had shared something that no one else could ever understand. The bond he felt was far deeper than any he’d ever known.

He moved toward her to speak, but the mere sight of Cavanagh made Scaling recoil, reminding her of the horrors that she’d suffered at sea while in the Zodiac. “I’m sorry, but I cannot be around you,” he recalls her saying. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with me. Please leave me alone.” Dejected and hurt, Cavanagh retreated. Then he did what he’d always done: He walked the docks, banging on boats until he found someone willing to hire him.

As the years rolled by like waves, Scaling became a socialite and motivational speaker, talking publicly and often about her fight to survive. She appeared on Larry King Live and wrote a memoir. She and Cavanagh both continued to sail and ran in similar circles, seeing each other often, and both trying desperately to hide their pain when they did.

Scaling eventually settled down in Medfield, where she raised a family and spent summers on the Cape. In 2009, her son, also an avid sailor, drowned in an accident. Nearly three years to the day later, she passed away in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, at 54. Cavanagh was walking out of a marina in Newport, Rhode Island, when someone broke the news to him. He was profoundly disappointed. Disappointed with life itself. He had loved her. There was no information in her obituary about her cause of death, but he recalls there were whispers among family members of suicide. Cavanagh believed no one could have saved her: She was still tortured by those days lost at sea. He was now the lone survivor of the Trashman tragedy.

Several years later, Scaling’s daughter gave Cavanagh a frame. Inside it was a neatly coiled metal wire—the same one Cavanagh had rigged up to suspend their shivering bodies under the Zodiac and flip the boat to keep it clean. It was what had kept them both alive. Unbeknownst to him, Scaling had retrieved it after the dinghy was found still floating in the ocean. She framed it and hung it on her wall, keeping it close all those years.

Cavanagh remains hell-bent on learning why the Coast Guard never showed up in the aftermath of that fateful storm.

On a cold winter day, I drove to Cavanagh’s home in Bourne, where he lives with his wife, a schoolteacher, and his two children. He still had wide shoulders and a strong face, now layered with deep wrinkles, and greeted me with a handshake. His enormous hands engulfed mine.

The wind howled outside and a fire burned in the living room’s gas stove as he sat down on his couch to talk—for the very first time at length—about his life since being rescued. Above his head was the rendering of a floating school he once wanted to build for the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. It had classrooms, living quarters for the students, and bathrooms, but it never was built. It became one of Cavanagh’s many grand ideas over the years, all of which had to do with sailing, that he never saw to fruition. He wants to write a book, too, like Scaling, but he hasn’t been able to get started.

Sailing is the one thing that has remained constant in Cavanagh’s life. He said the ocean continued to give him freedom, even as he remained chained to his past, to the shipwreck that almost killed him, and to the abusive father who failed him.

While we sat there, listening to the wind, Cavanagh pulled out his father’s sailing logbook. In it were the dates and locations of his around-the-world trip. The day his father set sail in 1982, Cavanagh thought he was finally safe. His mother had just filed for divorce and Cavanagh no longer felt he had to stick around to protect her, so he left home to start his life. His father had invited him to join him on his trip, but there was no way Cavanagh was doing that. He wound up on the Trashman instead.

Cavanagh paused to read his father’s entries from the days that Cavanagh was lost at sea. At the time, his father had been docked and drunk in Bermuda, which lies off the coast of the Carolinas, just beyond where the yacht went down. Then he set sail again into the weakened tail end of the same storm that had sunk the Trashman , not knowing that his son had been floating in that same ocean, fighting for his life and waiting for someone to save him.

Cavanagh remains hell-bent on learning why the Coast Guard never showed up in the aftermath of that fateful storm. He has documents and photos from the official case file after the sinking of the Trashman , but they give few, if any, clues. He has spent decades trying to figure out what happened, and now that he’s the only crew member alive, he’s even more determined to find the truth. He wants to know how rescuers forgot about him and his crewmates, and why. Haunted by his memories, he has driven up and down the East Coast, stopping at bases and looking for anyone to speak to him about the incident. He is still adrift, nearly 40 years later, still searching for answers.

Search for 3 missing American sailors off coast of Mexico has been suspended: US Coast Guard

They had not contacted friends, family or maritime authorities since April 4.

The search for three Americans missing off the coast of Mexico has been suspended, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

"An exhaustive search was conducted by our international search and rescue partner, Mexico, with the U.S. Coast Guard and Canada providing additional search assets," Coast Guard Cmdr. Gregory Higgins said in a statement . "SEMAR [The Mexican Navy] and U.S. Coast Guard assets worked hand-in-hand for all aspects of the case. Unfortunately, we found no evidence of the three Americans' whereabouts or what might have happened. Our deepest sympathies go out to the families and friends of William Gross, Kerry O'Brien and Frank O'Brien."

The Mexican Navy and Coast Guard spent "281 cumulative search hours covering approximately 200,057 square nautical miles, an area larger than the state of California, off Mexico's northern Pacific coast with no sign of the missing sailing vessel nor its passengers," the Coast Guard said.

Kerry O'Brien, Frank O'Brien and Gross had not contacted friends, family, or maritime authorities since April 4.

The trio likely encountered "significant" weather and waves as they attempted to sail their 41-foot sailboat from Mazatlán to San Diego.

"When it started to reach into five, six, seven days and we started to get a little more concerned," Kerry's brother Mark Argall told ABC News.

Higgins had expressed concern that the weather in that region worsened around April 6, with swells and wind creating waves potentially over 20 feet high. The three were sailing a capable 41-foot fiberglass boat, with similar sailboats successfully circumnavigating the planet. However, the lack of clear information about the sailors' location, partially attributable to the lack of GPS tracking and poor cellular service near the Baja peninsula, has left the families of the missing Americans uncertain about their loved ones' whereabouts.

"We have all been spinning our wheels about the different scenarios that could have happened," Gross' daughter Melissa Spicuzza said.

Kerry and Frank O'Brien, a married couple, initially decided to travel to Mexico to sail a 41-foot LaFitte sailboat named "Ocean Bound" to San Diego after the boat underwent repairs near Mazatlán, Mexico, according to Argall.

MORE: 6 children rescued near water diversion tunnel in Auburn, Massachusetts

The couple decided to hire Gross, a mechanic by trade and sailor with more than 50 years of experience, to help navigate the boat from Mazatlán to San Diego. Spicuzza recounted that friends of Gross would compare him to the 1980s fictional television character and improvisational savant MacGyver based on his ability to repair boats.

"Whatever it takes, he'll get it rigged up. He'll get it working," Spicuzza described.

The Coast Guard believed the sailors left their slip (the equivalent of a parking spot for boats) on April 2. They eventually departed Mazatlán on April 4, based on Facebook posts and cellphone usage.

The sailors expected the trip across the Gulf of California to Cabo San Lucas, where they planned to pick up provisions, would take two days. However, the Coast Guard does not believe the sailors ever stopped in Cabo San Lucas. Since April 4, marinas throughout the Baja Peninsula have not contacted the vessel, nor have any search and rescue crews spotted it.

According to Higgins, the weather worsened around April 6, with winds of 30 knots, strong swells, and waves making navigation more challenging. Spicuzza added that the sail from Mexico to California is inherently tricky since sailors need to navigate against the wind and current.

"From the tip of Baja all the way back up to Alaska, you're going against wind and current, so it's a more difficult, exhausting sail, but of course, doable with the experience that's on board," Spicuzza.

MORE: 1,200 aboard 2 migrant boats rescued in Mediterranean

Spicuzza added that the group's initially planned 10-day journey was likely unrealistic. Sailing against the wind and current would require the sailors to tack frequently, essentially zig-zag to make progress despite sailing into the wind, which could extend the journey to two and half weeks.

Moreover, according to the Coast Guard, the boat lacks trackable GPS navigation, such as a satellite phone or a tracking beacon. The limited cellular service in that region of Mexico also makes triangulating the cell position difficult.

Robert H. Perry, the designer of the 41-foot sailboat, noted that their boat was likely manufactured in Taiwan 35 years ago. Despite its age, the fiberglass sailboat itself was a time-tested, ocean-navigating boat.

The travel circumstances have left family members uncertain about the status of their loved ones. Based on the timing, it appears possible they are "just going to roll into San Diego like nothing happened in maybe about a week," Spicuzza suggested, with the radio silence attributable to some electronic issue. Alternatively, the Coast Guard has worked on plotting where their life raft might have drifted under current weather conditions.

"It's just been a roller coaster of emotions the last several days; I want my dad home, I want him safe, [and] I want the O'Brien's home safe," Spicuzza said. "I'm very much looking forward to sitting around a table with all of them and joking about the time they got lost at sea – that is the hope."

ABC News' Elisha Asif, Helena Skinner, Zohreen Shah, Amantha Chery and Marilyn Heck contributed to this report.

Popular Reads

4 dead in shooting at Georgia high school

• Sep 4, 10:47 PM

You might not want to rush to get new COVID shot

• Aug 26, 11:25 AM

ABC News releases Trump-Harris debate rules

• Sep 4, 6:33 PM

Texas teacher who was homeless speaks out

• Sep 4, 4:01 AM

Trump charged in Jan. 6 superseding indictment

• Aug 27, 6:25 PM

ABC News Live

24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events

Watch CBS News

Luxury yacht sinks off Sicily, leaving U.K. tech magnate Mike Lynch, 2 Americans among those missing

By Anna Matranga

Updated on: August 20, 2024 / 7:47 PM EDT / CBS News

Rome  — Six people, including two U.S. nationals, a British technology entrepreneur and one of his daughters, were still missing Tuesday after a large luxury sailing yacht sank off the coast of the southern Italian island of Sicily during a violent storm. The 184-foot Bayesian had been anchored about half a mile off the port of Porticello, near Palermo, with 22 people on board — 10 crew members and 12 passengers.

The vessel sank at about 5 a.m. local time (11 p.m. Eastern, Sunday) after being hit by a possible waterspout spawned by the storm. Italian media said the winds snapped the boat's single mast, unbalancing the vessel and causing it to capsize.

Fifteen of those on board managed to escape the yacht and were rescued by a Dutch-flagged vessel that was anchored in the immediate vicinity. They were brought ashore by Italian Coast Guard and firefighters.

One body — an unidentified male — was recovered, but six people remained missing, including British software magnate Mike Lynch, once described as Britain's Bill Gates. 

Lynch was acquitted in June of fraud charges in the U.S. that could have landed him with a decades-long prison sentence. In an unusual twist, Lynch's co-defendant in that fraud case, who was also acquitted, died Saturday after being hit by a car while out jogging in England.

Lynch's teenage daughter Hannah was also among those missing, along with Lynch's American lawyer Chris Morvillo, a former assistant district attorney in New York, and his wife Neda. British banker Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, was also still missing Tuesday.

Among the survivors was a 1-year-old British girl who was being treated at a nearby hospital along with her parents. They were doing well, according to Italian media.

"For two seconds I lost my child to the sea, then I immediately was able to grab her again in the fury of the waves," the girl's mother, identified only as Charlotte, was quoted as saying by Italy's ANSA news agency. "I held on to her tightly in the stormy sea. Many were screaming. Luckily the life raft opened up and 11 of us managed to get aboard."

"It was terrible," she told ANSA. "In just a few minutes the boat was hit by a very strong wind, and sunk soon thereafter."

Karsten Borner, the captain of the Dutch vessel that came to the rescue, told ANSA he had been anchored near the Bayesian.

"When the storm was over we noticed that the ship behind us was gone, and then we saw a red flare, so my first mate and I went to the position and we found this life raft drifting, and in the life raft was also a little baby and the wife of the owner."

Recovery efforts were back underway Tuesday, with speedboats, helicopters and divers continuing to search for the missing — as well as for answers, as to how a state-of-the-art superyacht could disappear in a flash. 

According to Italian media, Fire Brigade divers reached the boat and saw bodies trapped inside some of the cabins, but they had been unable to recover any of the victims from inside the vessel by Tuesday, due to obstructions. The Bayesian appeared to have sunk in an area with a depth of about 160 feet.

Witnesses said the boat sank quickly. 

"I was at home when the tornado hit," fisherman Pietro Asciutto told a local news outlet. "I immediately closed all the windows. Then I saw the boat, it had only one mast, it was very large. I suddenly saw it sink... The boat was still floating, then suddenly it disappeared. I saw it sink with my own eyes."

The director-general of Sicily's civil protection agency, Salvatore Cocina, confirmed to CBS News partner BBC News  that three of the six people still missing Monday were British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, whose company Autonomy Corporation PLC was acquired in 2011 by HP ; one of his daughters, Hannah Lynch, who is believed to be 18; and the boat's chef, Ricardo Thomas.

CBS News has seen corporate documentation showing a company called Revtom, solely owned by Lynch's wife Angela Bacares, who was among those rescued from the accident, as the owner of the yacht that capsized off Sicily. 

While the yacht was a privately owned pleasure boat, the waters around the island have claimed many lives over the last decade.

Dozens of migrants have died attempting to reach Sicily and smaller Italian islands in the region. Sicily sits only about 100 miles from the east coast of Tunisia in north Africa, and the Mediterranean crossing has been a frequent site of both nautical rescues and disasters as smugglers routinely send small boats overloaded with desperate people into the sea.

Alex Sundby , Joanne Stocker and Chris Livesay contributed to this report.

• Boat Accident

More from CBS News

At least 12 dead as boat with dozens of migrants rips apart off French coast

British woman found dead, man missing after flood hits Mallorca

NATO member Poland scrambles jets as Russia attacks western Ukraine

Apalachee High School shooting among these 2024 school shootings

Missing Submersible Vessel Disappears During Dive to the Titanic Wreck Site

Five people were in the submersible, which lost contact with a surface vessel on Sunday morning, the Coast Guard said. A search and rescue mission is underway in the North Atlantic.

• Share full article

Follow our live coverage of the missing submersible.

Jenny Gross Emma Bubola and Jesus Jiménez

The search area is 900 miles off the U.S. coast.

A submersible craft carrying five people in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic has been missing since Sunday, setting off a search and rescue operation by the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard confirmed Monday that it was searching for the vessel after the Canadian research ship MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning.

“It is a remote area and it is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board,” said Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard.

The submersible disappeared in a portion of the ocean with a depth of roughly 13,000 feet. Admiral Mauger said the occupants would theoretically have between 70 to 96 hours of air as of late Monday afternoon.

The submersible is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a company that offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons. “Our entire focus is on the crew members in the submersible and their families,” a statement on its website said. “We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible.”

Hamish Harding, the chairman of the aviation company Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director.

In an Instagram post, Mr. Harding indicated that another member of the submersible team was Paul Henry Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic. On his Facebook page on Saturday, Mr. Harding wrote that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.

Here’s what to know about the search operation:

Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, has compared its project to the booming space tourism industry. Its customers pay $250,000 to travel to the Titanic’s wreckage on the seabed, more than two miles below the ocean’s surface.

Admiral Mauger said aircraft from the United States and Canada were searching for the submersible, and sonar buoys had been deployed to help search under the surface. The Coast Guard was also coordinating with commercial vessels in the area to aid the search operation.

OceanGate chartered a vessel, the MV Polar Prince, to serve as the ship on the surface near the dive site. The company’s website outlines an eight-day itinerary for the trip out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.

The Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, on its maiden voyage from England to New York after hitting an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people. The wreckage was found in 1985, broken into two main sections, about 400 miles off Newfoundland, in eastern Canada. Read The Times’s coverage of the sinking.

John Ismay, a Pentagon reporter, served as a deep-sea diving and salvage officer in the U.S. Navy.

Why are undersea rescues so difficult?

Numerous complications could hinder the effort to rescue the five people aboard the deep-diving submersible Titan, which failed to return from a dive on Sunday to the wreck of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

For any search and rescue operation at sea, weather conditions, the lack of light at night, the state of the sea and water temperature can all play roles in whether stricken mariners can be found and rescued. For a rescue beneath the waves, the factors involved in a successful rescue are even more numerous and difficult.

The first and most important problem to solve is simply finding the Titan.

Many underwater vehicles are fitted with an acoustic device, often called a pinger, which emits sounds that can be detected underwater by rescuers. Whether Titan has one is unclear.

The submersible reportedly lost contact with its support ship an hour and 45 minutes into what is normally a two-and-a-half-hour dive to the bottom, where the Titanic lies.

There could be a problem with Titan’s communication equipment, or with the ballast system that controls its descent and ascent by flooding tanks with water to dive and pumping water out with air to come back toward the surface.

An additional possible hazard for the vessel would be becoming fouled — hung up on a piece of wreckage that could keep it from being able to return to the surface.

If the submersible is found on the bottom, the extreme depths involved limit the possible means for rescue.

Human divers wearing specialized equipment and breathing helium-rich air mixtures can safely reach depths of just a few hundred feet below the surface before having to spend long amounts of time decompressing on the way back up. A couple hundred feet deeper, light from the sun can no longer penetrate the water, and dark reigns.

The Titanic lies in about 14,000 feet of water in the North Atlantic, a depth that humans can reach only while inside specialized submersibles that keep their occupants warm, dry and supplied with breathable air.

The only likely rescue would come from an uncrewed vehicle — essentially an underwater drone. The U.S. Navy has one submarine rescue vehicle , although it can reportedly reach depths of just 2,000 feet. For recovering objects off the sea floor in deeper water, the Navy relies on what it calls remote-operated vehicles, such as the one it used to salvage a crashed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in about 12,400 feet in the South China Sea in early 2022. That vehicle, called CURV-21 , can reach depths of 20,000 feet.

Getting the right kind of equipment — such as a remote vehicle like the CURV-21 — to the site takes time, starting with getting it to a ship capable of delivering it to the site.

The Titanic’s wreck lies approximately 370 miles south of Newfoundland, and the kinds of ships that can carry a vehicle like the Navy’s deepest-diving robot normally move no faster than about 20 miles per hour.

According to OceanGate’s website, the Titan can keep its five occupants alive for approximately 96 hours. In many submersibles, the air inside is recycled — carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added — but on a long enough timeline, the vessel will lose the ability to scrub enough carbon dioxide, and the air inside will no longer sustain life.

If the Titan’s batteries run down and are no longer able to run heaters that keep the occupants warm in the freezing deep, the people inside can become hypothermic and the situation eventually becomes unsurvivable. Should the submersible’s pressure hull fail, the end for those inside would be certain and quick.

Advertisement

OceanGate Expeditions was created to explore deep waters.

OceanGate Expeditions, the owner of the missing submersible, is a privately owned company headquartered in Everett, Wash., that, since its founding in 2009, has focused on increasing access to deep-ocean exploration.

The company has made headlines in recent years for organizing expeditions for paying tourists to travel in submersibles to shipwrecks, including the Titanic, and to underwater canyons. According to the company’s website , OceanGate also provides crewed submersibles for commercial projects and scientific research.

“Our team of qualified pilots, expedition leaders, mission professionals and client-service staff ensure accountability throughout the entire mission and expedition process with a focus on safety, proactive communication and client satisfaction,” the website reads .

OceanGate was founded by Stockton Rush, an aerospace engineer and pilot, who currently serves as its chief executive officer.

At just 19 years old, in 1981, Mr. Rush became the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world, and obtained a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton University three years later, according to the OceanGate website. He later earned an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989.

OceanGate currently owns and operates three five-person submersibles.

The first submersible acquired by OceanGate, Antipodes, could travel to a depth of 1,000 feet.

In 2012, the company acquired another submersible, and rebuilt it into Cyclops 1, a vessel that could travel to a depth of up to 1,640 feet. It served as a prototype for the newest submersible, the Titan. That vessel, made of carbon fiber and titanium, is engineered to reach depths of more than 13,000 feet, or more than two miles. The Titan, which has been used to explore the Titanic’s wreckage, is now missing .

OceanGate has provided tours of the Titanic since 2021, in which guests have paid up to $250,000 to travel to the wreckage, which lies about 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface.

Last year, Mr. Rush described the business to CBS News as “very unusual,” providing “a new type of travel.”

The company first planned a voyage to the Titanic in 2018, according to the technology news site GeekWire , but the Titan sustained damage to its electronics from lightning. Then, in 2019, the voyage was postponed again because of a problem with complying with Canadian maritime law limitations on foreign flag vessels, according to GeekWire .

Before the first successful trip to the Titanic in 2021, the Titan was “rebuilt,” according to GeekWire , after tests showed signs of “cyclic fatigue” that reduced the hull’s depth rating to 3,000 meters.

In 2020, OceanGate announced that it was working with NASA ’s Marshall Space Flight Center to assure that the submersible was strong enough to survive in the ocean’s depths.

According to the company’s website, OceanGate has successfully completed more than 14 expeditions and more than 200 dives in the Pacific, Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

OceanGate’s board members include Mr. Rush, along with a physician and astronaut, a software consultant, a retired U.S. Coast Guard, and a C.E.O. of an investment advisory firm.

In addition to OceanGate, Mr. Rush is also a co-founder and member of the board of trustees of OceanGate Foundation , a nonprofit organization founded in 2012 which aims to “fuel underwater discoveries in nautical archaeology, marine sciences and subsea technology” through public outreach and financial support.

The nonprofit’s website features OceanGate’s Titanic expedition, along with other global exploration expeditions.

OceanGate is based on the backside of a marina facility in Everett, Wash., tucked between several boat maintenance companies, where some workers were washing, inspecting and relocating yachts on Monday. No sign or logo marks its location, and the windows at the OceanGate doors were covered on Monday, one with a Titanic expedition logo. The entrance door was locked, and nobody responded to knocking. A nearby marina worker said OceanGate employees packed up and left for the Titanic expedition several weeks ago.

Andrea Kannapell

An Instagram post from Hamish Harding, who was aboard the submersible that went missing on Sunday, indicated that another member of the submersible team was Paul Henry Nargeolet, a French expert on the Titanic.

Emma Bubola Salman Masood and Victoria Kim

Here is who was on the missing submersible.

Five people were on board the Titan submersible when it lost contact with its support ship during a dive to the Titanic wreckage site in the North Atlantic on Sunday. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard and the company that operated the submersible, OceanGate Expeditions, said that all five people on board were believed to be dead.

Here are the passengers who were aboard the craft.

Stockton Rush

Stockton Rush was the founder and chief executive of OceanGate Expeditions, the company that operated the submersible. He was piloting the vessel.

In an interview that aired on CBS in November, Mr. Rush said he grew up wanting to be an astronaut and, after earning an aerospace engineering degree from Princeton in 1984, a fighter pilot.

“I had this epiphany that I didn’t want — it wasn’t about going to space,” Mr. Rush said. “It was about exploring. It was about finding new life-forms. I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk. I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe.” He founded OceanGate, a private company that is based in Everett, Wash., near Seattle, in 2009.

Read his obituary here .

Hamish Harding

Hamish Harding , a British businessman and explorer, holds several Guinness World Records, including one for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive. He wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that he was proud to announce that he had joined OceanGate’s mission “on the sub going down to the Titanic.”

Mr. Harding, 58, was the chairman of Action Aviation, a sales and air operations company based in Dubai. He had previously flown to space on a mission by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company.

Mr. Harding also took part in an effort to reintroduce cheetahs to India, and holds a world record for the fastest circumnavigation of Earth via both the geographic poles by plane.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet

Paul-Henri Nargeolet , a French maritime expert, had been on more than 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

Mr. Nargeolet was the director of underwater research for RMS Titanic, Inc. , an American company that owns the salvage rights to the famous wreck and displays many of the artifacts in Titanic exhibitions. The company conducted eight research and recovery expeditions between 1987 and 2010, according to its website.

Shahzada Dawood and Suleman Dawood

The British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood , 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, were members of one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families.

Mr. Dawood had a background in textiles and fertilizer manufacturing. His son was a business student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, a spokesman for the school confirmed in a statement on Thursday.

Mr. Dawood and his son had “embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the Titanic” when contact with the vessel was lost, the statement said, asking for privacy for the family.

Mr. Dawood was also on the board of trustees for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute. The organization said on its website that he was a resident of Britain, and a father of two children.

April Rubin

‘Digital twin’ of the Titanic shows the shipwreck in extraordinary detail.

An ambitious digital imaging project has produced what researchers describe as a “digital twin” of the R.M.S. Titanic, showing the wreckage of the doomed ocean liner with a level of detail that has never been captured before.

The project, undertaken by Magellan Ltd., a deepwater seabed mapping company, yielded more than 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 still images and a high-resolution video. The visuals were captured over the course of a six-week expedition in the summer of 2022, nearly 2.4 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, Atlantic Productions, which is working on a documentary about the project, said in a news release.

The researchers used two submersibles, named Romeo and Juliet, to map “every millimeter” of the wreckage as well as the entire three-mile debris field. Creating the model, which shows the ship lying on the ocean floor and the area around it, took about eight months, said Anthony Geffen, the chief executive and creative director of Atlantic Productions.

Jesus Jiménez

A Coast Guard admiral says rescue crews are ‘making the best use of every moment.’

By air and sea, rescue crews on Monday were racing to find five people in a submersible that went missing on Sunday just hours into a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., officials said.

At a news conference in Boston on Monday afternoon, Rear Adm. John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said that rescue crews were searching in a “remote area” in water roughly 13,000 feet deep, and that they were up against the clock to find those on board the vessel.

Admiral Mauger said that Coast Guard officials understood from OceanGate Expeditions, the operator of the submersible, which offers tours of shipwrecks and underwater canyons, that the vessel was designed to have 96 hours of “emergency capability.” He did not provide specifics about what that capability meant for those on board, though it was believed to indicate that they would have breathable air for four days.

“We’re using that time, making the best use of every moment of that time,” he said.

The five people on board the submersible were not identified at the news conference “out of respect for the families,” Admiral Mauger said, noting that one person on board was a pilot, or operator, and that the other four were “mission specialists.” He did not share what role the specialists served on the vessel, referring that question to the operator of the submersible.

The United States deployed two C-130 aircraft, with another aircraft expected to join the search later on Monday from the New York National Guard, and Canada has sent a C-130 and a P-8 submarine search aircraft, Admiral Mauger said.

“On the surface we have the commercial operator that’s been on site, and we’re bringing additional surface assets into play,” he said, adding that they will provide some “subsurface” search ability.

Admiral Mauger said that rescue teams had also deployed sonar buoys on the surface of the waters to try to locate the submersible, which had sent out its last reported communication about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive. Exactly when that was on Sunday morning was unclear.

In an interview with Fox News earlier on Monday, Admiral Mauger said that the Coast Guard did not have the right equipment in the search area to do a “comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom.”

“Right now, we’re really just focused on trying to locate the vessel again by saturating the air with aerial assets,” he said.

Christine Chung

To the bottom of the sea and the ends of the earth, high-risk travel is booming.

Plunging to the depths of the ocean in a submersible to explore the remains of the Titanic is just one of many extreme excursions on offer for travelers willing to pay a hefty price tag — and accept a substantial dose of peril.

There’s also swimming with great white sharks in Mexico, sailing by an active volcano in New Zealand and rocketing to space . These types of singular and dangerous adventures are becoming increasingly popular with deep-pocketed leisure travelers in search of novel experiences, several travel experts said.

“There are a lot of incredibly well-traveled folks out there who constantly push the boundaries of their travels to chase thrills and claim bragging rights,” said Peter Anderson, managing director of Knightsbridge Circle , a luxury concierge service with offices in London, New York and Dubai. “They’re so accustomed to what they consider to be typical vacations that they begin to seek out more unique experiences, many of which involve a degree of risk.”

Mr. Anderson said he had recently planned a trip for a client to visit the pyramids in South Sudan, the site of one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, which has a “Do Not Travel” advisory from the U.S. State Department. The planning process, he said, involved consultations with security experts on how to best mitigate potential dangers.

Another client wanted to voyage to the geographic South Pole — the southernmost point on Earth — which required chartering an icebreaker, a large vessel that can pass through ice-covered waters, and two helicopters for sightseeing. The trip, which cost about $100,000 per person, required a week of various health screenings and weather preparedness training.

Physically demanding expeditions to some of the world’s most remote destinations are a growing business for the luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent , said Geoffrey Kent, its founder. He said the company uses expert guides to eliminate as much risk as possible.

“These are thrilling adventures for top-tier clients who have done pretty much everything,” Mr. Kent said in a statement, adding that the challenges left guests “with a sense of accomplishment.”

Perhaps the priciest ticket, and biggest possible risk, is space travel, which has been dominated by a trio of billionaire-led rocket companies: Blue Origin , owned by Jeff Bezos, whose passengers have included the “Star Trek” television star William Shatner; Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic , where tickets for a suborbital spaceflight start at $450,000; and Elon Musk’s SpaceX , which in 2022 launched an all-civilian spaceflight, with no trained astronauts on board.

A spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, speaking to reporters, said that the last reported communication from the submersible was about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive.

The spokesman said that the sea conditions in the search area right now are “fairly normal,” with three to six foot waves, with low visibility and fog.

Mauger said that the United States has deployed two C130 aircraft, with an additional on the way from the New York National Guard, and that the Canadians have sent a C130 and a P8 submarine search aircraft. “On the surface we have the commercial operator that’s been on site, and we’re bringing additional surface assets into play,” he said, adding that they will provide some “subsurface” search ability.

Mauger said that one submersible pilot was on board. “And there were four mission specialists, is the term that the operator uses,” he said. “You’ll have to ask the operator what that means.”

Jesus Jimenez

Mauger said it is believed the vessel was designed to sustain an emergency for 96 hours and estimated that the people inside would theoretically have between 70 to 96 hours of air. “We’re using that time making the best use of every moment of that time,” Mauger said.

Mauger said the location of the search is approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., in a water depth of roughly 13,000 feet. “It is a remote area and is a challenge to conduct a search in that remote area, but we are deploying all available assets to make sure that we can locate the craft and rescue the people on board.”

Mauger said that the search is being conducted both under the water, with sonar buoys and sonar on the expedition ship, and over the water, in case the submersible surfaced and lost communications, with the help of aircraft and surface vessels. He said the Coast Guard was coordinating both with the Canadian authorities and commercial vessels in the area for help.

Mauger said the Coast Guard was notified on Sunday afternoon by the operator of the submersible that it was “overdue” and that it had five people on board.

Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said at a news conference that “we are doing everything we can do” to find the submersible and rescue the five people inside. United States and Canadian aircraft are being used in the search, he said. Mauger said that the Coast Guard has put sonar buoys in the water to try to locate the submersible.

We’re standing by for Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard to provide updates on the missing submersible at a news conference in Boston.

Ben Shpigel

The Titan is equipped with only a few days’ worth of life support.

The Titan , the vessel that went missing in the area of the Titanic wreck in the North Atlantic on Monday, is classified as a submersible, not a submarine, because it does not function as an autonomous craft, instead relying on a support platform to deploy and return.

According to the website for the tourism company operating the Titan, OceanGate Expeditions of Everett, Wash., the missing vessel is a submersible capable of taking five people — one pilot and four crew members — to depths of 4,000 meters, or more than 13,100 feet — for “site survey and inspection, research and data collection, film and media production, and deep sea testing of hardware and software.”

Made of titanium and carbon fiber, it weighs about 21,000 pounds and is listed as measuring 22 feet by 9.2 feet by 8.3 feet, with 96 hours of “life support” for five people.

The Titan, one of three types of crewed submersibles operated by OceanGate, is equipped with a platform similar to the dry dock of a ship that launches and recovers the vessel, the website said.

“The platform is used to launch and recover manned submersibles by flooding its flotation tanks with water for a controlled descent to a depths of 9.1 meters (30 feet) to avoid any surface turbulence,” according to the website.

“Once submerged, the platform uses a patented motion-dampening flotation system to remain coupled to the surface yet still provide a stable underwater platform from which our manned submersibles lift off of and return to after each dive,” the site continues. “At the conclusion of each dive, the sub lands on the submerged platform and the entire system is brought to the surface in approximately two minutes by filling the ballast tanks with air.”

OceanGate calls the Titan the only crewed submersible in the world that can take five people as deep as 4,000 meters — or more than 13,100 feet — enabling it to reach almost 50 percent of the world’s oceans. Unlike other submersibles, the Titan, the website said, employs a system that can analyze how pressure changes affect the vessel as it dives deeper, providing “early warning detection for the pilot with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.”

The Titan began deep-sea ventures related to the Titanic in 2021. According to the tech news site GeekWire , the vessel was “rebuilt” after OceanGate determined through testing that the vessel could not withstand the pressure of a 4,000-meter dive.

In a Fox News interview, Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said that the agency did not have the right equipment in the search area to do a “comprehensive sonar survey of the bottom.” He said,“Right now, we’re really just focused on trying to locate the vessel again by saturating the air with aerial assets, by tasking surface assets in the area, and then using the underwater sonar.”

Mauger said that one of the aircraft being used in the search could detect underwater noises.“But it is a large area of water, and it’s complicated by local weather conditions as well,” he said.

The U.S. Coast Guard said in statement that it was searching for five people after the Canadian research vessel MV Polar Prince lost contact with a submersible during a dive about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Mass., on Sunday morning. The Coast Guard scheduled a news conference for 4:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Jenny Gross

The Marine Institute at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, which partnered with OceanGate on the trip, said in a statement that it became aware on Monday morning that OceanGate had lost contact with its Titan submersible. One Marine Institute student who was on a summer employment contract with OceanGate was safe, the statement said. “We have no further information on the status of the submersible or personnel,” the statement said.

Emma Bubola

Rory Golden, an Irish diver who has previously visited the Titanic wreckage and is part of the OceanGate expedition, said in a Facebook post on Monday that a “major search and rescue operation” was underway. The focus on board the ship is “our friends,” he wrote. Communications were being limited to preserve bandwidth to coordinate operations, he added. (Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this update misstated Rory Golden’s nationality. He is Irish, not Scottish.)

Hamish Harding, the chairman of a Dubai-based sales and air operations company, Action Aviation, is among those aboard the missing submersible, according to Mark Butler, the company’s managing director. Harding, who holds several Guinness World Records, including for the longest time spent traversing the deepest part of the ocean on a single dive, wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday that a dive had been planned for Sunday: “A weather window has just opened up,” he wrote.

Tourists have been going to the Titanic site for decades, by robot or submersible.

For decades after the Titanic sank, searchers scanned the dark waters of the North Atlantic for the ship’s final resting place.

Since the wreck was found, in 1985, it has drawn hundreds of filmmakers, salvagers, explorers and tourists, using robots and submersibles.

First there was the team that took undersea robots to depths of more than 12,000 feet, verifying that the broken hulk it found at the bottom was in fact the Titanic. Then came many others, including James Cameron, the director who reinvigorated interest in the ship with his 1997 film, “ Titanic .”

The ship had long garnered intense interest among researchers and treasure hunters captivated by the tragic history of the wreck: the horror of the accident, the supposed hubris of the ship’s builders, the enormous wealth of many and the poverty of others on the luxury liner juxtaposed with the cold facts of the iceberg and the sea.

But Mr. Cameron’s hit imbued the wreck with a new story of romance and tragedy, renewing interest far beyond those with an interest in famous accidents at sea.

By the early 2000s, scientists were warning that visitors were a threat to the wreck, saying that gaping holes had opened up in the decks, walls had crumpled, and that rusticles — icicle-shaped structures of rust — were spreading all over the ship.

Tourists were paying up to $36,000 per dive by submersible. Salvage crews hunted for artifacts to bring back up, over the objections of preservationists who said the wreck should be honored as the graveyard for more than 1,500 people. Wreckage from a submersible accident was found on one of the Titanic’s decks. Researchers said the site was littered with beer and soda bottles and the remains of salvage efforts, including weights, chains and cargo nets.

Mr. Cameron, who has repeatedly visited the wreck, was among those calling for care around the site. In 2003, he took 3D cameras there for his 2003 documentary, “ Ghosts of the Abyss .”

OceanGate Expeditions, the private company operating the submersible that went missing on Monday, was founded in 2009. By the time it began offering tours to paying customers, researchers said that the Titanic had little scientific value compared to other sites.

But cultural interest in the Titanic remains extraordinarily high: OceanGate charges $250,000 for a submersible tour of the wreck, and the disaster continues to command a fascination online, sometimes at the expense of facts .

A spokeswoman for Canada's Coast Guard said that a military aircraft and a Coast Guard ship had been deployed to help search for the missing submersible. The ship, Kopit Hopson 1752, was off eastern Newfoundland, and headed for the search area.

Dana Rubinstein

John Lockwood, a longtime OceanGate board member, has been in the company’s submersibles, though not the Titan, the one that he said takes people to the Titanic. He said the submersibles have a viewing port and external cameras. “But it’s not like going down in a submarine at a very shallow depth, where there are multiple viewing ports,” he said.

Amanda Holpuch

The tour’s operator charges $250,000 for trips to the sunken wreckage.

OceanGate Expeditions, the operator of the submersible that disappeared during a voyage to the wreckage of the Titanic, has led previous tourist trips to the site at a cost of $250,000 per person.

Stockton Rush, the president of OceanGate, told The New York Times last summer that private exploration was needed to continue feeding public fascination with the wreck site.

“No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” Mr. Rush said. “There are other sites that are newer and probably of greater scientific value.”

OceanGate takes paying tourists in submersibles to underwater canyons and shipwrecks, including the Titanic. Last year, it shared a one-minute clip of video obtained during one of its trips to the wreck site, which was discovered in 1985, less than 400 miles off Newfoundland.

The dives last about eight hours, including the estimated 2.5 hours each way it takes to descend and ascend. Scientists and historians provide context on the trip and some conduct research at the site, which has become a reef that is home to many organisms. The team also documents the wreckage with high-definition cameras to monitor its decay and capture it in detail.

Mr. Rush said that the high quality of the footage allowed researchers to get an even closer look at the site without having to go underwater. He compared the OceanGate trips to space tourism, saying the commercial voyages were the first step to expanding the use of the submersibles for industrial activities, such as inspecting and maintaining underwater oil rigs.

“For those who think it’s expensive, it’s a fraction of the cost of going to space and it’s very expensive for us to get these ships and go out there,” Mr. Rush said. “And the folks who don’t like anybody making money sort of miss the fact that that’s the only way anything gets done in this world is if there is profit or military need.”

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the day that the expedition’s research vessel lost contact with the submersible. It was Sunday, not Monday.

How we handle corrections

Trevor Munroe, a Canadian Coast Guard spokesman, said his country is involved in the rescue mission, but the U.S. Coast Guard is leading it from Boston. “It’s technically in their waters,” he said.

The news of the missing submersible recalls an OceanGate trip last year that was the subject of a CBS story . During the trip, the CBS correspondent David Pogue reported that “communication somehow broke down”and that the submersible was briefly lost for a couple of hours.

You may remember that the @OceanGateExped sub to the #Titanic got lost for a few hours LAST summer, too, when I was aboard…Here’s the relevant part of that story. https://t.co/7FhcMs0oeH pic.twitter.com/ClaNg5nzj8 — David Pogue (@Pogue) June 19, 2023

The New York Times

Here’s how The New York Times covered the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

The Titanic was en route to New York on its maiden voyage when it struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912. The sinking was front-page news around the world, including in The New York Times. Here is a portion of The Times’s coverage, as it was written that day. The digital version of the paper from that day can be viewed here .

The admission that the Titanic, the biggest steamship in the world, had been sunk by an iceberg and had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic, probably carrying more than 1,400 of her passengers and crew with her, was made at the White Star Line offices, 9 Broadway, at 8:20 o’clock last night.

Then P.A.S. Franklin, Vice President and General Manager of the International Mercantile Marine, conceded that probably only those passengers who were picked up by the Cunarder Carpathia had been saved. Advices received early this morning tended to increase the number of survivers by 200.

The admission followed a day in which the White Star Line officials had been optimistic in the extreme. At no time was the admission made that every one aboard the huge steamer was not safe. The ship itself, it was confidently asserted, was unsinkable, and inquirers were informed that she would reach port, under her own steam probably, but surely with the help of the Allan liner Virginian, which was reported to be towing her.

As the day passed, however, with no new authentic reports from the Titanic or any of the ships were known to have responded to her wireless call for help, it became apparent that authentic news of the disaster probably could come only from the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic.

The wireless range of the Olympic is 500 miles. That of the Carpathia, the Parisian, and the Virginian is much less, and as they neared the position of the Titanic they drew further and further out of shore range. From the Titanic’s position at the time of the disaster it is doubtful if any of the ships except the Olympic could establish communication with shore.

Miawpukek Horizon Maritime Services, of St. John’s, Canada, said it was supporting OceanGate Expeditions, a client. “We are working closely with authorities on the search and rescue effort,” they said in a statement.

Hundreds of ships go missing each year, but we have the technology to find them

Senior Lecturer in Astronomy, University of Leicester

Disclosure statement

Nigel Bannister works for the University of Leicester. He received funding from US Office of Naval Research - Global to conduct this work.

University of Leicester provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

View all partners

The seas are vast. And they claim vessels in significant numbers. The yachts Cheeki Rafiki , Niña , Munetra , Tenacious are just some of the more high-profile names on a list of lost or capsized vessels which grows by hundreds each year.

Yet it took the disappearance of flight MH370, now declared lost with no survivors , to demonstrate how difficult it can be to find something in the open ocean. As the search continued, incredulity grew: exactly how, in the 21st century, is it possible to lose a 64-metre aircraft?

There are great unknowns at sea: planes and boats go missing. Illegal fishing and piracy are easy to conduct – and small vessels can smuggle powerful weapons and dangerous individuals. The technology to improve this situation already exists, we just need to make better use of it.

The view from above

Satellites provide the vantage point necessary to monitor large areas of ocean. Spacecraft carrying synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide high-quality images with resolution down to a metre, regardless of the weather. But the relatively small number of spacecraft equipped with SAR, and the dawn-to-dusk orbits which most occupy, also limit the times of day when they can provide coverage.

To offer comprehensive monitoring at sea, we need to bring together different types of imaging, including radar and photographic images in the human-visible wavelength. This is often overlooked for maritime purposes due to the effects of cloud, rain, and darkness that limit its use. But there are enough satellites with the capability that could provide excellent coverage.

Detail and coverage

The two key requirements for effective monitoring are high spatial resolution (good detail) and a large field of view (wide area). One tends to come at the expense of the other, so that a device – whether it is a camera, satellite or radar – capable of detecting small vessels will usually only be able to scan an area a few tens of kilometres wide, making it both unlikely that the search area of interest has been recorded and rendering subsequent searches very slow.

But the situation is changing. The number of imagers is growing rapidly. In our recently published study , we identified 54 satellites carrying 85 sensors which offer useful resolution and could be accessed commercially (excluding military surveillance spacecraft). Companies such as PlanetLabs are in the process of launching many more.

While each satellite’s imaging device generates an image track only 10-100km across, the motion of the satellite as it orbits the Earth effectively “scans” that track so that the image is narrow in one dimension but circles the world in the other. With orbital periods of around 90 minutes, one satellite makes around 16 passes over the daylit hemisphere every day. The combined imaging work of all these satellites now make a significant contribution to our awareness of maritime traffic.

Image early, image often

Imagery used in search-and-rescue operations is usually taken after the target is lost. In the case of the Niña which disappeared off the coast of New Zealand, eight days elapsed between last radio contact and the alarm being raised. For MH370, the search area evolved over periods of weeks. In both cases, ocean currents carry evidence away from the accident site, while debris disperses and sinks, making it more difficult to identify by satellite.

It would be far better to have an archive of recent, regularly updated images so that the recent history of a location over a period of several days can be examined. This could offer evidence of the vessel’s course or state, or pick up on areas of fresh, concentrated debris.

Making the best of what we have

Satellites with visible wavelength cameras are generally used for gathering images of land. What if satellite operators could generate revenue by taking images of the oceans? The limited resources on satellites mean that it isn’t generally possible to constantly take images, to store that data and transmit it all in the next available contact with the ground (which may be some time after an image is acquired). As it is, it’s not possible to create a global maritime monitoring system of this kind without purpose-built spacecraft with bigger data storage and more frequent contact with ground stations to download it.

But it is possible to monitor high-priority areas of heavy traffic, protected fisheries and security-critical regions, with co-operation between operators of existing spacecraft (for which there are precedents such as George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project , which uses satellites to gather evidence of atrocities and war crimes), and incentives, perhaps involving maritime insurance companies.

Retrieving hundreds of gigabytes of data a day from satellites requires a new approach to ground stations. One solution may be to “crowdsource”: to create a network of stations operated by small institutions, universities and individuals to spread the burden of downloading data and increasing the periods during which data can be recorded and transmitted.

There are groups working on automated vessel-detection algorithms – and crowdsourcing also has a role here, such as TomNod , for example, which asked members of the public to help inspect images online in the search for Niña. How much more effective could search and rescue be if the power of crowdsourcing was applied to each stage of data acquisition, storage and processing, combined with high-quality images taken around the time the vessel was lost?

• satellite tracking
• Missing aircraft
• Search and Rescue
• Maritime security

Research Fellow in Coastal Numerical Modelling

Director of STEM

Community member - Training Delivery and Development Committee (Volunteer part-time)

Chief Executive Officer

Head of Evidence to Action

Two rescued from yacht after terrifying night at sea amid 20-foot waves

T wo people have been rescued after a terrifying night at sea as six-meter (20-foot) waves tossed their stricken yacht nearly 200 miles (322 kilometers) off Australia’s eastern coast as they drifted at speed towards New Zealand.

Authorities were first alerted to the crew’s crisis around 1 p.m. on Monday, when they deployed a distress beacon, but it was hours before the first rescue helicopters located the vessel.

The 20-meter yacht, the Spirit of Mateship, had lost power and communications and was being hit by winds of up to 90 kilometers an hour (56 mph) as well as waves up to six meters high.

“(The helicopter’s crew) were able to fly above the yacht, and they could communicate via radio to the yacht, but they were unable to pick them up,” said Ben Flight, duty manager at the Australian Maritime Safety Authority Response Center.

Another rescue attempt was later abandoned due to rough seas, forcing the two people – named by New South Wales police as Brett, 60, and Lisa, 48 – to spend what Flight described as a “horrible” night at sea.

“They weren’t injured, but the vessel had suffered a mechanical issue of some kind, and they couldn’t steer, and they couldn’t make their own way through the water, so they were drifting, and they were taking on water as well. So, they were in quite a serious situation,” said Flight.

“They were sort of just at the mercy of the elements. They would have been moving around quite uncomfortably. It would have been particularly windy, noisy, probably quite wet as well.”

Two Australian Navy ships – HMAS Arunta and HMAS Canberra – answered calls for help, as well as Royal Australian Air Force C-130J Hercules aircraft, according to the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

The ships, along with a nearby merchant vessel, monitored the yacht’s location overnight, and the rescue resumed in the early hours of the morning, when conditions had eased.

NSW Police vessel Nemesis arrived at the yacht about 3 a.m. Tuesday and deployed a smaller boat to rescue the sailors around 7:30 a.m. in choppy seas with swells of four meters to five meters.

The couple returned to shore on the Nemesis on Tuesday evening, telling reporters in Sydney that they were “glad to be back.”

“The boat is more than seaworthy. It’s just mainly we were tired and seasick and couldn’t continue any further,” said Brett.

Flight said the outcome would have been much worse if the crew hadn’t deployed the distress beacon, which issues a satellite alert to advise the rescue coordination center of their location.

The Spirit of Mateship has competed in the prestigious Sydney to Hobart yacht race several times, crewed by wounded veterans and army personnel.

Together they raised money to support army veterans. However, the yacht has changed hands since then, according to Flight.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

resources for christian youth ministry and leadership

Lost at sea - a team building game.

You have chartered a yacht with three friends, for the holiday trip of a lifetime across the Atlantic Ocean. Because none of you have any previous sailing experience, you have hired an experienced skipper and two-person crew.

Unfortunately in mid Atlantic a fierce fire breaks out in the ships galley and the skipper and crew have been lost whilst trying to fight the blaze. Much of the yacht is destroyed and is slowly sinking. Your location is unclear because vital navigational and radio equipment have been damaged in the fire. Your best estimate is that you are many hundreds of miles from the nearest landfall.

You and your friends have managed to save 15 items, undamaged and intact after the fire. In addition, you have salvaged a four man rubber life craft and a box of matches. Rank the items correctly and you will survive until rescue comes. Make too many mistakes and... Download (pdf) the complete 'Lost at Sea' team building game.

MORE TEAM BUILDING GAMES

For more, click on team building games in the category list on the sidebar.

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE

Each month I add more youth ministry ideas, resources and personal reflections on leadership. May I encourage you to subscribe to INSIGHT and you won't miss a thing.

• Reblog It 0

17 Comments

Yes thanks a lot for sharing - v excited to do this w my team cheers

Posted by: steve b | 09/11/2016 at 11:53

This is a great game because it forces everyone in the team to work together. It fosters trust and friendship among the team, which will most likely be working together a majority of the time. By having games and tasks like this for teams to complete, it better helps them perform and succeed at their job.

Posted by: Stephan Bashkir | 31/03/2015 at 21:55

Had done this test a decade ago. The trainer used this game to demonstrate the concept of synergy and leadership quality. First, soled the game individually. Then formed teams and selected (by members) one leader for each team. Team collectively solved the problem. Then compared the individual scores with team score. In all cases, team score was better than average scores of team members. Also done several permutations like comparing the best individual score among team members to combined score, leader's score to combined score etc. A lot was there to learn from such games.

Posted by: Krishnakumar | 25/07/2013 at 11:35

Great resource for indoor team building.

Posted by: Toni | 07/07/2013 at 06:01

There's a couple of ideas here that I have not seen before, so I'm adding them to my repertoire asap. Thanks Grahame...

Posted by: Mark Collard - ice-breakers & team-building games expert | 25/05/2013 at 09:09

You have published a fantastic resource.

Posted by: www.gforcebc.com.au | 06/01/2013 at 07:56

This was an awesome project to do with my class mates.

Posted by: Haley | 03/01/2013 at 00:49

Hi there, I enjoy reading through your article post. I wanted to write a little comment to support you.

Posted by: work in cruise | 23/12/2012 at 08:23

It was so funny today with my team.

Posted by: Account Deleted | 06/02/2012 at 12:23

This worked very well, thank you!

Posted by: Tobin Crenshaw | 03/11/2011 at 22:39

I'm the head of the non-profit English Club in Novosibirsk State University (Russia). Your games is pretty well written and I used it in our meetings several times with success. I had known some of these games before due I participated in Intel's trainings but when I tried to find description of these games your web-site was the only one where I could get it for free. Thank you for you work.

Posted by: Kirill Lykov | 16/05/2010 at 06:21

Thank you so much for taking the time and effort to put together such a wonderful resource for us all to access. God bless you!

Posted by: Kishi | 26/11/2009 at 10:41

What a wonderful find. Have just started a youth group for tweens - this site is amazing. God Bless.

Posted by: Carol Dubery | 17/08/2009 at 12:09

only one word to describe this site - Awesome!! may God bless you for the efforts you have put in. - kenman

Posted by: kenman | 13/04/2009 at 23:02

If only I knew about this site while I was volunteering in Sunday school lol. It would have made things much less painful

Posted by: Lukewarm | 14/02/2009 at 23:27

@Lukewarm. Thanks for your comment. I write all the discussion starters, talks and reflections myself. The icebreakers and team builder ideas have been collected over 25+ years in youth ministry and come from a variety of public sources. I've just tried to put them together in a way which is helpful to youth workers. At least that's the plan :-)

Posted by: Grahame | 13/02/2009 at 23:09

This is such a great resource. Do you come up with these yourself? Because they are great.

Posted by: Lukewarm | 13/02/2009 at 21:36

Verify your Comment

Previewing your comment.

Posted by:  | 

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Leave a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.

Please sign in before leaving a comment.

(URLs automatically linked.)

Your Information

Name and email address are required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.

Name is required to post a comment

Please enter a valid email address

Invalid URL

This weblog only allows comments from registered TypeKey users. To comment, please enable JavaScript so you can sign into TypeKey.

NEXT POST Moon landing - a team building game Apart from the ‘fun’ challenge of Moon Landing, this team building game can help encourage communication, cooperation and decision making skills among your group. PREVIOUS POST Servant leadership - more food for thought Food for thought - servant leadership

Grahame Knox

Writer, blogger and knows a bit about youth work!

Recent Comments

• Subscribe to this blog's feed
• Powered by Typepad

Sailors met by family on dry land after yacht rescue in 'horrendous conditions'

By Millie Roberts

A man and a woman have returned to dry land after being rescued from a yacht on the New South Wales South Coast.

Brett and Lisa were saved during a multi-agency rescue on Tuesday morning, before docking in Sydney on Tuesday.

Lisa, 48, said she was feeling "safe and secure and happy" after the ordeal.

A man and woman have expressed gratitude for being back on dry land after they were rescued from a stricken yacht on the New South Wales South Coast on Tuesday. 

Brett, 60, and Lisa, 48, were found "safe and sound" about 170 nautical miles east of Nowra at around 7:30am.

"I am so pleased to say that this rescue operation has been a resounding success," NSW Marine Area Command Acting Superintendent Siobhan Munro said.

The rescue mission was launched off the South Coast after a distress beacon was activated about 1pm on Monday.

Two sailors, Lisa and Brett, were rescued off the NSW coast after their yacht began taking on water. ( ABC News: Victoria Pengilley )

At the time, the yacht was 85 nautical miles from Sydney, and had drifted 160 nautical miles offshore by the time emergency services reached Brett and Lisa.

"That's how strong the winds were and how fast it was, pushing the vessel away," NSW Marine Area Command Sergeant Ryan Spong said of the conditions.

The 19-metre vessel, Spirit of Mateship, had experienced mechanical failure and was taking on water, Ben Flight from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said on Tuesday morning.

Spirit of Mateship was left abandoned at sea following the rescue. ( Supplied: POB Jason Herrmann )

It's believed Brett and Lisa left Jervis Bay on Sunday or Monday for Sydney, NSW Marine Area Command Chief Inspector Anthony Brazzill said.

On Tuesday, a multi-agency operation retrieved the pair "in some quite horrendous conditions", Sergeant Spong added.

The pair were taken on board NSW Water Police vessel Nemesis, and thanked everyone involved in their return to Sydney.

Lisa said she was feeling "safe and secure and happy" despite not getting much sleep last night.

The 60-year-old man and 48-year-old woman were greeted by family members at the NSW Police Area Command in Balmain. ( ABC News: Victoria Pengilley )

Brett said the waiting was "alright" and that the boat was "safe" and "more than seaworthy".

"It was more we were tired, seasick, we couldn't continue any further," he said.

"That was a decision we made to call ... it could have got worse ... I think we made the right decision."

The Nemesis passed through Sydney Heads just before 6pm, before the pair were met by family in Balmain half an hour later.

Spirit of Mateship, which has raced in several Sydney to Hobart yacht races, was abandoned at sea.

Search and Rescue How To Find A Missing Boat

Oct 24, 2019 | News

Portrait of an Inessential Government Worker

Glory isn’t part of the deal when you go to work for the federal government., “i’ve only thought about one problem in my  life ,” says art allen. “which is how to improve coast guard search and rescue.”.

Art Allen – Improving Coast Guard Search & Rescue Photographer: Annie Tritt/Bloomberg

October 15, 2019, Updated on October 21, 2019 The following is adapted from a new chapter for the paperback edition of “The Fifth Risk,” which will be published by Norton in November.

I found Art Allen standing on the lawn just outside his front door, a few miles inland from some uninviting Connecticut beach. He was in his mid-60s, and a scientist — but a scientist with a man-of-action feel to him. He wore a Coast Guard Search and Rescue polo and a massive Fenix 3 GPS watch, and he had this snow-white Hemingway beard. Six canoes hung from hooks inside his garage, a scrum of mountain bikes leaned against the wall, and all looked as if they had a lot of miles on them. So did he.

For nearly 40 years, Art Allen had been the lone oceanographer inside the U.S. Coast Guard’s Search and Rescue division. Among other subjects, he had mastered the art of finding things and people lost at sea. At any given moment, all sorts of objects are drifting in the ocean, a surprising number of them Americans. The Coast Guard plucks 10 people a day out of the ocean, on average. Another three die before they’re found. Which is to say that 13 Americans, every day, need to be hauled out of the water or off some crippled sailboat or sea kayak or paddleboard. “I’ve only thought about one problem in my life,” said Art, with an odd little laugh, which sounded half like a chuckle and half like an apology for speaking up. “Which is how to improve Coast Guard search and rescue.”

I’d first learned of Art’s existence back in early 2019, during the 35-day government shutdown. About half the employees of the federal government had been deemed essential for the safety of life and property and been made to work without pay. The other half had been sent home. The line running between the two groups, the essential and the inessential, was oddly drawn. The airport people who make sure that the toiletries in your carry-on can’t be turned into a bomb were required to show up for work. The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents working undercover inside terrorist groups were told to go home. So were the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety inspectors; the people at the Environmental Protection Agency assigned to stop poison from leaking from power plants; and the hundreds of immigration court judges who would decide the fate of thousands of immigrants held in detention facilities.

During the shutdown I’d stumbled upon a very long list of federal workers who had been nominated for an obscure  public-service award called the Sammies . Virtually all the people on the list had been laid off without pay and more or less told by their society that their work was not all that important. I wondered what it felt like to be at once up for an award for one’s work, and required by law not to do it. The list was in alphabetical order. At the top was Arthur A. Allen.

Art hadn’t set out in life to save people at sea; he hadn’t actually set out to do anything in particular except to be a scientist. “I think I was always going to be a scientist,” he said. “Science is driven by the love of the subject. I have an aunt who studies the genetics of mushrooms. I don’t know why she finds mushroom genetics beautiful and fascinating, but she does.” What Art had always found beautiful and fascinating was water. He’d grown up on the New York side of Lake Champlain, and even as a little kid his idea of fun was to dig tunnels to drain snow ponds. He went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and designed his own major, aquatic science and engineering. From there, he went into a graduate program in physical oceanography at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. “Oceanographers come in two flavors,” he said, with the same odd little apology-chuckle. “To find out which one you are, they send you to sea for a couple of weeks. And you either become a theoretical oceanographer — because you throw up a lot. Or you become a field guy. And I was particularly gifted with a strong  stomach .”

Book about a Mexican fisherman who survived for 438 days alone on a raft at sea Photographer: Annie Tritt/Bloomberg

He was also particularly gifted at finding things out. “That was one of my strengths,” he said, but without his odd little laugh. “I could get good data out of the sea.”

The question at the  start  of Art’s career, back in 1984, was where to apply that strength. He’d seen an ad placed by the Coast Guard for a junior researcher, and while the idea of government work wasn’t as off-putting in the early 1980s as it would become in, say, 2019, Art didn’t really think of himself as a government guy. He certainly didn’t have any sense of being on some mission. “I thought I’d give it six months,” he said.

Just then the Coast Guard was trying to figure out how to improve its ability to spot objects on the ocean surface from its planes and helicopters. It was a little shocking how hard it was to see even a small boat from 1,000 feet; if you flew over and didn’t see it, you might never look there again. To see better, there wasn’t much the Coast Guard wasn’t willing to try. Not long before Art arrived, for instance, it’d attempted to train pigeons, riding in cages attached to Coast Guard aircraft, to respond to any orange object in the ocean by pecking at an alarm. The pigeons seemed to have natural advantages over humans as spotters of objects lost at sea. Their  vision  was sharper, and they never got bored or distracted. The pigeons didn’t miss a thing, which turned out to be their downfall. “The problem was that there are orange things that aren’t survivors and things not wearing orange that are survivors,” said Art. “The pigeons drove the pilots crazy.”

By the time Art arrived, the pigeons were gone, replaced by questions that Art did his best to answer. For example, the Coast Guard wanted to know the odds of a plane flying at 500 feet over some object actually spotting that object, so Art threw stuff in the water and made people fly over it and try to see it. The Coast Guard wanted him to find better ways to measure ocean currents and winds, so Art built and bought better gadgets to measure them. The Coast Guard needed a device that might better track what was happening to currents at the last known position of some boat or person. Art helped invent a new buoy to do the job.

When a Coast Guard commander looking for a guy lost at sea, and presumed to be floating on a life raft made by the Elliot company, realized that he didn’t really know what an Elliot life raft looked like, or how fast it might travel in relation to the wind compared to life rafts better known to the Coast Guard, he called Art and asked him — and Art called a facility in Essex, Connecticut, that certified life rafts and had them send him a brochure for one. “I’m just looking at it as a pure scientist,” said Art. “They want to know how these objects drift in the ocean, so I figure out how they drift in the ocean.”

In June 2002, off the southern shore of Long Island, a fishing boat was swamped in a storm and threw the four men on it into 60-degree waters. The men had been competing in a shark-fishing tournament when the storm came through. There were a couple of Mustang survival suits on the boat — not enough for all the men. Before they’d capsized, the men had sent a distress signal that was picked up by a Coast Guard station in New Jersey, but the signal was fuzzy and the Coast Guard had no idea where the men were or even, really, if they were in trouble. The real search didn’t get going until that night, when the boat failed to return to port. It lasted four days.

A human can survive in cold water for maybe 36 hours, even inside a Mustang suit, but the Mustang suit company told the men’s families that anyone wearing the suit could last for eight days. The families implored the Coast Guard to keep looking long past the point the Coast Guard thought there was any point in doing so. Three of the men were never found. The body of the fourth was discovered a week later by a fishing boat 30 miles off the New Jersey coast.

When it was over, the people who had failed to find the men called Art with a question: Who’s right, us or the Mustang company? Art looked into the hypothermia models used by the Coast Guard and found they had some problems, apart from the issues raised by the suit. The service made no allowance for the clothing a person might be wearing under the suit, for instance, or his body fat. It assumed the weather was constant throughout the search and that nights in the water were the same as days in the water. “This was another area of Coast Guard ignorance,” said Art. “Survivability.”

Art sought out scientists who had studied hypothermia, and collected what was known on the subject. Even if they’d been wearing the Mustang suits, he concluded, the men almost certainly would have died within two days. These studies suggested to Art that the old Coast Guard models had been, if anything, optimistic about the ability of human beings floating in ocean water to survive. Never mind hypothermia. A person could go only three days without water and 62 hours without sleep before he lost the ability to keep himself alive. But what really struck Art Allen about the whole incident was that “no one really knew.” No one knew how a Mustang suit, or anything else you might be wearing, might affect your ability to survive. Not even the scientists who studied hypothermia.

Art had started his career as a junior researcher, but a decade into it he was the lone oceanographer inside Coast Guard Search and Rescue. And he began to notice something: The people engaged in rescuing Americans at sea were turning to him for answers to questions he’d never been asked. The questions put to him weren’t questions to which he should obviously know the answer. “It occurred to me,” said Art, “that I was getting these questions. And I realize that if I don’t know the answers, no one does.”

People were coming to him because they had nowhere else to go. “Rather than being the wide-eyed scientist in the background, suddenly I’m being asked for my opinions,” said Art. “It was like they thought, There’s this bearded oceanographer guy out there; maybe he knows.” Usually he didn’t know, but he had his talent for creating knowledge.

The biggest thing that no one knew, he decided, was how various objects drifted at sea. The ocean never stopped moving. Every object was pulled and pushed along by currents and winds. And so if you wanted to know where an object might be that had been spotted, say, five hours ago 20 miles due east of Cape Hatteras, you needed to know the winds and the currents off Cape Hatteras in the intervening five hours.

But that knowledge wasn’t enough: You also needed to know exactly what the object was and how it interacted with the forces of nature. Leeway was the technical term for the difference between the movement of an object and the current that pulled it along. “The Coast Guard has always been interested in physical oceanography — oil spills and icebergs,” said Art. “You got stuff that gets into the water and you want to predict where it’s going to go.” Even if they started in the same place, a disabled fishing trawler and a sea kayak might soon be many miles apart.

Art Allen set out to find what was known on the subject. Shockingly little, it turned out. The history of search and rescue at sea is mostly the story of people neither being searched for nor being rescued. For most of human history, lost at sea meant gone for good.

“It really only started during World War II,” said Art. “There was not much looking for people at sea until we started losing pilots in the Pacific.” Scouring the literature, he found that there was really only one good study of leeway. A Coast Guard commander named W.E. Chapline, who had been stationed in Hawaii in the late 1950s, had grown sufficiently weary of not finding people that he had made tests on the few objects on which people lost in the South Pacific tended to float: a surfboard, a sampan, a small fishing boat.

“Estimating the Drift of Distressed Small Craft” was published in 1960, in the Coast Guard Alumni Association Bulletin. It was 2 1/2 pages long and wholly original and, like a lot of things wholly original, had its limitations, which the author hinted at. “It was difficult at times to obtain sufficient volunteers from among the local small boat owners,” he wrote, “due mainly to the discomfort involved while drifting, the relatively small size of the local Coast Guard Auxiliary, and generally small number of boats available in Hawaii.

Otherwise, the short paper was inspiring, at least to Art. It had been done with care, by a man clearly aware that it might one day be the difference between life and death. It contained new insight — like the fact that a lot of boats don’t make their leeway directly downwind. “I’m reading this and I’m saying, ‘Right on, guy!’” recalled Art. There was no reason that Art Allen, Coast Guard oceanographer, could not study every object on which people might drift upon the sea, and reduce to a mathematical equation how each of those objects moved through the water. There was no reason these equations might not be plugged into every search-and-rescue plan. If you knew where some object had been, and when it had been there, you could predict more or less exactly where it was at the moment you needed to find it. If you knew the currents and the winds — which the Coast Guard usually did — all you needed was leeway.

Norwegian operational drift model using Art Allen’s equations. Source: “US Coast Guard Search and Rescue Mission & Operational Oceanography: History, Model Skill, Future Work” by Art Allen via Forum for Operational Oceanography

Without anyone particularly noticing, or caring, Art gathered every object ever studied — the ones in Chapline’s paper, some stuff the Japanese had tested, and objects that had been tossed into the ocean by the Coast Guard and observed. To these, he added 45 or so objects that he’d studied himself, usually after the Coast Guard had failed to find someone said to be adrift upon them. When he was finished, he had a list of 95 different objects: a Tulmar four-person life raft, a 12.5-meter Korean fishing vessel, a Japanese 13-person life raft, a sea kayak, a 100-gallon ice chest, a 65-foot sailboat, a windsurfing board, a Cuban refugee raft with a sail, a Cuban refugee raft without a sail, an airplane evacuation slide raft that Art had persuaded Delta Air Lines to lend him, and so on.

Some items were redundant. Art’s list ultimately reduced itself to 63 classes of objects. For each, Art created equations to describe their drift. The idea was to build the equivalent of those charts you point to when you ask the airline to find your bags: The greater the range of choices, the more likely you will find a bag that resembles your own — and the people who are looking for it can identify it. The thing that was lost might not be exactly like the thing that had been studied, but the closer it was, the more quickly and surely the Coast Guard could design the search for it.

In 1999, Art Allen published everything he knew in a 351-page treatise called “Review of Leeway.” “I only hope that this report is up to the highest standards that were set by W.E. Chapline in 1960,” he wrote in his dedication. Such was his respect for what Chapline had done that Art retyped Chapline’s paper and inserted it into the back of his own. “Review of Leeway” became required reading for anyone going through the National Search and Rescue School. It made Art Allen slightly famous, in his small world. Search and rescue people in other countries began to call and ask him to come and speak to them, or help them with some specific problem.

Even after Art published his treatise, he wasn’t totally sure that it was having its intended effect. The search and rescue people could now, in theory, use Art’s equations in their searches. But they didn’t have a simple computer program that did the work for them, so it was unclear just how the stuff he had learned was being applied. The truth was that, 15 years into his career, Art still didn’t know exactly what happened in the heat of a rescue because he’d never been on the scene during a search. In May 2001, that changed, after a commander in a field office called and asked him if he’d like to see what they did. “That was the first time I got out of the office,” said Art.

The invitation had come from the office in Portsmouth, Virginia. The idea was that Art would spend the first weekend in May with the SAR operator, the person who coordinated the search and rescues in that particular Coast Guard district. The forecast for the weekend was sunny, warm and unthreatening. When Art turned up late in the afternoon, it didn’t really seem like anything would happen. But not long after he sat down with the search and rescue guy, all hell broke loose. There were a bunch of calls for help, one right after another. One boat had run aground. Another boat had caught fire. Yet another boat had capsized and several people had gone overboard in the Chesapeake Bay.

Across the water people were coming to grief. “What had happened was a dry cold front had come through and no one had seen it,” said Art. The search and rescue operator was dispatching helicopters and cutters as fast as he could, and saving one person after another. For help, he had only a crude computer tool and was having to make a lot of calculations by hand. Art was impressed, but after six hours of drama he could see the guy tiring. “And after all of this,” said Art, “someone calls in at the end of the day and says, ‘We have an overdue sailboat.’”

The overdue sailboat’s last known position was a beach it had left that morning. Its intended destination had been the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It was 20 feet long and equipped with life vests. On board were a man and two women in their 40s, and a 9-year-old girl.

Just how weary the search and rescue guy had become revealed itself when he tried to use a satellite picture to zoom in on the Chesapeake Bay only to realize, after a very long beat, that he was actually staring at the mouth of the Yangtze River in China. Art watched this obviously overwhelmed young man plug crude information into his crude computer tool. He had a fair description of these people’s plans but his program didn’t allow him to input a voyage. Nor could he find good data on the winds over the water — he finally pulled something from an anemometer at a nearby state park. He didn’t even have a good reading of the tides in the bay. On top of all this, he had no drift equations for a swamped skiff, as Art hadn’t studied one. The equations the guy was using came from work on a drifting sailboat done by Chapline in 1960. “I could see he couldn’t adequately plan the search,” said Art. “The tool he’d been given could not help him do what he needed to do.”

Students in immersion suits climb into a raft as part of a safety and survival training program, US Coast Guard Sector Northern New England, Maine Photographer: Gordon Chibroski/Portland Press Herald

And so the Coast Guard went looking for something without any real idea of where it was. The helicopters and an 87-foot cutter searched through the night, and found nothing. Not until the following morning did the sailboat appear, upside down, a long way from where the Coast Guard had been searching. A fishing boat spotted it. Two adults were in the water beside the boat, alive. A 42-year-old woman and her 9-year-old daughter, both wearing life vests, were taken off the hull. They’d gone hypothermic. A few hours later, at a local hospital, both were pronounced dead.

Art had stayed late into the night and seen all this unfold, in real time. “I watched this happen,” he said, rising from his dining room table. We’d been sitting there talking for maybe five hours before he’d thought to mention the incident. “These two were the same age as my wife and daughter,” said Art — and suddenly he was fighting back tears.

He turned to a stack of papers on a bookshelf. He wasn’t a big keeper of memorabilia. He had some books given to him by a Norwegian search and rescue person grateful for the Norwegian lives he had helped to save. He had a coffee mug with a poem in Mandarin — a tribute to Art, written by the Taiwanese search and rescue people, to thank him for saving Taiwanese lives. The newspaper clipping he now produced was not part of some larger collection of clippings. It was a yellowing edition of the Virginian-Pilot, dated May 7, 2001. A front-page article told the story of Jennifer Curtis Byler, 42, and Sarah Byler, 9. “I was just … ” said Art, haltingly. “This was just a real kick in the teeth for me. For me, it was a real turning point.”

Art’s brother, an electrical engineer, was fond of saying that “a good scientist asks the right question and a good engineer solves the right problem.” Art didn’t put it quite this way, but up until May 5, 2001, he’d been more scientist than engineer. On that day, he saw that the Coast Guard needed him to be both. It wasn’t enough to ask, or even to answer, the questions; he would need to solve the problems. Every day there were more and more data that might be used to find people lost at sea that either wasn’t available or was hard to use.

Both the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made observations of winds, currents and water temperature. There were Art’s own studies of leeway, and his equations that described how different objects drifted at sea. What was needed was a computer tool, as simple to use as TurboTax, which instantly grabbed all the relevant data and turned it into a prediction. If Art had been more senior, or more persuasive, he would have created a PowerPoint presentation to sell his superiors on the idea. “I said, ‘I’m not particularly good at making verbal arguments. But I can build something.’”

Four years later, the Coast Guard had a prototype. It would soon be the envy of the search and rescue world. SAROPS, it was called: Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. Art hadn’t built it by himself, of course. No one built anything by himself. But he had taken the lead on most of it and made sure that key information was at the fingertips of search and rescue teams. The SAR operator could now enter a detailed description of the search — two officers, say, peering down from a C-130 flying at 1,000 feet — and SAROPS could calculate the probability of the officers having seen what they were looking for, so they could decide if it made sense to fly over the same patch of ocean again.

The searchers could enter the height, weight and clothing of a person floating in the ocean and, along with the water temperature, figure out how long that person had to live — and so, in the bargain, find out when it was time to call off a search. They could enter the last known location of an object and, because Art had almost certainly studied its leeway, predict how it would move in relation to the winds and the currents.

Often the Coast Guard was unsure exactly what it was looking for. Upright sailboat or an overturned one? A disabled trawler or five fishermen in the water? Now officers could plug multiple objects into their tool and visualize several searches at once. Art’s curious science had yielded information that people could act on.

Search area developed by SAROPS watchstanders looking for a man who went missing in a plane crash off American Samoa in 2014 Source: U.S. Coast Guard

The Coast Guard rolled out its new search tool in early 2007. Art spent two days at each of the service’s nine districts teaching people how to use it — showing them what it was, and what it was not. It was not a simple deterministic device. It did not offer up one distinct answer but a map of probabilities that allowed rescue teams to allocate their search resources in the most likely places. The field people for their part couldn’t quite believe how much more quickly and accurately the new tool allowed them to figure out where in the ocean to look for whatever had gone missing. “The old way took forever to do — it almost took longer to do than the search itself,” said Paul Webb, who ran Coast Guard search and rescue operations in the Alaska district. “You used to launch the planes with a guess. Now you have a search location before the plane is in the air.”

The United States had always been a leader in search and rescue; our country has made more of a priority than any other of saving its citizens at sea. If you were lost at sea there was never much of a question which country you wanted to have looking for you. Now the United States was in a class by itself. Even as Art ran around the country unveiling the new tool, stuff happened that astonished search and rescue people.

For instance, less than an hour past midnight on March 16, 2007, an overweight 35-year-old man who’d had too much to drink tumbled off the balcony of his cabin on a Carnival Cruise ship and into the Atlantic Ocean. But here’s the thing: The man didn’t die. On land, fat will kill you. At sea, it can save your life — and not because it keeps you warm. “Everyone floats,” explained Art, “but the fatter you are the further your mouth is from the water line.”

Someone on the ship, which was 30 miles off the Florida coast, had seen the man go into the dark water and told the captain. The captain had notified the Coast Guard and so the Coast Guard knew roughly where and when the man had splashed down. Still. Spotting a person without a life jacket in the ocean was, as Art put it, “like looking for a soccer ball in Connecticut.”

But now the Coast Guard had a much better idea where to look. The searchers knew the currents and they knew how the man’s body would move in relation to them: his leeway. Interestingly, before Art came along, the assumption was that a person in the water had no leeway. A body was assumed to simply drift with the current. Art had proved that wasn’t true. People didn’t drift exactly with the current and the nature of their drift varied with their circumstances. By the time the man fell off the cruise ship, Art had studied five cases: a person with a life jacket, a person with no life jacket, a person in a scuba suit, a person in a survival suit and a dead person. The people running the rescue plugged in the equations Art had provided for a person with no life jacket. And in March 2007, the following item appeared on a blog under “Cruise and Ferry Passengers and Crew Overboard”:

A 35-year-old man was rescued approximately eight hours after jumping or falling overboard from the ship when it was 30 miles east of Fort Lauderdale. A witness said that the man, who was intoxicated, ran through a window and then fell 60 feet into the ocean — it is not clear whether the window was open at the time. The ship was en route to Nassau and will arrive slightly behind schedule.

They’d found the man 15 miles from his point of entry, floating in the ocean. Had he gone overboard at just about any previous moment in human history, he likely never would have been found. Now the pictures of him flopping down naked but alive on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter were on the front pages of Florida newspapers. With the exception of a great piece in the Baltimore Sun, which described this magical new Coast Guard search tool, the articles mostly told the story of the guy’s miraculous survival. They never even asked the question of exactly how he’d been found.

The answer to that question, at least to the people now using SAROPS, was obvious: Art Allen.

Of course, there was no scientific study to determine the value of Art Allen. “We never take someone and say, ‘Sorry, we’re throwing you back in the ocean and we’re using the old methods to see if we find you,’” said Art. But the response of the people in the field to the new tool was shockingly enthusiastic. “The survivors don’t know what saved them but they owe their lives to Art,” said Geoff Pagels, who runs Coast Guard search and rescue out of Portsmouth. “It’s monumental.”

Despite all the lives saved, Art’s mind found it difficult to move on from the lives that had been lost. The night we were talking in his kitchen, he told me a story: Not long after he had the first working version of SAROPS, he re-created the search for the sailboat that had gone missing in the Chesapeake back in 2001. The new tool automatically pulled in better wind data, as well as the currents and tides, from the day the boat was lost. It knew when the dry cold front swept across the bay and so could estimate when, and where, the boat capsized, and tossed the 9-year-old girl and her mother into the chilly waters. It used Art’s equations for a drifting sailboat — drawing on data that Art had himself harvested. It took only a couple of minutes before up on the screen popped the most likely track the boat had taken. “It took you right to where they’d been,” said Art.

In the fall of 2016, Art told the Coast Guard of his intention to retire in 18 months. When the time came for Art to go in the spring of 2018, the Coast Guard was unprepared. It hadn’t hired his replacement or even given him a junior scientist to train. Like the rest of the federal government, the Coast Guard was aging. At the end of 2018, around the time of the big government shutdown, 18 percent of the civilians employed by the U.S. government became eligible for retirement, and you had to wonder how many Art Allens were walking out the door and not being replaced. What was happening inside, say, the State Department, or the Bureau of Land Management, or the Food and Drug Administration? Art decided to delay his retirement for a year simply because there wasn’t anyone in search and rescue who knew what he knew.

It’s curious how knowledge is at once so hard to create and so easily taken for granted. And in truth it was hard to say exactly what would be lost with Art’s retirement. When the people in the field called Art Allen with a question, it was usually after something had gone wrong. “When things aren’t going right, that’s when I get a call,” said Art. “If things are going right, they don’t need me.” But there were still times that things didn’t go right.

Just before the government shutdown that had pronounced Art inessential, he’d received a call from the Miami district, which had been looking for a missing scuba diver off the Florida coast. Two male scuba divers, one in his 50s, the other in his 20s, had emerged from a dive to find their boat, and its driver, specks in the distance, and strong currents pulling them ever further apart. They were 18 miles from shore. The younger diver decided to swim toward the boat and get help. He never would have made it, but that didn’t matter, as he was rescued by the Coast Guard before he arrived. But in the meantime, the sun had set. The other diver was still out there, alone in the dark, presumably drifting as described by one of Art’s equations.

Art got the call from the search and rescue people that night, after they’d searched the area that SAROPS told them to search and found nothing. A thought occurred to Art that hadn’t occurred to the rescue squad: The guy was trying to swim to shore. Eighteen miles away! The Coast Guard knew, from his fellow diver, that the guy had a scuba suit and orange pool noodles to help keep him afloat. He also had a compass. Art said, Broaden the search, and look closer to shore. “This wasn’t science,” Art said. “It was What would I do if I was in his position?”

The Coast Guard found the diver. “This guy was a survivor,” said Art. “He used his compass. He flipped his mask up and used it to catch rainwater.” On the other hand the guy was still 9 miles from shore, and it was unclear if he was ever going to reach it.

Storage closet where Art Allen kept his gear Photographer: Annie Tritt/Bloomberg

Many months after the Florida incident, and three months into his retirement, Art took me to see his old office in New London, Connecticut. He’d turned over the little access card that opened the front door, so an old friend had to come down and let us in. Art led me down a long hall with shiny white floors and no sign of human life and into a storage closet, where he’d kept his gear. He seemed sort of pleased, but also a little sad, that it was just as he’d left it: the current meters and anemometers and PVC pipes and mannequins still dressed in life vests. Even the orange pool noodles he’d used when studying the progress of ocean swimmers remained coiled where he’d left them, in the corner.

We then climbed three flights of stairs to his old office, not much bigger than a cubicle and sealed with partition walls. At first glance it looked like what it was: an impersonal government office vacated months earlier by some anonymous public servant, waiting for its next occupant. Keys dangled from file cabinet keyholes; reference books filled the shelves.

At second glance, it was still very much a specific person’s office. The fingers of a ghoulish gray rubber Halloween hand poked out of one of the file cabinets. (“It looks like a hypothermia victim,” said Art, by way of explanation.) Upon inspection the books, too, were singular. One was about a Mexican fisherman who had survived for 438 days alone on a raft at sea. The author had sent it to Art to thank him for verifying that the raft could have indeed drifted as the fisherman described (and everyone else doubted).

I grabbed a pamphlet from a stack on a shelf. “The Leeway of Cuban Refugee Rafts and a Commercial Fishing Vessel,” by Art Allen. “There was an earlier study that said it drifted at 4 percent of the speed of the wind and I came up with 3.98 percent,” said Art, with his odd little laugh. “So what did I add?” Under that pamphlet were other pamphlets — all by Art. At the bottom was his 351-page treatise on the leeway of 95 more objects. On the cover was a note. “To my successor:” Art had scrawled in thick black ink. “You will find this report will provide a good background on the search objects in SARS. All the best, my friend. Art Allen.”

“It’s really kind of sad, isn’t it?” he said.

Art Allen had done what he’d done without asking for much for himself. Back in 1984, as a GS-11, he’d been paid less than $30,000 a year. After 35 years, he’d risen to a GS-14, and he’d been paid a bit more than $100,000. He hadn’t even expected the attention of others, outside his small circle of search and rescue people. It was nice that the Taiwanese coast guard wrote poems about him. But that sort of thing rarely happened here, in the United States. And he didn’t expect it to happen: Glory wasn’t part of the deal when you went to work for the federal government. Stability, on the other hand, was. He’d never expected to be chased from his job.

There’d been a moment, a few years earlier, that captured the spirit of Art Allen’s relationship to the society he’d tried to save. He’d flown to Long Beach, California, to help the Coast Guard search and rescue people there upgrade their search and rescue tool. Purely by accident, he’d arrived on the day a ceremony was being held to honor the heroes of a recent rescue. A few months earlier, a Los Angeles man had fallen off the back of his brother’s fishing boat, without anyone noticing what had happened. He’d floated in the Pacific for seven hours. The Coast Guard had plucked him from the water in the middle of the night.

On the day of Art Allen’s visit, the guy who’d been rescued had returned to the Coast Guard station to thank his rescuers. His visit had attracted the interest of local media. A bunch of TV cameras were there to witness the moment as the guy broke down and confessed that the experience of floating for hours in the darkness, and then by some miracle being saved, had left him a changed man. He’d quit smoking and lost 30 pounds and tried to help other people in distress.

Art stood off to one side, respectfully, and watched as the television cameras turned their attention from the man to the Coast Guard patrol that had saved him. “Against all odds, the crew detected yelling and a faint whistle in the darkness,” someone said into a microphone as the patrollers stepped forward, in turn, to receive their medals. Just then an older Coast Guard guy who had worked with Art Allen for many years leaned over and whispered to him, but to him alone: “Nice job.”

Michael Lewis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and his books include “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” and “Liar’s Poker.”This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Bloomberg Opinion: Politics & Policy By Michael Lewis , [email protected] October 15, 2019, 5:00 AM EDT  Updated on  October 21, 2019, 2:59 PM EDT To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Shipley at  [email protected]

Recent Posts

• BOLO for Four Missing New Guinea
• Bolo for MV OPTIMUN Montserrat
• BOLO for SV “Kehaar” Darwin Australia to Mexico
• USCG Rescues Two Sailors During Tropical Storm Debby
• BOLO for “SV LUKE” 8:24″ Burrum Heads Australia
• BOLO for 20 foot Galaxy MV Overdue Nassau to Moore’s Island
• BOLO for Guanaja Fisherman
• BOLO MV Jigging Isla Mujeres Mexico
• BOLO for SV Pretty Woman Hawaii to Oregon
• SV Rhapsode Overdue San Juan to Lake Worth, Florida

All Reports for…

View All Archived Reports

9 Unbelievable True Stories About People Who Survived Being Lost at Sea

The sea can be harsh and unforgiving. These fortunate souls fought back against all odds.

The sea is like a wet desert: There's no food, water, or shelter, and in every direction, the view is simply a glistening sheet of nothingness. Not to mention, dangerous predators abound, lurking just beneath the depths.

→ Think you can survive anything? Let's brush up on our skills together.

A shipwreck out on the open ocean can be a death sentence. If a rescue team doesn't come in the first 48 hours, it probably never will. Learning to survive will take skill, courage, and a heaping of luck.

Here are nine stories of brave people who got lost at sea, and survived despite the odds.

(The following maps are only rough approximations of route and distance traveled.)

MORE DEEP SEA STORIES FROM POP MECH:

➡️ The 25 Coolest Shipwrecks in the World

➡️ The 50 Weirdest Freaks That Live Beneath the Sea

➡️ This Jurassic Deep Sea Creature Looks Like a (Terrifying) Starfish with Razor Teeth

Filo Filo, Etueni Nasau, and Samu Pelesa

In many Pacific island chains, people use small boats to sail from one island to the next. The islands are close enough together that sailing from one to the other is a relatively simple, cheap, and straightforward mode of travel.

For three teenage boys on the small island of Tokelau, sailing was routine. However, when Filo Filo, Etueni Nasau, and Samu Pelesa set sail on October 5, 2010, it would be a longer trip than any of them were expecting.

Shortly after sailing into the ocean, the three teens lost sight of the shore and became disoriented. Not knowing which way was home, the group became lost, drifting further and further from land.

They had brought enough water with them for two days, but that quickly ran out and they had to rely on rainwater . After a few weeks—with no food and no sign of rescue—they grew desperate enough to catch a bird and eat it.

Meanwhile, after a month with no news, their community believed that the boys were dead. Around 500 people attended a memorial service for the boys, representing about a third of the total population of the island chain.

Having spent more than a month adrift at sea, the three boys had no food and no water, and were suffering from extreme exposure. Their situation was so dire that they began drinking seawater , a sure sign that death is near. With only days or even hours left to live, a fishing boat halfway between Samoa and Fiji spotted them. They had drifted over 500 miles.

The sailor rescued the three boys and took them to a hospital in Fiji, and then back to their homes on Tokelau. They had been lost at sea for 50 days in total.

Brad Cavanagh and Deborah Kiley

Deborah Kiley was no stranger to the seas. She had spent most of her life working as a crew member on yachts around the world. So, she thought that signing up to crew the 58-foot sailing yacht Trashman in October of 1982 was just another job. It would turn out to be anything but .

John Lippoth, the captain of the ship, brought his girlfriend Meg Mooney along for the ride. The two other crew members on the trip were Mark Adams and Brad Cavanagh. The plan was to take the yacht from Annapolis, Maryland down to Florida to meet up with its owner.

The first half of the trip was pretty smooth sailing, although Kiley started noticing things that made her uneasy. Lippoth kept making excuses to go below deck, for instance, and Kiley soon realized that their captain was afraid of the ocean . Lippoth and Adams also spent the entire voyage completely drunk. Of the five people on that yacht, only Kiley and Cavanagh were experienced, capable sailors.

After the boat passed North Carolina, the trip took a turn for the worst. A massive storm appeared out of nowhere, and Trashman headed right into the heart of it. Kiley recalls wind speeds of over 70 knots, and 40-foot waves so powerful they ripped holes in the boat. Two days after they set sail, the yacht, torn apart by the sea, began to sink.

The crew managed to make it to a lifeboat , but not before the ship's rigging seriously injured Mooney, leaving severe lacerations on her arms and legs. Her bleeding attracted sharks, who followed the lifeboat for the remainder of the journey. The crew found themselves adrift with no supplies or water, miles from land.

Two days after the Trashman sunk, Lippoth and Adams, already dehydrated from alcohol and dying of thirst, began drinking seawater. They started hallucinating and rambling incoherently. On the third day, Lippoth—in a state of delirium—jumped into the water and attempted to swim to shore. He was immediately attacked and killed by the sharks . Soon, Adams jumped overboard as well, muttering something about going to get some cigarettes. The sharks attacked him also, so violently that the boat spun around and the water turned red.

That night, Mooney succumbed to her injuries, dying of blood poisoning. Kiley and Cavanagh, the only two left, had to toss her body overboard where she, too, was eaten by sharks. Shortly after, Kiley and Cavanagh, close to death themselves, were spotted by a Russian cargo ship off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The crew rescued them four days after they abandoned ship, and five days after setting sail.

Steven Callahan

Steven Callahan is an expert on sailing. Specifically, a naval architect who has been sailing ships since he was young. He even built his own boat, called the Napoleon Solo , and set sail from Rhode Island in 1981. His travels led him all over the Atlantic: first to Bermuda, and then to the coast of Europe. On his way back, bound for Antigua, he ran into trouble .

About a week after he set sail for home, a storm started brewing. The storm was relatively mild, and Callahan said he wasn't worried. But his boat hit something that tore a gaping hole in the bottom. Callahan suspected it was either a whale or a large shark.

The boat began filling up with water, and Callahan made it to his inflatable raft. But he needed the emergency supplies in the cabin, which was already underwater. Diving in again and again, he managed to retrieve food, water, flares, a spear gun, solar stills, and a handful of other items. All in all, he was particularly well-equipped to be adrift.

And a good thing too, because Callahan drifted on his raft for 76 days. During that time, he faced threats from starvation, dehydration, sharks, and raft punctures. Finally, some sailors off the coast of Marie-Galante, near Guadalupe, spotted him. He had lost a third of his weight and could barely stand, so they took him to a hospital for treatment. However, Callahan didn't even stay the night, opting instead to recuperate on the island, while hitchhiking throughout the West Indies.

Much later, Steven Callahan would work as an advisor on the movie Life of Pi , providing his sea survival expertise to make the film more realistic.

Poon Lim holds the world record for the longest survival on a life raft. It's not a record he hopes anyone will ever beat.

Poon was a Chinese sailor on the British Merchant vessel SS Benlomond during WWII. The ship had left Cape Town, South Africa on its way to New York when a German U-boat attacked it a few hundred miles off the coast of Brazil. That encounter destroyed the ship, but Poon managed to escape with a life jacket. He was the ship's sole survivor.

After about two hours, Poon found a small wooden raft and climbed aboard. Amazingly, the raft contained some survival supplies , like food, water, and flares. But as the days turned into weeks, and his food started to run low, Poon had to improvise.

He began by crafting a makeshift fishing hook and catching fish. With his new food supply and the water from his raft, he felt he might be able to make it. He still had his flares, and all he had to do was wait for a ship to come close.

Then things took a turn for the worst. A storm hit, and Poon lost all his food and water. With no supplies, and close to death, Poon had to go to extremes to survive. With the last of his strength, he caught a passing bird and killed it, drinking its blood to quench his thirst.

Poon realized that if he was going to survive, he would need a more permanent water source. The only one available happened to be protected by many sharp teeth. Still, Poon strengthened his fishing line and started trying to catch sharks. He managed to hook one, and brought it onboard. He drank the blood from the shark's liver to sustain himself.

After 133 days, Poon drifted close to the shore of Brazil, where some fishermen rescued him, and took him to a hospital to recover. Despite being lost at sea for almost half a year, he had only lost around 20 pounds and could walk by himself.

Maurice and Marilyn Bailey

In 1973, Maurice and Marilyn Bailey were planning to live out their dream of moving from their home in England to New Zealand. They sold their house, bought a yacht, and set sail with their possessions. They believed the trip would be a pleasant journey. They were wrong .

The first half of their voyage went well, and they passed through the Panama Canal in February of that year. Soon after, they ran into trouble, or more accurately, trouble ran into them.

While both of the Baileys were below deck, they felt a massive impact. Rushing onto the deck, the couple saw a whale diving below the water and a large hole in their hull. The ship quickly began to sink, and the Baileys grabbed what little they could and headed for their life raft.

The couple was stranded in the Pacific with a few days' worth of food, a compass , some flares, and little else. They collected rainwater to drink, and when their food ran out, they ate birds, fish, and even turtles.

During their time at sea, they spotted seven ships, which they attempted to signal, but no one noticed them. As the weeks stretched into months, they became badly sunburned and malnourished. Their life raft started to deflate, they were plagued by sharks, and they suffered multiple storms.

After 117 days stranded at sea, with no supplies and near the brink of death, they were finally rescued. A passing Korean ship spotted them in the water and changed course to bring them aboard. They could barely move and they were so weak that they couldn't eat solid foods.

The Korean ship dropped the Baileys off at Hawaii, where they immediately vowed to build another yacht and return to the sea, because they clearly didn't get the message the first time. With the proceeds from the book they wrote about their experiences, they did indeed build a second yacht, and spent years sailing around the world comparatively uneventfully.

Rose Noelle Crew

John Glennie, Rick Hellriegel, Jim Nalepka, and Phil Hofman were four friends who decided to take a winter vacation to the island of Tonga. They left on their ship, the Rose Noelle , and hoped for smooth sailing .

On June 4, 1989, three days after they set sail, a massive wave came out of nowhere and hit the ship, flipping it completely upside down and severely damaging it. The crew found themselves trapped in the ship's cabin, which began rapidly filling with water.

They set off a signal beacon in an attempt to get help, but the beacon went unanswered. Alone and trapped in a dark cabin, the crew had to chop a hole in the hull of the ship to escape. Fortunately the Rose Noelle , though now upside down, did not completely sink, and its wreckage served as a twisted vessel on which the men could still float.

A week later, with supplies running out, the signal beacon stopped working, still with no response or rescue. The crew were on their own.

After the ship's water reserves ran out, the crew rigged up a system to collect rainwater and started catching fish for food. They were still adrift, they had food, water, and shelter, so they were in no immediate danger as long as the weather didn't turn.

They drifted in this manner for weeks without rescue. Glennie began diving into the wreckage to recover pieces of the ship they could use. He managed to recover a gas cooker so the four men could have occasional barbecues.

On September 30, 118 days after they were set adrift, the four castaways and the wreckage of the Rose Noelle washed up on a beach in New Zealand. They were extremely lucky. A few months later, the wind and water currents would have taken them in the direction of South America.

Even the location on the beach where they washed ashore was fortunate. A few dozen yards to the left or right were rocky cliffs, and if the ship had landed there, it would have broken apart on the rocks.

Salvador Alvarenga

José Salvador Alvarenga holds the record for the longest solo survival at sea. He was adrift for 438 days, and traveled over 6,700 miles.

Alvarenga is a fisherman, and on November 17, 2012, he set sail from the fishing village of Costa Azul in Mexico. With him was Ezequiel Córdoba, another fisherman, whom Alvarenga had never worked with before.

Shortly after departing the shore, a storm hit their boat. It blew the ship off course, and damaged the motor and most of the electronics onboard. Alvarenga managed to contact his boss on the radio before it died, but he was unable to help.

The storm lasted for five days. When it ended, Alvarenga and Córdoba had no idea where they were or how to get home. The storm had destroyed most of their fishing gear, leaving them with only basic supplies. And with no motor, no sails, and no oars , their boat was adrift.

The two drifted for months, surviving on rainwater and catching sea animals like fish, turtles, and birds. After four months, Córdoba gave up hope. He stopped eating, and starved to death. Alvarenga says he considered giving up too, but persevered.

Even after four months at sea, Alvarenga was not even halfway through his ordeal. He tried signaling every ship he saw, but none of them spotted him. He continued surviving off rainwater and sea animals, and kept track of the time by the phases of the moon.

More than a year after the storm that set him adrift, Alvarenga spotted land. He abandoned his boat and swam for the shore, and found himself on one of the Marshall islands, on the other side of the Pacific from where he started. He was taken to a hospital, where he made a full recovery.

Louis Zamperini

Louis Zamperini first made national headlines in 1938 when he traveled to Berlin to compete in the Olympics. He ran in the 500-meter dash and placed 8th, which is more than enough to earn a spot in the history books. But Zamperini wasn't done yet .

In 1941, just a few months prior to Pearl Harbor, Zamperini enlisted in the United States military. He became a second lieutenant in the Air Force, and when the war began, he was deployed as a bombardier in the Pacific.

In 1943, during a search-and-rescue mission, his bomber suffered a mechanical failure that brought it down. It crashed in the ocean, and eight of the 11 crew members died. The three that survived were Zamperini and his crewmates Russell Allen Phillips and Francis McNamara.

The three crewmates were adrift in the Pacific Ocean, in enemy territory, with no food, water, or supplies. They managed to salvage two rafts from the wreckage of their plane, and collected enough rainwater to survive. They ate small fish and birds.

They drifted like this for weeks. After 33 days, McNamara died, leaving only Phillips and Zamperini. Two weeks later, their rafts washed ashore in the Marshall Islands and the two men were immediately captured by the Japanese.

Zamperini and Phillips were sent to various POW camps, and Zamperini eventually found himself at the Naoetsu camp in Northern Japan. There, he was tortured for two years by infamous prison guard Mutsuhiro Watanabe, one of Japan's most brutal war criminals. When the war finally ended in 1945, Zamperini was released and finally reunited with his family.

Oguri Jukichi

Jukichi was a sailor during Japan's Edo period, about 200 years ago. He was the captain of the freighter Tokujomaru and its crew of 14 men. He was transporting soybeans to the city of Edo, which would become present-day Tokyo, when his ship was caught in a massive storm. The storm damaged the ship's mast and set them adrift .

Very quickly, the crew exhausted their supply of food and water. They began surviving entirely on captured rainwater and the large stores of soybeans in the ship's hold. After several months, members of the crew began suffering from scurvy due to lack of nutrients.

One by one, over months, the crew started dying, while the Tokujomaru drifted further and further from home. After more than a year adrift, only three people were left: the captain Jukichi, and two members of the crew, Otokichi and Hanbe. All three were suffering the effects of scurvy and likely close to death when their ship was discovered off the coast of California in 1815.

The three Japanese sailors became the first people from that country to set foot on American shores. They had drifted over 5,000 miles and were lost at sea for 484 days.

The three sailors returned to Japan after recovering, however Hanbe died during the trip. Upon their return, Jukichi received numerous honors, and was granted a last name, Oguri. Even 200 years later, Jukichi still holds the Guinness World Record for longest time adrift at sea.

The 6 Best First Aid Kits

8 Best Hunting Ground Blinds For Your Next Outing

The 5 Best Rubber Boots We Tested and Recommend

The Best Camp Stoves We Tested and Recommend

The Best Pop-Up Tents We Tried and Loved

Treasure Hunters Discover $200,000 ‘Wish Lamp’

Tested and Reviewed: The Solo Stove Mesa Fire Pit

The 9 Best Yeti Products, According to Our Staff

The Best Gear Totes We Use and Love

Best Camping Deals for Prime Day 2024

Prime Day Yeti Deals 2024

The Best Headlamps for Running, Camping, and More

World News | About 20 migrants — including 3 children —…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Investigative Reporting
• Environment

SUBSCRIBER ONLY

World news | about 20 migrants — including 3 children — reported missing after boat capsized off of italy.

Seven Syrians were rescued and taken to the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, Italian rescuers said.

Subscribe to continue reading this article.

Already subscribed to login in, click here..

• Newsroom Guidelines
• Report an Error

More in World News

National Politics | With charges and sanctions, US takes aim at Russian disinformation ahead of November election

World News | Mother mourns at funeral of son killed as Hamas hostage: ‘Forever my sweet boy’

World News | Netanyahu refuses to budge on war despite protests over hostages

National Politics | China-linked ‘Spamouflage’ network mimics Americans online to sway US political debate

News | Politics

Crossings continue day after 12 migrants die in Channel tragedy

Get our award-winning daily news email featuring exclusive stories, opinion and expert analysis

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice .

More migrants embarked on the perilous Channel crossing a day after 12 people died attempting the journey but 300 made it to UK shores.

A pregnant woman and six children were among those who lost their lives in what is being described as the deadliest Channel crossings tragedy of the year so far when their boat was “ripped apart” and sank off the northern French coast of Cap Gris-Nez on Tuesday.

Dozens of migrants continued to make the journey on Wednesday, with more people pictured being brought ashore in Dover, Kent, amid calm weather conditions at sea.

At the same time, a Calais charity told how around 200 migrants were spotted trying to embark on the crossing from the French coast earlier that morning – but were stopped by police.

Home Office figures show 317 migrants made the journey in five boats on Tuesday, suggesting an average of around 63 people per boat.

This takes the provisional total number of migrants who have arrived in the UK so far this year after crossing the Channel to 21,720 – 3% higher than this time last year (21,086) but 19% lower than at the same point in 2022 (26,692), PA news agency analysis of government data shows.

The latest tally means more than 8,000 arrivals have been recorded since Labour won the general election and Sir Keir Starmer walked into Number 10 (8,146).

Up to 65 people were rescued in Tuesday’s incident, which the Prime Minister branded “shocking and deeply tragic”, telling MPs in the Commons: “We must have a renewed determination to end this.”

His comments came after Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said “vital” efforts to dismantle “dangerous and criminal smuggler gangs” and to boost border security “must proceed apace”.

French interior minister Gerald Darmanin reportedly called for a UK-EU migration treaty to curb crossings in the wake of the tragedy.

But Downing Street rejected this, with a spokesman saying: “We have no plans to be part of an EU scheme on asylum, but we will continue to work with European partners to shut down smuggling routes and smash those criminal gangs.”

A vigil to remember those who died is due to take place in Calais on Wednesday evening.

More than 30 people have now died in Channel crossings so far this year, compared to 12 who are thought to have died or were recorded as missing in 2023, according to the French coastguard.

Politicians and police have expressed fears over how people smugglers are cramming more and more migrants into small boats, increasing the likelihood of fatalities when they risk the dangerous crossing.

Earlier on Wednesday, reporters on a beach in Wimereux – near the site of Tuesday’s incident – described how a large group of migrants were crammed into a small dinghy, many with their legs dangling over the sides.

The boat, filmed by media for more than an hour as it slowly made its journey out to sea as passers-by walking dogs strolled on the beach, is said to have been approached by a patrol boat flying a French flag with a crew member seen tossing more life jackets to the migrants.

Meanwhile, a larger French patrol boat shadowed the dinghy from a distance.

Fishermen who recovered some of the dead on Tuesday said they were moved to tears seeing the bodies of two young women.

Axel Baheu, a crew member of Murex, one of two fishing boats that assisted the French rescue effort, said the body of one young woman – he guessed she was between 15 and 20 – had a telephone in a waterproof pouch around her neck.

It started to ring as he was pulling her out of the water and checking for a pulse, he said.

“That was hard because you know full well that no-one will ever answer,” Mr Baheu said.

We see it every month... every death at the border, the people don’t stop crossing

Angele Vettorello, Utopia 56

Angele Vettorello, from Utopia 56 – which supports displaced and homeless migrants in France, told PA: “The crossings, it’s not going to stop.

“Even this morning we saw more than 200 people trying to cross and have been stopped (by police).

“We see it every month… every death at the border, the people don’t stop crossing.”

She said a lot of police were at the shoreline, with officers intervening overnight and in the morning.

Last week was “really busy” for crossings and there had been a “huge increase” in the number of people dying in the Channel this summer, Ms Vettorello said, adding: “We know a lot of people who were stopped to cross and were back to shore during those seven days.

“We received calls from people in distress in boats in the Channel, we received for example eight calls from eight different boats on Friday.”

The living conditions at the French shore are “really awful” she said, adding: “They just want to be in England.”

Claiming the deaths are “kind of expected because of the politics” amid “repression and securitisation of the coast”, she called for safe passage for migrants trying to reach the UK, adding: “If the politics changes here this could stop.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in