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Chapter 1: What does it feel like to face the vastness of the ocean?
There's a particular kind of terror that comes with vastness. Of course, not the claustrophobic fear of walls closing in, but the complete opposite. The sickening realisation that there are in fact no walls at all. Just endless, indifferent space in every direction.
We can talk about feeling small in the world, standing at the edge of, say, a canyon or looking up at the night sky scattered with stars. But most of us will never truly comprehend what it means to be genuinely, catastrophically alone in an environment that simply doesn't care whether you live or die. The ocean is deceptive. From shore, it's beautiful, romantic even. But out there...
Past the side of land, past the shipping lanes, past any hope of stumbling upon help, the Pacific becomes something else entirely. Not an adventure, not a challenge to overcome. Just pure mathematics. You, a tiny speck of flesh and bone adrift in millions upon millions of square miles of water.
He's actually telling me to abandon ship Al. I couldn't take it in, you know. And I thought, no, no, no, no, this is a dream.
And the questions that follow aren't philosophical. They're brutally practical. How long can a human survive without fresh water? What happens when the body starts to shut down? How far are you willing to go? What lines are you willing to cross? When survival stops being hopeful and starts being desperate. For the Robinson family, those questions were no longer hypothetical.
Dougal appeared on the deck and said, what are you doing? I said, I'm taking the sails down. And he said, get the life raft over the side.
The Lucette was going down. Five of them, one small life raft and a dinghy. And an expansive ocean so enormous that its surface area is larger than the total land area of all continents and islands combined. Meaning quite simply, all land could fit inside the Pacific Ocean with room to spare.
moon in the sky i'm looking at the moon in the sky it shouldn't come as a surprise but i can't sleep war in my mind i'm trying to fight a war in my mind i don't know who's the winner tonight but yeah
Chapter 6. Dougal. Are we going to die?
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Chapter 2: How did the Robertsons prepare for survival after the shipwreck?
I was giving them an arm up. And then my dad or my mom said, come on, Douglas, get on board. And I remember getting into the raft and seeing everybody was sitting there orange. you know, from the canopy of the raft. They were just like an orange colour. And I just thought to myself, I can't believe this.
I can't believe we're here now and I'm looking at this scene and I just don't know where we're going to go from here. you know, to me it seemed impossible that we would survive the day, let alone what was to come.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest ocean on Earth. It covers more than one-third of the planet and contains some of the most remote stretches of water anywhere. In many parts of the Pacific, the distance to the nearest land can be measured in thousands of kilometres. For people stranded on its surface, survival is never a given. In fact, it's almost impossible.
Even when a disappearance is noticed, search and rescue efforts face enormous limitations. Aircraft can only scan narrow corridors. Ships can pass within a few miles and never even see anything. A life raft or small boat sits low in the water and blends almost completely into the surrounding sea. In the 1970s, the odds were even worse.
There were no satellite beacons transmitting precise locations, no real-time tracking. Searches relied on estimates, weather patterns and currents that could move people far from their last known position in a matter of hours.
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Chapter 3: What practical survival questions did the family face at sea?
Once adrift, there is no control over direction or speed. You go where the ocean takes you. And for the Robinson family, that meant facing a night, and far more than a night, in one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth. with no certainty that anyone would ever find them. However, Douglas says it wasn't all doom and gloom.
There were some good looks in this. Dougal had tied the dinghy that was sunk to the raft. So we had the raft and the dinghy. I had managed the handle where they tied to Lucette had come away from the coach roof. So the dinghy, the raft had started to blow away from the wreckage, but the dinghy was now holding it back.
So the dinghy full of water was acting as a sea anchor and keeping the raft on the wreck site. And that enabled us to collect some things. My mother's sewing basket, a sail, the genoa sail. In my mum's sewing basket was a load of treasures, you know, that would be very useful to us in the days and weeks ahead, you know. It gave us time.
And if you go from when the whale struck to when we were sitting in the raft, looking at each other, I think about 15 minutes had gone past. But the Lucette herself had stayed upright and afloat for two minutes. Lucette went straight to the bottom. You know, that was our home. That was our adventure. That was our life. All our economic wealth was tied up in another set. And that was gone.
We were very, very sad. Very sad, unhappy. And this was going to take some getting over. If we were going to survive, we had no idea what the next step was going to be.
Well, I mean, I'd imagine just those next few hours would have been just, I don't know, was anyone even talking?
Well, we were talking because only me and Sandy had seen the killer whales. We were recounting to the others what had happened. And we were exploring the raft. I mean, you know, if you've never been in a raft, it's quite a strange experience. There was a booklet, a survival manual that was sent.
There was an inventory of things in the raft, sugar tablets, glucose sugar tablets, 45 bread, 18 cans of water. There was a heliograph. There was some other things in the raft itself. But nobody was talking about the elephant in the room. Nobody. We were all very frightened because we were worried about the killer whales coming back to get us.
We thought that, you know, they've hit us and they, Lucette, how can we be safe here? And there was a lot of trepidation while we were waiting for them to come back and reappear, but they didn't. It was my mum that asked the question, Dougal, are we going to die? Dougal had to come up with an answer for that question.
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Chapter 4: How did the family adapt their survival strategies in the life raft?
Their father, Dougal, considered the option to row back towards the Galapagos Islands. The issue was they couldn't see them. They were over 200 miles away from them, upwind and up current. And the current was definitely their biggest challenge.
We would have to do two knots just to stay still, 50 miles a day just to stay still. And to make some headway, we'd have to do four knots. That's 100 miles a day. I would have to row that. We'd have to separate the raft from the dinghy. And, you know, but it was still there at the moment. And then I said, Luke, Dad, you know, we need water. Water is the key to this survival.
We need to get water from somewhere. And the doldrums contain water. It rains heavily in the doldrums. We know that because we've just come through the doldrums not a month before, and it rained very heavily. If we sail to the doldrums, we can get more water. And with more water, we can make another plan.
Freshwater is the first thing that determines whether you live or die at sea. A person can survive weeks without food, but only days without water. In the heat of the Pacific, dehydration can set in quickly, weakening judgment and accelerating exhaustion. The Robinson family knew that if they were going to survive, they needed a reliable way to collect rain. And that meant reaching the doldrums.
more formally known as the intertropical convergence zone, sits near the equator, where the trade winds from the northern and southern hemispheres meet. Instead of a steady breeze, this region is characterised by still air, oppressive heat and frequent heavy rainfall. Warm, moist air rises constantly here, forming towering storm clouds that can release sudden downpours.
For sailors, the doldrums are infamous. Ships can sit motionless for days. The sun can be brutal and then, without warning, rain can fall in sheets. For most mariners, it's a place to avoid. However, for the Robinson family, it could be a lifeline. By moving toward the doldrums, they weren't chasing wind or progress, they were chasing water.
The single resource that would decide whether they could endure what lay ahead. However, it wouldn't be the only discussion around survival that the family would have.
Whilst we were discussing this, we hadn't reached a conclusion yet about what we would do. We discussed other things about survival and about food and about water and about tools that we had. And I always remember a flying fish jumped out of the sea And the frigate bird swooped down and picked it out of the air and flew off with it, as if to take the piss out of us, you know.
Look what I can do, you know. And I looked at that frigate bird and I said to my dad, they've got millions of years on us, dad. They've got millions of years on us. And Dougal said, yes, Douglas, but we have tools and we have brains. And with those brains and those tools, we can bridge that gap. We will learn how to catch fish. And I just thought that is so far away. There's not a chance.
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of the promises made by Dougal Robertson?
And I'll tell you what they were. The promises were, it was Dougal who made these promises. He said that whatever happens, we will not eat each other. I will not stop trying to get us home, get us to land. And I will not stop looking for a rescue ship to pick us up. So with those three promises as the foundation for our new future, we came up with a plan, an absurd plan.
And the plan started with Douglas doing something he had never done before. And that was to stand up to his father and tell him no.
My dad was a very tough character, very hard, hard man. And he asked me outright, Douglas, will you take the dinghy and row to the Galapagos Islands and raise the alarm? And I said to him, Dad, where are the Galapagos Islands? I can't see them. Over there, go that way, and I'd be rowing backwards at four knots. Four knots, Dad. I would need all the water that we have got in order to.
He says, you can take half the water and half the rations, and it will rain. I said, Dad, no. No, Dad. I'm not going to do that. I'd rather die here with you than us all die alone. I'm not going to do it. And do you know what? That was the first time I'd ever stood up to him. I was 18 and a half. I was a man already, you know. But he was a very tough, tough character. And Dougal melted.
He said, I'm sorry, son. I should never have asked. It was a fool's mission, you know. I should not have asked. But what does that leave us? That only leaves us one option left, to sail to the center of the Pacific Ocean, pick up rain, It wouldn't get there in 10 days. We've got a 10-day supply of water. We can get to the doldrums, and we can catch the countercurrent back.
So the current flows in a westerly direction across the Pacific at the equator. But much like the bath, when you're in the bath and you push all the water to the end of the bath, it flows back. It finds a route and flows back down to the other end of the bath. And the Pacific Ocean does exactly the same.
It shoves all the water off westerly, and it mounts up, and then it flows back down through the doldrums in what's called the countercurrent. The countercurrent is one and a half knots. That's 30, 40 miles a day. He says, we'll catch that, and with the help of the sail, we might make 100 miles a day back to the east.
So we'll sail through the doldrums, collect water, and sail east until we hit the American coast. So suddenly we had a plan. We hung everything on that plan. This plan had to work. And so we're in business in lots of ways. By the end of the second day when we'd finally made this resolution, we had a plan and we felt much better about that. My mum summed it up.
She said, Dougal, we would rather die trying than sit here and wait for death to come. So we made these huge decisions that, you know, a family shouldn't have to make. And, you know, we got down to the business of survival.
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Chapter 6: How did the family cope with the psychological challenges of isolation?
They were bailing, we were bailing all the time. blowing the raft up by mouth because it kept deflating, non-stop, non-stop bailing, non-stop blowing. And we were looking for a rescue ship that was not to be found, you know, scanning the horizon and gradually coming to terms with what had happened and what we had to do to get home.
There must have been so many occasions during that plan that people probably threw their hands in there and said, this is pointless. We're not going to make this.
Yeah. I mean, I felt that every minute of every day. Yeah. You know, this was a fight against the odds. I used to watch the sun go down at night. and wonder if we'd still be around in the morning to see it. Because the nights were worse, you know. You couldn't see where the weather was coming from. It was more difficult to manage things in the darkness.
Another day would come and suddenly a week's gone by. It actually rained on the sixth day as well. The first rain that we got, we managed to save some water, you know, and replenish our water stocks. We'd had a flying fish jump into the dinghy. I'd bailed the dinghy out. We started towing the raft with the dinghy. We'd made a sail out of that generous sail that I'd caught.
And with that, we had a little Operation Go, a towed boat, we had a raft, and we were sailing towards the north to the doldrums where water was. We were carefully consuming our water with sips only. It wasn't rationed, it was self-rationed, which was even worse, you know. As much as you want, but as little as you need. Please be careful with the water. We would take just a sip of water.
We would just have a little tiny bit of food, a little bit of fish, that had jumped in, the flying fish, between six of us. And slowly we made our way to the north. We thought we were headed to the north at about 25, 30 miles a day. We thought we were making about 30 miles a day. And the water would last until we got to the doldrums. Just. It would just last.
So there was a big gamble on that, of course, because if it didn't rain in the doldrums, then we were stuck. That would be the end. So we had lots of fears and certainty and doubt. We had whales visit us on the raft and swim round us. They scared the hell out of us, you know. I bet. We had sharks. They weren't as scary as the whales. We had sharks in constant attendance.
But we did also get visits from turtles. And I remember telling my dad I'd read in a book somewhere that you could eat turtles. I didn't tell him it was a, it was a novel written by Alistair McLean called South by Java head. It was a fictional novel. You know, I didn't mention that, but I just said, and a bit of fake news, you know, and that we did eventually learn how to kill these turtles.
We took us the third one and we found that they had red meat in them. They had blood. We could drink their blood. I'll tell you, we became experts. In our environment, we learned how to catch fish. We were catching fish. We were catching those big Dorado sports fish.
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Chapter 7: What role did rainwater collection play in their survival?
We can't go anywhere else. We've just got to wait here for the rain. Anyway, on the third day of waiting there, it rained heavily and we were so grateful. We were so happy. You know, I mean, everybody else would have been saying, oh, no, it's raining.
It was a gift from the gods.
It was a gift from the gods. We tucked all our water cans up and bottles. We just looked up into the sky with our mouths open and let the rain rain into our mouths, you know. And it was fantastic. But then we lost the raft. The raft sank under us. It was falling apart anyway from the biting, constant biting of the fish from underneath. And the fact that bellows, the inflation bellows had broken.
And I was having to blow it up by mouth. And that constant blowing, I just couldn't keep it inflated. We all took turns. My mum took turns. The twins took turns. My dad did a bit of it. Robin did a bit of it. And we tried to keep the raft afloat, but we couldn't. and it just gradually deteriorated.
And we were so wet, we were up to our chests in water inside the raft, because our bodies displaced their own weight in water. So we were cold, we were wet, we were miserable, we were covered in seawater boils, we had the inflammation of foot. It's like when you get in the bath for a long period of time, you get that crossword effect on your hands and feet. It's like that on steroids, you know.
It cuts the blood supply off to your hands and feet. And they go cold, you know, and you can't move them. And that's because you're constantly immersed in water. And the life on the raft was miserable. And on the 17th day, we made this decision that we would leave the raft and go on the dinghy alone. And that was full of risk because if the dinghy sank, we couldn't get back on it.
And, you know, if it was swamped by a wave or something like that, and we were open, We had no protection. We had a canopy that protected us in the raft. But we made this big decision to leave the raft and go alone on the dinghy. And so for the majority of the trip, we were on the dinghy and we sailed 750 miles on that dinghy and raft.
We sailed 300 miles to the Dahlgrens and we sailed 450 miles to the east. And unbeknown to us, although we had a rough idea where we were, we were only seven days off the coast of America when we got picked up. You know, we would have made it, but you never know. Death hung on every wave. Never knew whether you were going to make it, you know, for sure.
When the nighttime came, would you still be here in the morning? We just didn't know. We had invented this kitchen, this cafe that we would open when we got home. And it gave us the excuse to talk about food. And we talked about food constantly. You know, real survivors, real survivors talk about food all the time. Pretend survivors think about camps and fires and...
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Chapter 8: How did the Robertsons finally get rescued after 38 days at sea?
It's easier to adjust the trim of a dinghy or a boat from the bow than from the stern. You've got much more response from the bow, you know. So I sat in the bow and I shifted my weight as Dougal shifted his weight and he hung on to the mast and he lit the flare my mum had handed up to him. And he couldn't hold it. It was so hot. And he threw the flare out of the ocean.
And it was that arc of light that the Japanese fishermen had seen. And they altered course towards us, but not at us. And then they altered course. When it seemed like they were about to sail past us, they altered course straight towards us. And Dougal flopped down on the thwart and he said, Our ordeal is over. Our ordeal is over. We knew, we knew we were going to be rescued. And, you know,
That Japanese fishing boat stopped. It came alongside us and stopped. They looked at us sitting in that raft like a bundle of fragile humanity clinging to life, like barely alive really. I mean, we thought we were doing all right. We didn't realize how much weight we'd lost or how decrepit we looked. You know, we had no idea that we were covered in blood and turtle blood and fat.
And we were naked and, you know, they looked upon us and one of them threw a heaving line across to us. A dirty, oily heaving line. And I grabbed it with my hands and hung on to it. And I knew that this rope, dirty, oily, smelly, though it was, was not from our world. It was from another world. And that this was our link back to humanity. This rope was going to save our lives. And I hung on.
And another rope came across and Dougal caught that in the aft end of the boat.
It was before dawn this morning when the Tokaburu birthed at the quayside in the Panamanian port of Balboa. The Robertson family were finally back to safety after one of the most harrowing ordeals in the annals of the sea. The family were picked up from this dinghy by the Tokaburu on Saturday. Incredibly, they survived for five weeks on water they'd recovered, supplemented by turtles and fish.
Before we knew it, we were alongside, all out of the dinghy. And Dougal asked them to save the dinghy. Don't sink the dinghy, he said. And they said, why not? You're finished with it, you know. And Dougal's response was just typified the way that we thought. He said, all our food and water's on the dinghy. And that was so precious to us. And the captain said, we have food.
We've got some for you.
And the dinghy was saved. And in fact, it now sits as a relic in the Maritime Museum in the UK.
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