The Man Who Survived 76 Days At Sea Recalls His 2 Month Battle | Fight To Survive S2 EP9 | Wonder

It's every sailor's worst nightmare: their ship was wrecked and they were forced to abandon ship in rough seas. He knew that the ship was doomed to be lost and adrift

fight

ing thirst, hunger and exposure. The chances of survival were basically zero with the sharks circling like vultures going crazy, you're going to die. You're going to die, staying alive becomes an epic

battle

with the mind and the Atlantic in one man's

fight

to

survive

in the wild when things go wrong, they go wrong fast without warning your life may hang by a thread, Adventurer and survivor Craig Dimartino fought back from his own wilderness disaster to get his life back.

Now Craig meets other brave wilderness lovers who beat the odds and come back from their own fight to

survive

. I'm craig dimartino. There are few stories in the history of survival tales as powerful as that of Steve Callahan when he was lost in The sea is not just a fight against the elements, but a fight that takes place in the depths of the human mind. It is a place where loneliness and desperation can become enemies much greater than hunger, thirst or the predators of the depths. Sailors who challenge the ocean. i will tell you they don't really control what happens around them they just adapt to what the sea dictates and how well they adapt decides whether they live or die is a valuable lesson that steve callahan started learning at a young age my boy scout master He had a small boat and he would ask the kids if they wanted to go sailing.

I lay on the boat and looked at the waves, which were about eye level, and I felt like I was in a womb. I really felt at home. steve had a knack for reading waves, wind and currents and how to get a boat to do what he wanted at sea is where he wanted to be. I was probably much more comfortable in nature without man than in society with people sailing. and rock climbing have a bit in common. I think Craig Dimartino talked to Steve about the intangible appeal of the sea. It is a true zen experience.

When you synchronize the boat, you move. the waves and this really dynamic surface and with the wind everything varies all the time and then you are in total contact with what is happening at that moment and the past and the future disappear in terms of importance and you are very, very present, it is a spiritual place for me, it's like I don't know you're going to climb to Yosemite or anywhere like that, with the greatness that you face, it's humbling and it's incredible. Steve became a skilled sailor and boat designer in In 1980 he built the Napoleon Solo, a 21-foot cruiser that responded to light winds and tolerated adverse weather conditions.

Part of the reason for building the Napoleon Solo was to show that you could build a ship that worked well and could be a home, and it wasn't. you know a huge yacht or anything you can be very autonomous and can do this on a relatively limited budget in the fall of 1981, steve and his friend chris sailed alone on the napoleon from bermuda to england the two men successfully crossed the atlantic in Less than two weeks Steve's next trip would be just a trip back across the Atlantic to Antigua Steve thought the trip would be easy it was going to be the milk run across the ocean it blows a lot but it's all from behind or mostly from back so i thought about slipping to the caribbean but steve was wrong on january 29, 1982 steve and napoleon only set sail from the canary islands towards the vast atlantic the first

days

passed without incident but steve was sailing in the middle of a big storm, The wind started to pick up and the waves got bigger so I thought I was in for a bit of a bump, but the boat and I had been through several bumps which soon got worse, the winds became a gale. just below a storm jib, the main was fully furled and the ship was moving at five and six knots through these waves and from time to time a large breaker would hit the side all day and night, the relentless storm lashed his ship, I kept getting up and checking things, making sure everything is okay, trying to be proactive about these things and everything seemed to be okay, like looking at all the seams on the ship and how the bulkheads were and everything seemed to be okay.

Steve did his routine to check the boat. he was holding his ground, he hit his bump to rest and then suddenly there was a disaster, there was a big band inside the boat, a lot of water came in immediately I knew the boat was doomed from like a nanosecond after it happened, Napoleon just crashed against something big and the helmet. The cold, open ocean water quickly flooded the ship with only seconds to react. Steve picked up the survival kit from him. There is a part of me that is crazy. You will die. You will die. And there is a part of me.

You know, slap that guy and just tell him, "Shut up." Let me do my thing, it was dark and I couldn't see and I just left it and started acting according to my training. It had a life raft on the deck. I tried to get the emergency kit out but I couldn't. It wasn't that the ship started to sink. His next decision was not easy. The water was rising like that, so I thought, "Hey, it's doomed. I've got to get out of here and get on the beam. This thing is going to sink and take you down." Seven

days

into his solo transatlantic voyage, Steve Callahan's boat collided hard with something beneath the waves as his boat sank.

He launched his self-inflating life raft into rough seas. A rope tied the raft to the swamp boat once I got on the life raft. I didn't want to leave Napoleon alone until it was absolutely necessary because that bow contained food, water, all kinds of things. The watertight compartments that Steve had built into the Napoleon Solo prevented her from sinking immediately, giving me the opportunity to get back on board and dive and get some really critical gear, especially this emergency bag I still had strapped to the boat. The raft was also in danger of being flooded and these big waves that would come would hit the raft and crash like they were in a car.

Crash every few minutes, just completely collapsing the raft and I was stuck there and water was flying everywhere and I was really worried that the raft was going to break into pieces, but Callahan didn't want to let go. of his boat and lose his best chance of surviving this ordeal. He was going through all these dream scenarios. Well maybe if it lights up I can see where the damage is and maybe I can find a way to repair it and pump it. I take out the boat and continue on my way. You know you never want to leave the boat until you know it's completely doomed, but the rough seas made the decision for him.

Suddenly there was one of those big waves that came and hit the raft and then. It suddenly seemed very peaceful and I looked out and I was walking away from the Napoleon alone in the dark. Callahan watched his boat as the waves pushed it further and further away in a way that was like, oh, now I'm totally at their mercy. of what is going to happen to me, but I already understood it well and the fact is that the raft was being hit so hard by the ocean being tied to the boat that I felt a relief now that he was really alone, tossed from wave to wave in a storm-tossed ocean, that's when I beat myself up for all my failures and all that kind of stuff.

Steve wrote down the date February 5, day one of his new life. The first thing I did was attach everything to the raft. It's vulnerable, you know you lose a little bit of equipment and that's it. Their main priority was food and water. Fortunately, the survival kit had eight cans of fresh water, a can of peanuts. , a bag of dried beans and a box of raisins, so for the moment his immediate needs were taken care of. It really was a very, very difficult moment. I thought, well, how am I going to live here? I don't have enough water, I don't have enough food to even get to the shipping routes, so I thought my chances of survival were basically zero.

Steve Callahan's dream of sailing solo across the Atlantic sank along with his ship. He has now been adrift in the ocean for over a week. Surviving this ordeal would require much more. reserves that its limited supplies I began to adapt the attitude that this is not the end of a voyage, it is a continuation, it is just a slightly more humble vessel, so develop a routine on board, people log exercise, sail, normalize life as much as possible to get through this period of disorientation and fear into a period of adaptation or survival routine, Steve took a careful inventory of everything he managed to salvage from his boat.

Almost all survival experiences in some way try to figure out how to solve problems in an isolated environment with limitations. resources and in a life raft the resources are quite limited, so you get right to the basics of life and what you really need. I had grabbed some medical supplies, spools of line of various diameters and some fishing equipment, it was like you know a 50 foot piece of rope and a small trout hook and I thought maybe I would catch some bait fish or something with this, but it was pretty useless. The most valuable thing was a stock of signal flares.

He had a whole arsenal of very good types of flares, parachute flares that go up, blow up a small parachute that hangs in the air for a long time, plus he had meteor flares that went up and down much faster and then he put flares in his hand , so the idea is that you send the parachutes first if anyone sees them coming towards you and then make the hand flares, also in the kit, it was a last minute addition that he had bought just before starting his trip, a small short spear that I bought in the canary islands, I thought this might be useful when I get to the Caribbean maybe do a little spearfishing, but in reality it was almost a toy.

It also had an emergency radio transmitter that sends an emergency signal and they were being monitored by a plane, but a plane had to do it. Being about 250 miles away from you or no one would hear you, it would only transmit a signal for as long as its battery lasted, it was a long shot for any plane to pass over that empty part of the ocean, however, the most critical piece of survival equipment was decidedly the more technological, a salt water distillation still, is like a small environment where you can pour sea water from above and it drips inside into this black cloth, the idea of ​​which is that the sun comes out and evaporates the fresh water from the salt and it accumulates inside this balloon and it rains inside in a small collection bag without fresh water steve would die after many failed and frustrating attempts steve got the still working and it started producing a few ounces of fresh water just when his supply of cans sold out.

I had eight pints to start with, which was a good start and that gave me a window of opportunity to get the solar piles going and then they would produce maybe a pint and a half of pine a day on a good day. Other small, easily overlooked items also came in handy for Steve. One of the most important things he had were these little pads of paper and pencils from the dime store because that would allow me to keep track and that was really important to me from a pragmatic standpoint. Level in terms of making navigation notes and stuff, knowing when, oh, now I'm going through a navigation route.

You should keep a better eye on the boats and the psychological element that this is a continuation of a journey. I'm still in command of a small boat. I'll keep a record and I'll be able to get out of all the pain and frustration and all that and I'll be able to look at things almost like a third person is looking at me and that was very important. Behind the raft was a tall marker. buoy rescued from the ship tied by a rope the buoy was there to help potential rescuers spot the raft as it moved with the current towards the west with a few yellow pencils steve made a rudimentary sextant during the day he estimated its latitude and with the night stars, he plotted his course, the line behind him was basically a 70 foot piece of line, so I made a little speed distance chart like a little speedometer and I could time the seaweed or something floating, he knew his approximate speed and his current location and approximately how far he was from the nearest islands in the Caribbean, so Steve did the math to figure out how long he had to drift before making landfall.

Arithmetic dealt a sobering blow, a number that no one adrift alone had endured before. steve callahan was on a solo transatlantic voyage when he was forced to abandon ship in the middle of the ocean the good news for steve was that after almost two weeks in the atlantic he was heading towards the caribbean islands the bad news at his speed current It would take two

month

s to get there. He looked like he was 30 years old and what have I done right? I made some drawings, designed a couple of boats and died. You know, it was really miraculously quite bleak.

He saw a cargo ship in thedistance, he was quick to fire some flares and the ship passed quickly and was close enough, I could smell the diesel in the air, the ship disappeared over the horizon and I was quite upset. Large fish began to swim next to the raft and accompany it, these were dorados, aquamarine fish with a square head and three feet long with yellow tails, they are popularly known as mahi-mahi. Steve pointed the rifle. He could hit one, but not hard enough. that it wouldn't pierce the fish and within about 24 hours they knew exactly what the range of my spear was and they would be swimming just outside that range, the big 30 to 40 pound fish would dart near the raft and I would often intentionally hit the raft, nails big ones that are very bony and have square heads, they would hit her pretty hard.

In fact, when I was lying inside I had to make sure my head was positioned like a gear bag or something because otherwise it would be like someone coming up and just hitting me, Steve leaned over the raft for hours with the harpoon ready waiting for an unsuspecting fish. He gave her fresh food for the first time in weeks when I caught the first fish, suddenly the other fish that were there. I got into this kind of frenzy and they kept hitting the bottom of the round, it just smells. Max Max Max Mac wouldn't let me rest or anything and I felt like I was trapped in that Alfred Hitchcock kind of thing, it was me.

I'm on the fish and the fish will eventually destroy the raft and eat me and that went on for quite a while. Steve cut the fish meat into strips about one inch thick and six inches long. He made a hole in the strip and hung it. He tied a rope in the corner of the raft, he called this area a butcher shop and I started eating it and it was like, oh man, this is good, one fish gave enough food for three or four days, the days turned into weeks, the routine turned into weeks. Steve's board kept his mind on the task at hand, survival along with his still, collected rainwater, a constant supply of fish and even an occasional bird kept his body nourished, but there were always present dangers from the elements and the sea. that could take your life at any moment. worried about the sharks, I wasn't so worried about them jumping out and dragging me off the raft or something, but I knew they could be pretty aggressive, I was like asleep and suddenly at the bottom of the raft it was this flap flap flap flap and it was a dorado and then boom the whole raft was like thrown from the surface of the water and it was a shark chasing the dorado that was under the wrapper I had my heart in my mouth and the whole time and I grabbed the harpoon and kept aiming at it finally i took a couple of good hits and any challenge he faced disappeared steve never let go of his life preserver his daily routine there were always jobs to do and i was concentrating on doing jobs while trying to conserve energy and have some kind of balance there and then finally nightfall came and I fished and finished the day in his little notebooks Steve counted the monotonous passing of the days everything was going as well as could be expected until March 19, day 43 of this epic survival journey, Steve had harpooned a dorado, the The fish broke away and with the tip of the spear through its side, it rammed the raft and opened a four-inch gash in the raft just below the water line.

The raft began to deflate on the 43rd when the dorado broke in the tube. and that was the lowest point. I wasn't going to lose any more strength physically, emotionally and mentally and it was clear that you know this was all in vain. I just spent the last

month

and a half or whatever fighting and I'm not going to be able to go back and fix anything and I'm going to die here and all my past sins will remain and I can't do it. anything about it the withering raft made it impossible to keep the fresh water running and it was increasingly difficult to catch and slaughter fish in the deflated raft if it couldn't cover the huge hole the consequences were dire the raft would collapse and send steve to the bottom of the Ocean, Steve knew that an answer had to be within his reach somewhere among the remains of the equipment he kept on the raft.

His life depended on finding a solution, discover how in the next fight to survive.