I Drank Turtle Blood & Ate Sharks To Survive: A Real Castaway Story | Extraordinary Lives |@LADbible

sitting on the raft, looking very yellow because it has a canopy over it, yes, it's made of yellow material and my mom says let's say the Lord's Prayer and my dad said I don't believe in God and I'm not going to say the laws brother and I told Dougal I said dad, you know we might need God

real

soon, why not? just say the Lord's Prayer, you don't have to mean it and he said Douglas, if there was a god, don't you think he'd know I didn't mean it and it wouldn't count anyway? And I just remember that moment because I thought what a tough man, you know his life is on the line here and he still won't give up, it's been two minutes, that's all, but it seemed like a lifetime and we looked at each other and We looked out to see the whales.

He was gone and we searched for a ship that was never going to be found, I mean we were in a very, very desolate part of the ocean and my dad had always been our leader, we asked him if we were going to die and we did the search. to his family and he thought that they don't deserve to be lied to right now they deserve the truth and somehow I have to tell them that we are all going to die there is no hope we didn't receive an SOS we had no food or water I managed to save two vital things while I was fixing the raft and that was the generous sale and my mother's sewing kit, what is a general sale, it is a sale of the light that had been on the deck and was simply washed over the side and is part of the Flotsam, if you wish , in the water and I managed to get that and get a minimal sewing basket.

My mother's sewing box was full of trinkets and things that were invaluable to us, like a pair of scissors, a piece of copper wire. of thread, these are invaluable to the Castaways, you know, although in a sewing box that you look at, you wouldn't even

real

ize we're there, you know, and um Dougal was preparing us to tell us that this was something very serious that had happened to us. and that we probably won't make it and he began to summarize what had happened, he says that we were 200 miles west of Cape Espinoza, we were hit by an orca that he said sank in less than two minutes. or two minutes or so, it's Dale, it was daylight, thank God, so we were all able to get off the boat, you know, citizen, we got to the raft and we have, we have some water, there were 10 cans of water, maybe maybe maybe. 18 cans of water so several cans of water there are some rations for 10 days from there come the 10, it is enough for 10 days but we are in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where we are downwind and downwind of the Galapagos Islands.

We would have to sail a hundred miles a day just to stay still if we were going to sail back to the Galapagos Islands, so we can't go back to the Galapagos, of course, I'm 18 and a half years old and I know everything I said. dead doogle it is clear to me that there is only one solution, we know that stagnation reigns strongly and one of the things that occurred to me with my famous saying is that you can live 30 days without food and three days without water and 30 seconds without air I don't know why I added that but it seemed to rhyme what water we need without water we are going to die and it rains in the stagnation why don't we sail towards the stagnation?

We have the raft, we have the boat that will keep us afloat as long as we can get water. We should be able to do it in 30 days. We should be able to reach land in 30 days. Can you explain what the crisis is? The trade winds blow throughout the year with different intensities depending on the seasons and they are the ones that go around the world and on each side of the equator, so the trade winds blow towards the equator from the south and from the north, but because the Earth spins, so if you can imagine that the air is trying to fill that Shock here and the Earth is spinning, it makes the wind spin that way so you understand, let me get this right, the southwest trade winds in the south and the northeast trade winds in the north of the equator and of course the stagnation is like the meteorological equator - it just moves up and down as the trade winds move, so the two heirs meet and rise and they create huge thunderstorms as massive as you would never believe this is the the clouds go up to the stratosphere and it rains a lot so we should go there to collect rain, collect water and then Douglas suddenly discovered that while he was explaining to us why we were going to die, the conversation changed to how we could

survive

, okay? a sort of assessment of what we had, not what we didn't have, when we got enough water, we had the oars for the American coast.

Wow, suddenly we had a plan and without a plan you can't

survive

, you have to do it. I have a plan and then Dougal found himself explaining to us how we could survive instead of how we could die and he said this was a turning point for him, he realized that and we looked up, you know, the flame fish, they're Flying fish. In the tropics we fish with very small and large fins to help them fly so when a predator comes they jump out of the sea and fly about 100 feet and then basically run away but frigate birds fly in the sky above and when they see one of these flying fish jump out of the sea, they dive down and just pick it up and eat it, bust its butt right there and this happened in front of us, Dougal and I were discussing this plan and, uh, a frigate.

The bird came down and just grabbed this fried fish like mocking, you know, look what I can do, you know, useless human beings, you don't stand a chance and I told my dad. I told him they are millions of years old. We and Google said yes, Douglas, but we have brains and with brains we can make tools and with tools we can survive well survive hard work survival is hard work, very hard work first of all we had the raft and the boat together and we tied them with the cable of that generous corridor that had just saved we um we did uh we were visited during the night by flying fish we jumped into the boat we uh a Dorado a big dolphin sport fish we jumped into the boat one night wow and we got that and it you killed, you know, raw, I just ate it, oh yeah, yeah, so what are you doing, you didn't have knives, so how did you not break it?

Wow, yeah, I'll tell you what human man, humanity, just beneath the surface of civilization, there are thousands of years of skills that we've forgotten, you don't need them living in London, do you, but you don't know you have them until you You end up in a situation like that and suddenly you know what we got. Turtles. I caught the. The first

turtle

that showed up had a piece of everything and I hit it on the top of the head and its eyes filled with

blood

and it swam away and I remember telling Madonna, she said Dad, you know we have to hunt, no. catch them these animals do not want to give their

lives

they will fight until the end we have to catch them, hunt them and kill them if we are going to eat them and we agreed that we had to be many More intelligent the next one appeared and I thought: "Well, I'll get him out of the water, he won't be able to get away swimming then, so I lifted it straight out of the water and then I didn't realize it had gotten sharp, those fins." They have on the back they're boney and sharp as a razor wow and now all of a sudden it's cutting my hands like that, you know, and I threw it on the raft, which was the last place I should have thrown it, right now it's flapping around inside. the inflatable raft and the doodles are like that and everyone jumps thinking, you know, and Google picks up this

turtle

and throws it out the front, so the turtle is gone and we're back to square one again, you know?

We weren't very smart about this. You know, the third turtle showed up and there was some kind of safety line with a Coit on the end to throw it at the people who were close to the left to attract them. and I tied it in that and then so that it couldn't move its fins and couldn't escape and Google went to the boat that was towing us and I passed him the end of the rope and he pulled the turtle. We turned around and took the turtle on board and we had a knife, a kitchen knife.

I don't know how he got to the bottom of the boat, but he was there and he scribbled the cut on the turtle's throat and bright red

blood

gushed out of it. and he had read a fictional

story

by Aleister McLean called Java Head Going South where these people had survived in a lifeboat and they

drank

turtle blood and I said Dad, I think you can drink turtle blood. I mean, it was a novel, right? He tried it and

drank

some turtle blood and realized that it wasn't salty and that he could drink that and maybe live off it, so we thought it was a very high protein food source and um.

The turtles had red meat like a steak, we thought we could dry this meat and store it, so the turtles became our mainstay and when they were there, we realized later that mating was a mating instinct that the turtles brought to us, so what happens? They must be found. in the deep sea and we mated and then we actually witnessed this and that's it, they were gone, so if we had two turtles nearby, say a male and us, and then a female appeared, they would mate and they would go to the right, so we realized that we had to catch the males and the females, but the first one we caught was a female and in her there were eggs, egg yolks, hundreds of them like grapes like Clusters of grapes, how did you know which pieces you could eat? hungry you have instinct right you have instinct we knew that the liver of the turtle was poisonous how did you read that you never read it correctly you just looked at it you knew you couldn't eat it properly while the liver of the shark, you could eat it and you come home and discover that the liver of the turtle is poisonous and the shark's delivery is healthy, you know that, but you have this innate ability and you know that you touch it in a situation like this. and I've read other great survival stories where people have had the same experience and realize what you can and can't do.

I guess it's a bit like being in a forest and seeing red berries and you get this. sense red berries are dangerous somewhere inside the soft red berries no, don't eat that you know you have there's an alarm going off you know and we ate some lemons and we ate some we had lemon water my mom had put a I see a bag of lemons and a bag of onions, would you believe in a boat at the time of the shipwreck, but how is it so? The way you're describing it is incredible and it sounds like some kind of Adventure, but was there still one? feeling of impending doom, yes, absolutely, yes, absolutely, and the younger kids, the twins, I think they were immune to that too young, I think they were too young and they thought well, I don't know why we're doing this, but yeah my mom and dad are doing it, so we better do it and it was 12 or 13.

Yeah, yeah, maybe Sandy thought a little bit that maybe it was a little unusual to be doing this kind of thing, you know? But no one shouted that we are. We're going to die, we're going to no, no, it was all, let's just make it that we made a deal, we made a deal with each other early that first day, that no matter what happened, we wouldn't eat each other and die, wow. You said that out loud, yeah, because what's called the custom of the sea is that, oh yeah, the customer, can you tell us about that?

Well, I mean, The City Client is banned now, yes, but there is a book called The Sea Client. a very good read on the last case of cannibalism at sea, where it was accepted until that decision which is around 1870, something like that until maybe until 1800, mid 1800s, where straws were drawn to see who would eat the one who drew shorts. draw was the person who would be eating and was accepted as the customer of the sea so that others could live so that others could live and um they um they them on the Great Ships the crew were even in groups of passengers, the first female passengers before Male passengers then semen Sailors then ship officers apprentices Cadets first chief officer last Captain did not participate in that that was the sea customer and you know, we thought about the sea customer and decided because Robin, of course, was not a member of the family and We assured Him that we would die together.

Do you think he was in this together? Yeah, I think he was very, he thought you could eat him, he thought we could hit him and he was very happy to hear us say that we told him no, you are. one of us, you're one of our family and we'll treat you like that and we'll die together if that's what's going to happen, you know, we made that promise to each other too and you know these are weird conversations. Don't you know when things like that happen? You have to discuss those things to know where you stand.

Google was going to tell us that we were all going to die, but he ended up telling us that we were all going to live. We were discussing how we were going to live Robin thought we were going to eat it secretly and we assured him that we weren't going to do that and we were honest we were honest that if this is this this is it and uh and what was the The temperature was very hot, it was tropical , so 37 degrees, that's all the time, but at night it was like that, but it was still hot, but it was cooler, but in those thunderstorms in the stagnation it was bloody cold and we were shivering as we were so you came to the stagnation we reachBack on the deck of the tokamaru and we were looking out to sea.

We were safe now going to Panama City, but we missed it. and this is the irony of this we were masters of our destiny we had survived 38 days on that raft and in the boat and raft combination we had caught Turtles we had caught Dorado we had caught a shark we had even caught rainwater so we innovated, we innovated and we survived and we looked back at the Pacific Sea and we missed it because our Lives had value every day verified every day because we were still alive that was a simple measure and we never thought I would survive another night as we watched the darkness the sun set the night was more dangerous than the day and we wondered if we would ever see the sun rise again Douglas is an absolutely incredible

story

and you tell it incredibly and it is just fascinating I can hear there is like a pin in this room.

I can hear everyone is absolutely wrapped up in this, but unfortunately we're out of time. What I do want to tell you is that thank you very much for coming here and talking. For us, it's an incredible story of Hope and you know the kind of indomitable will to push for diversity. Thank you very much for your time, yes, thank you and it is a pleasure to share it. There are times when I have had chills. my back and how the hell that happened, how I walked away from that someone, your distance from me trying to blow my head out of a fog with Six Bullets, that happened, yes, God, and I wonder how I'm going to make this day I do not know yet