Adrift – A True Holiday Story Of Hope And Survival At Sea

Many of us are guilty of it; doing something dumb early in life to impress a girl. In this way the three South Pacific teens are no different from the average sailor, but the rest of their story is a bit more harrowing.  A local news website tells us:

It was a great story before, but now it’s just epic: The three Pacific Island teenagers who were rescued after being lost at sea for 50 days had been on the trail of a cute girl. It seems she had caught their eye while visiting their island for a sports tournament. After she returned to her own island about 100 miles away, the boys—ages 14, 15, and 15—decided to steal a small boat that night and follow. Crucially: Beer was involved in their decision-making.

The teens eventually became disorientated and went hopelessly adrift, managing to survive on 20 coconuts they brought along, along with rainwater, fish, and a seagull. They were being examined today in Fiji after their rescue by a fishing boat but appeared to be in relatively good shape. “You should have seen the village,” one of the boy’s uncles tells CNN. “Everybody was crying.” Monsters and Critics has more details on their hunt for the girl.

There are many more details to this story still emerging including the capture of seagulls and floating coconuts but none of them are consistant. Soe we will have to wait for the full details but for those interested I suggest you run out and purchase the New York Times bestselling book Adrift: Seventy Six Days Lost at Sea – By Steven Callahan to get an idea of what these boys experienced.

The book itself is a bit dated, Callahan was lost at sea in 1981, but is an accurate protrayal of the grity details of life and survival aboard a small liferaft. And its a book that every mariner should read before he finds himself in alone at sea.

Stay tuned as gCaptain seperates fact from fiction and continues coverage of this amazing story.

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