Im sure everyone has seen that they found 2 women that were lost for 6 months at sea during a trans Pacific trip. They were stranded when their engine quit during a storm. So they drifted helplessly around the Pacific for over 5000 miles and 6 months. The problem I seen is its an ocean going SAILBOAT. All the pictures show the boat with intact sails folded up. Why not just put up the sails and go about their day...sailboats dont require an engine. Columbus did it 500 years ago. Some report that the sail mast was jammed. Im guessing that means some motor pulled the top of the sail up the mast. If I was there and going to die, and been there for 6 months, im sure I could have figured out a way to pull it up by hand. They have lots of rope and all ive seen have hand cranked winches somewhere on board.
I'll let those folks that are sailors comment on this.
Sailing is not something I enjoy. My BIL has a 38 foot sail boat he's constantly trying to get me to go out on it with him. Did it once. Not my cup of tea. I think he asks me to come along so we can use one of my trucks to put it in and take it out of the water. Damn thing is huge and heavy. It only comes out of the water once a year and then back, normally for maintenance issues.
I don't mind assisting him in that but, I don't need the joy ride.
[This message has been edited by blackrams (edited 10-30-2017).]
They tried to sail but they got lost. I don't know how they got lost. That means they had no GPS, no watch and no sextant. It also means they probably would have gotten lost even with their engine working.
No engine=no electric power after the batteries died. Few people today have a good knowledge or skill set for navigating in open ocean by the stars and the currents can take you wherever they want to and you'll never even know you are moving, as the water is moving with you, so there is no sensation of moving. For a sextant to be of any value, you have to know 'where' you are and unless they kept meticulous records of daily or even hourly travel, (direction and speed+/- current) they had no way of knowing their position relative to any land mass once their electronics went down.
[This message has been edited by maryjane (edited 10-30-2017).]
No engine=no electric power after the batteries died. Few people today have a good knowledge or skill set for navigating in open ocean by the stars and the currents can take you wherever they want to and you'll never even know you are moving, as the water is moving with you, so there is no sensation of moving. For a sextant to be of any value, you have to know 'where' you are and unless they kept meticulous records of daily or even hourly travel, (direction and speed) they had no way of knowing their position relative to any land mass once their electronics went down.
Well heck, maybe I am a sailor. I'm frequently lost..............
Solution...sail during the day and to go east or west, just follow the sun. Drift at nite. Even a grade school kid knows the sun comes up in east and goes down west. Sooner or later, and not 6 months, they would have run out of ocean going either direction. Id chose trying that over dying at sea doing nothing at all. And all that is only if they dont have a compass. They dont cost anything, dont use any kind of power. Anyone taking out any kind of boat and going out of site of land should have a compass. With a 40' ocean going sailboat, it probably has several compasses. My airplane has 2.
[This message has been edited by rogergarrison (edited 10-30-2017).]
Solution...sail during the day and to go east or west, just follow the sun. Drift at nite. Even a grade school kid knows the sun comes up in east and goes down west. Sooner or later, and not 6 months, they would have run out of ocean going either direction. Id chose trying that over dying at sea doing nothing at all. And all that is only if they dont have a compass. They dont cost anything, dont use any kind of power. Anyone taking out any kind of boat and going out of site of land should have a compass. With a 40' ocean going sailboat, it probably has several compasses. My airplane has 2.
All well and good, on paper, except for an anomaly known as oceanic gyres. Every ocean and gulf has at least one and the south Pacific is no exception. Even the Gulf of Mexico, tho they call them loop currents in the Gulf. They just take you round and round in a great big circle unless you have the power to overcome them. Gyres are the reason the huge rafts of plastic and garbage stay in one area even tho there are surface winds that one might think would eventually blow it all to a landmass somewhere. But, I really haven't read much on what problems these 2 had other than they lost their engine and had some kind of problem with their mainsail on their way from Hawaii to Tahiti, 2600 miles away.
Which direction is which was no mystery. Whether you are actually moving is. The currents are wind caused and as a result, you aren't moving any faster than the current and with all that seaweed the pictures showed hanging off their boat, it acts as a sea anchor. It is very difficult to get out of a loop current without power or enough sail to acquire more speed than the forces within the current. Again, since you're moving more or less the same as the upper parts of the ocean is, you don't even know you're moving.
Which direction is which was no mystery. Whether you are actually moving is. The currents are wind caused and as a result, you aren't moving any faster than the current and with all that seaweed the pictures showed hanging off their boat, it acts as a sea anchor. It is very difficult to get out of a loop current without power or enough sail to acquire more speed than the forces within the current. Again, since you're moving more or less the same as the upper parts of the ocean is, you don't even know you're moving.
No engine=no electric power after the batteries died. Few people today have a good knowledge or skill set for navigating in open ocean by the stars and the currents can take you wherever they want to and you'll never even know you are moving, as the water is moving with you, so there is no sensation of moving. For a sextant to be of any value, you have to know 'where' you are and unless they kept meticulous records of daily or even hourly travel, (direction and speed+/- current) they had no way of knowing their position relative to any land mass once their electronics went down.
A sextant is used to tell you where you are.
A sextant tells your latitude. A watch tells your longitude. A compass tells your direction. Combine those three tools with a map, some knowledge and you can tell where you are and where you are going.
Of the three tools, the watch was the hardest for sailors to get accurate. It was the British that finally made a pocket watch that was accurate enough to use for navigation.
[This message has been edited by Doug85GT (edited 10-30-2017).]
A sextant tells your latitude. A watch tells your longitude. A compass tells your direction. Combine those three tools with a map, some knowledge and you can tell where you are and where you are going.
Of the three tools, the watch was the hardest for sailors to get accurate. It was the British that finally made a pocket watch that was accurate enough to use for navigation.
"Few people today have a good knowledge or skill set for navigating in open ocean by the stars ." Our sun is a star.
If they didn't/don't know how to use a sextant, it becomes dead weight.
Lots of inconsistencies in their story from what I can tell. https://www.washingtonpost....-finally-reach-land/ Their real problems most likely stemmed from a lack of knowledge in general seamanship and common sense..and most importantly, not realizing they overestimated their own abilities in that area. They hit a storm their 2nd day at sea, which drove them a couple hundred miles off course and damaged the mast. They pulled into Kiribati ( otherwise known as Tarawa) but said they couldn't find a "slip large enough for their 39' boat" so they continued on with just their engine and then another squall caused it to go out. Evidently no battery operated emergency radio or satellite emergency communication device either, tho some of the reports I've read said there was one but they hadn't activated it. *
All I'm going to say is, they didn't call me Wrong Way Ron for no reason at all. I always found my way back home but rarely did I know where I had been.
Actually, I was a former Artillery Fire Support Officer on Flight Status before going to flight school and then a Scout Pilot before going to MTP school. I could read a map and navigate better and faster than most. The problem with this scenario is, there ain't too many land marks to go by 2K miles out in the ocean. Dead reckoning will get you only so far and then, you're dead I reckon.
I would be less generous: Sounds like a case of "rich and clueless" to me.
2600 miles, Oahu to Tahiti. [sarcasm]Sounds to me like a great choice for your very first open-water journey.[/sarcasm] Hint: Tahiti is a very small navigation target at that distance. But GPS makes it a no-brainer ... until the batteries run flat.
[This message has been edited by Marvin McInnis (edited 10-31-2017).]
I would be less generous: Sounds like a case of "rich and clueless" to me.
2600 miles, Oahu to Tahiti. [sarcasm]Sounds to me like a great choice for your very first open-water journey.[/sarcasm] Hint: Tahiti is a very small navigation target at that distance. But GPS makes it a no-brainer ... until the batteries run flat.
Ran across this report this morning. Seems there may be more to the story than previously thought. Can you spell scam. This has me skeptical about their story.
Experts say some of the details of the women's story do not add up. A retired Coast Guard officer who was responsible for search and rescue operations said that if the women used the emergency beacon, they would have been found.
"If the thing was operational and it was turned on, a signal should have been received very, very quickly that this vessel was in distress," Phillip R. Johnson said Monday in a telephone interview from Washington state. Emergency Position Indication Radio Beacons, or EPIRBS, activate when they are submerged in water or turned on manually and send a location to rescuers within minutes.
The beacons are solid and built to be suddenly dropped in the ocean. "Failures are really rare," Johnson said, but added that old and weak batteries also could cause a unit not to work.
The women also said they had six forms of communication that all went dead. "There's something wrong there," Johnson said. He knows of cases in remote Alaska where a ship in distress just using one form of beacon brought a fairly quick response from nearby fishing boats and the Coast Guard.
"I've never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time," he said. And there's more that doesn't add up.
Key elements of the women's account are contradicted by authorities, weather reports and the basic geography of the Pacific Ocean. The discrepancies raised questions about whether Appel and her sailing companion, Tasha Fuiava, remember the ordeal accurately or could have avoided disaster.
Anyone have any idea what such a movie script might sell for?
Edited: Ya know, after reviewing about a dozen different photos of the "survivors" of this sea story, they look pretty darn healthy after 5 months at sea. So do the dogs. Hmmm.....
[This message has been edited by blackrams (edited 10-31-2017).]
Ya, their story is getting more and more fishy. They had 2 transponders on board and it wasnt dead batteries because they told them they never turned them on. They had all kinds of communications gear, short wave radios, satellite phones, satellite radio and CB radio. Its extremely unlikely not one of them worked at all at any time. I suspect they didnt want to be found, maybe others involved in an insurance scam for 'lost persons' and a missing boat. They had a water system and a years supply of food. I dont know why you would store a years worth of food for a month or less planned trip. They could have planned to drift around till they were forgotten about, landed on some island next year, and collected their part of the money and lived new lives happily ever after. Its been done or attempted before.
Ya, their story is getting more and more fishy. They had 2 transponders on board and it wasnt dead batteries because they told them they never turned them on. They had all kinds of communications gear, short wave radios, satellite phones, satellite radio and CB radio. Its extremely unlikely not one of them worked at all at any time. I suspect they didnt want to be found, maybe others involved in an insurance scam for 'lost persons' and a missing boat. They had a water system and a years supply of food. I dont know why you would store a years worth of food for a month or less planned trip. They could have planned to drift around till they were forgotten about, landed on some island next year, and collected their part of the money and lived new lives happily ever after. Its been done or attempted before.
A years supply. Dang.
I think it was planned to be more of the "Disappear for six months at sea, get rescued, write book and be famous."
[This message has been edited by Fats (edited 10-31-2017).]
Jennifer Appel confirmed in an interview Tuesday that they had the beacon and did not use it. She said that in her experience, it should be used only when you are in imminent physical danger and going to die in the next 24 hours.
“Our hull was solid, we were floating, we had food, we had water, and we had limited maneuverable capacity,” Appel said in Japan, where the U.S. Navy took them after they were rescued by a Navy ship. “All those things did not say we are going to die. All that said, it’s going to take us a whole lot longer to get where we’re going.”
The women also say their boat was damaged in a heavy storm when they were off the coast of Hawaii at the beginning of their trip. But "key elements of the women’s account are contradicted by authorities, and are not consistent with weather reports or basic geography of the Pacific Ocean," the AP reported.
On their first day at sea, the two women described running into a fierce storm that tossed their vessel with 60 mph (97 kph) winds and 30-foot (9-meter) seas for three days, but meteorologists say there was no severe weather anywhere along their route during that time.
After leaving “we got into a Force 11 storm, and it lasted for two nights and three days,” Appel has said of the storm they encountered off Oahu. In one of the first signs of trouble, she said she lost her cellphone overboard.
“We were empowered to know that we could withstand the forces of nature,” Appel said. “The boat could withstand the forces of nature.”
But the National Weather Service in Honolulu said no organized storm systems were in or near Hawaii on May 3 or in the days afterward. Archived NASA satellite images confirm there were no tropical storms around Hawaii that day. Appel expressed surprise that there was no record of the storm. She said they received a Coast Guard storm warning while sailing after sunset on May 3.
Ya, Fats...she caught herself in her own lie there. She said she was not supposed to turn on a beacon unless in imminent danger of dying in the next 24 hours. Also in the interview, she said if theyd not been rescued when they were, they would have died by the next day. So why didnt she turn on the beacon ? They said they had seen ships pass closeby...wouldnt that have been a great time to turn on the beacon, if only for an hour or so ?
[This message has been edited by rogergarrison (edited 10-31-2017).]
Forgot to add, the weather service in Hawaii said there were no storms where they were when she said it hit them and flooded out their engine. Wonder if anyone has tried to start the engine since they were found...or hoist up the sails ? Since they didnt bring the boat back on the carrier, wonder whats happened to it ? Ive heard nothing about where the boat is now. Typically as far as I know when a boat is found adrift, its either towed or a small crew put on board to sail it to nearest port. Im guessing a carrier crew has enough expertise to fix either the engine or mast...after all it was still floating at the waterline so no danger of sinkings. Maybe they just pulled the plugs and let it sink.
