NavList:

   

Reply

I read the book Survive the Savage Sea in the 1970 when it came out. I
didnt read the book by the son though. It was very influential on my
thinking about sea survival and voyaging by small boat at the time,
even though it was many decades before I bought my own blue water
cruiser. It says in the BBC article he fired up his radio and sent an
SOS. I don't remember them having a suitable radio. At the time they
might have had a 500kHz life boat unit, a 2182kHz "call buoy" or an HF
 ham rig, Marine MF/HF rigs were huge at that time and used loads of
power so it is unlikely they had one. The nearest to an EPIRB was a
121.5 aeronautical beacon which relied on line of sight to a plane.

 I seem to remember he threw a sextant and a chart in the boat before
they sank, and a knife which was the most crucial thing to their
survival.

Bill

On Mon, 13 Jan 2020 at 03:48, Frank Reed  wrote:
>
> Here's a story of a schooner in the Pacific sailing from the Galapagos to 
the Marquesas that was sunk by a killer whale:
> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-how-to-survive-being-shipwrecked-by-whales
>
> They all survived in a little dinghy, and there's a point where they were 
able to estimate their latitude by sighting Polaris (not much detail in the 
article but you get the idea). As I started into the article, I was waiting 
for the part about the EPIRB but then in the fifth paragraph I realized why 
there was no EPIRB. The article is a good read by itself, and it's such a low 
key advert that I find myself interested in buying and reading the book on 
which it's based.
>
> Frank Reed
>
> 

   

Reply