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Shipwrecked: A Shocking Tale of Love, Loss, and Survival in the Deep Blue Sea

Illustration by Comrade

A drift in the middle of the ocean, no one can hear you scream.

It was a lesson Brad Cavanagh was learning by the second. He had been above deck on the Trashman , a sleek, 58-foot Alden sailing yacht with a pine-green hull and elegant teak trim, battling 100-mile-per-hour winds as sheets of rain fell from the turbulent black sky. The latest news report had mentioned nothing about bad weather, but two days into his voyage a tropical storm formed off of Cape Fear in the Carolinas, whipping up massive, violent waves out of nowhere. Soaked to the skin and too tired to stand, the North Shore native from Byfield sought refuge down below, where he braced himself by pressing his feet and back between the walls of a narrow hallway to keep from being knocked down as 30-foot-tall walls of water tossed the boat around the open seas.

Below deck with Cavanagh were four crewmates: Debbie Scaling, with blond hair and blue eyes, was an experienced sailor. As the first American woman to complete the Whitbread Round the World Race—during which she’d navigated some of the most difficult conditions on the planet—she was already well known in professional sailing circles. Mark Adams, a mid-twenties Englishman who had been Cavanagh’s occasional racing partner; the boat’s captain, John Lippoth; and Lippoth’s girlfriend, Meg Mooney, rounded out the crew, who were moving a Texas tycoon’s yacht from Maine to Florida for the winter season.

As the storm continued, Cavanagh grew increasingly angry. At 21 years old and less experienced than most of the others, he felt as though no one had a plan for how they were going to get out of this mess alive. He knew their situation was dire. The motor was dead for the third time on the trip, and they had already cut off the wind-damaged mainsail. That meant nature was in control. They could only ride it out and hope to survive long enough for the Coast Guard to rescue them. Crewmates had been in contact with authorities nearly every hour since the early morning, and a rescue boat was supposedly on its way. It’s just a matter of time , Cavanagh told himself again and again, just a matter of time.

After a while, the storm settled into a predictable pattern: The boat would ride up a wave, tilt slightly to port-side and then ride down the wave, and right itself for a moment of stillness and quiet, sheltered from the wind in the valley between mountains of water. Cavanagh began to relax, but then the boat rose over another wave, tilted hard, and never righted itself. Watching the dark waters of the Atlantic approach with terrifying speed through the window in front of him, Cavanagh braced for impact. An instant later, water shattered the window and began rushing into the boat. He jumped up from the floor with a single thought: He had to rouse Scaling from her bunkroom. He had to get everyone off the ship. The Trashman was going down.

Three days earlier, the weather had been perfect: The sun sparkled on the water and warmed everything its rays touched, despite bursts of cool breezes. Cavanagh was walking the docks of Annapolis Harbor alongside Adams, both of them hunting for work. A job Adams had previously secured for them aboard a boat had fallen through, and all they had to show for it was a measly $50 each. As they made their way along the water, Cavanagh spotted an attractive woman standing by a bank of pay phones. He looked at her and she stared back at him, a sandy-haired, 6-foot-3-inch former prep school hockey player draped in a letterman jacket. It wasn’t until she called out his name that he realized who she was: Debbie Scaling.

Cavanagh came of age in a boating family. He’d survived his first hurricane at sea in utero, and grew up on 4,300 feet of riverfront property in Byfield, where his father, a trained reconnaissance photographer named Paul, taught him and his siblings how to sail from an early age. From the outside, the elite schools, the sailboat, the new car every five years, the grand house, and the self-made patriarch gave the impression that the Cavanaghs were living the suburban American dream. Inside the home, though, it was a horror show. Always drinking, Cavanagh’s father emotionally abused, insulted, and belittled his wife and children, Cavanagh recalls. Whenever Cavanagh heard the clinking of ice cubes in his father’s glass, his stress meter spiked.

Despite that—or perhaps because of it—all Cavanagh ever wanted was his father’s approval. Sailing, he thought, would earn his respect. Cavanagh’s sister, Sarah, after all, had been a star sailor, and at family dinners his hard-drinking—and hard-to-please—father talked about her with pride and adulation. In fact, it was Cavanagh’s sister who had first met Scaling when they raced across the Atlantic together a year earlier. She had recently introduced Scaling to Cavanagh and her family, and now, standing at that pay phone in Annapolis, Scaling could hardly believe her eyes. At that very moment, she had just called Cavanagh’s household in hopes of convincing Sarah to join the crew of the Trashman , and here was Sarah’s younger brother standing right in front of her.

Scaling was desperately looking for help on the yacht. Already things had been going poorly: The boat’s captain, Lippoth, who was a heavy drinker, was passed out below deck when she first showed up at the Southwest Harbor dock in Maine to report for work. Soon after they set sail, they picked up the captain’s girlfriend, Mooney, because she wanted to come along for the trip. From Maine to Maryland, Lippoth rarely eased the sails and relied on the inboard motor, which consistently sputtered and needed repair. They’d struggled to pick up additional hands as they traveled south, and Scaling knew they needed more-qualified help for the difficult sail along the coast of the Carolinas, exposed at sea to high winds and waves. Scaling didn’t share any of this with Cavanagh or Adams when Lippoth offered them a job, though. Happy to have work, the pair accepted and climbed aboard.

Perhaps Cavanagh should have known something was wrong with the yacht when the captain mentioned that the engine kept burning out.

“Mayday! Mayday!” A crew member was shouting into the radio, trying to summon the Coast Guard as the yacht began taking on water. Cavanagh had just burst into Scaling’s cabin, while Adams roused Lippoth and Mooney. And now they huddled together at the bottom of a flight of stairs watching the salty seawater rise toward the ceiling. Lippoth tried to activate the radio beacon that would have given someone, anyone, their latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, but the water rushing in carried it away before he could reach it.

The crew started making their way up toward the deck to abandon ship. Cavanagh spotted the 11-and-a-half-foot, red-and-black Zodiac Mark II tied to a cleat near the cockpit. The outboard motor sat next to it on the mount, but the yacht was sinking too fast to grab it. As he fumbled with the lines of the Zodiac, one broke, recoiled, and ripped his shirt open. Then he lost his grip on the dinghy, and it floated off. Fortunately, it didn’t go far. Adams wasn’t so lucky. A strong gust of wind ripped the life raft out of his hands, and the sinking yacht started to take the raft and its emergency food, water rations, and first-aid kit down with it. By the time Cavanagh swam off the Trashman , it was nearly submerged.

As Cavanagh made his way toward the dinghy, he kicked off his boots, which belonged to his father. For a moment, all he could think was how angry his dad would be at him for losing them. When he got to the Zodiac, he yelled to the others to grab ahold of the raft before the yacht sucked them down with it. The crew made it onto the dinghy with nothing but the clothing on their backs. As they turned around, the last visible piece of the Trashman disappeared beneath the ocean.

Terrified, the five crew members spent the next four hours in the water, being thrashed about by the waves while holding on to the lines along the sides of the Zodiac, which they had flipped upside down to prevent it from blowing away. During the calmer moments, they ducked underneath for protection from the strong winds, with only their heads occupying a pocket of air underneath the raft. There wasn’t much space to maneuver, but still Cavanagh felt the need to move toward one end of the boat to get some distance from his crewmates while he processed his white-hot anger at Lippoth and Adams. Over the past two days, Adams had often been too drunk to do his job, and Lippoth never did anything about it, leaving him and Scaling to pick up the slack. Cavanagh had spent his childhood on a boat with a drunken father, and now, once again, he’d somehow managed to team up with an alcoholic sailing partner and a captain willing to look the other way.

Perhaps he should have known something was wrong with the yacht when the captain mentioned that the engine kept burning out. Maybe he should have been concerned that Lippoth didn’t even have enough money for supplies. But there was nothing he could do about it now, adrift in the Atlantic and crammed under an inflated dinghy trying to stay alive.

As nighttime approached and the temperature dropped, Cavanagh devised a plan for the crew to seek shelter on the underside of the Zodiac yet remain out of the water. First, he grabbed a wire on the raft and ran it from side to side. He lay his head on the bow of the boat and rested his lower body on the wire. Then the others climbed on top of him, any way they could, to stay under the dinghy’s floor but just out of the water. When the oxygen underneath the Zodiac ran out, they’d exit, lift the boat just long enough to allow new air into the pocket, and go back under again.

Sleep-deprived and dehydrated, Cavanagh’s mind wandered home to Byfield and the endless summer afternoons of his childhood spent under his family’s slimy dock, playing hide-and-seek with friends. Cavanagh had spent a lot of his life hiding from his father and his alcohol-fueled rages. If there was a silver lining to the abuse and the fear he grew up with, it was that he learned how to survive under pressure and to avoid the one fatal strain of seasickness: panic.

The next morning, that skill was suddenly in high demand as Lippoth unexpectedly swam out from under the Zodiac to find fresh air. He said he felt like he was having a heart attack and refused to go back under. The storm had calmed, but a cool autumn breeze was sucking the heat from their wet bodies, and Cavanagh wanted the crew to stay under the boat to keep warm. Disagreeing with him, Cavanagh’s crewmates decided to flip the boat right-side up and climb onboard. It momentarily saved their lives: They soon noticed three tiger sharks circling them.

Mooney had accidentally gotten caught on a coil of lines and wires while abandoning the yacht, leaving a bloody gash behind her knee. Everyone else had their cuts and scrapes, too, and the sharks had followed the scent. The largest shark in the group began banging against the boat, then swam under the craft and picked it up out of the water with its body before letting it drop back down. The crew grabbed onto the sides of the Zodiac while Cavanagh and Scaling tried to fashion a makeshift anchor out of a piece of plywood attached to the raft with the metal wire, hoping that it would help steady the boat. No sooner had they dropped the wood into the water than a shark bit it and began dragging the boat at full speed like some twisted version of a joy ride. When the shark finally spit the makeshift anchor out, Cavanagh reeled it in and Adams, in a rage, grabbed it and tried to smash the shark’s head with it. Cavanagh begged his partner to calm down. “The shark’s reaction to that might be bad,” he said, “so just cool it.”

Cavanagh believed that if they could all just stay calm enough to keep the boat upright, they could make it out alive. “The Coast Guard knows we’re here,” Cavanagh told the others, who had heard a plane roaring overhead before the Trashman sank. It was presumably sent to locate any survivors so a rescue ship could bring them back to shore. Unknown at the time was that a boat had been on the way to rescue the group, when for some reason—a miscommunication of sorts—the search was either forgotten or called off. No one was coming for them.

Brad Cavanagh is still haunted by his fight for survival. / Portrait by Matt Kalinowski

Fighting to survive, Cavanagh knew he needed to keep his mind and body busy. With blistered lips and cracked hands, he pulled seaweed onboard to use as a blanket, and he flipped the boat to clean out the urine and fetid water that had accumulated in it. First, he scanned the water to make sure the sharks had left. Then, with Adams’s help, he leaned back and tugged on the wire to flip the boat, rinsed it out, and flipped it back over again so everyone could climb back in. He had a job and a purpose, and it kept him sane.

The others struggled. Adams and Lippoth were severely dehydrated. (Adams from all the scotch he drank and Lippoth from the cigarettes he chain-smoked before the Trashman went down.) Meanwhile, Mooney’s cut was infected and filled with pus; she was getting sicker and weaker. As they lay together in a small pool of water in the bottom of the boat, they all developed body sores, likely from staph infections. Cavanagh’s skin became so tender that even brushing up against another person sent a current of pain through his body. After three days without food and water and using their energy to hold on to the Zodiac during the storm, they were all completely spent.

Realizing that the Coast Guard may not be coming after all, some crew members began to believe their only hope for survival was to eventually wash up on shore. What they weren’t aware of was that a current was pulling them even farther out to sea.

That night, Cavanagh dreamt of home. He was on a boat, sailing, and talking to the men on a fishing vessel riding along next to him as he made his way from Newburyport to Buzzards Bay. It was the route his family took when moving their boat every summer.

The day after he had that dream, the situation descended into a nightmare: Lippoth and Adams began drinking seawater. It slaked their thirst momentarily, but Cavanagh knew it would only be a matter of time before it sent them deeper into madness. Soon enough, the delusions began. First, Lippoth started reaching around the bottom of the boat looking for supplies that didn’t exist. “We bought cigarettes. Where are they?” Lippoth asked. Then Lippoth began trying to convince Mooney that they were going to take a plane to Maine, where his mother worked at a hospital. “We’re going to Portland,” he told her. “I’m going to get the car. I want you guys to pick up the boat and I’ll come back out and get you,” Lippoth said before sliding over the edge of the Zodiac and into the water.

“Brad, you’ve got to get John,” Scaling said to Cavanagh in a panic. But Cavanagh was so weak, he could barely muster the energy to coax Lippoth back onboard. “If you go away and die, then I might die, too. I don’t want to die,” Cavanagh pleaded.

It was too late. The wind pulled the Zodiac away from him. The captain soon drifted out of sight. Across the empty expanse of the ocean, Cavanagh could hear Lippoth’s last howls as the sharks attacked.

An old newspaper clipping of Cavanagh and Scaling, not long before their rescue. / Courtesy photo

Now there were four. Cavanagh, though, noticed Adams was quickly careening into madness, hitting on Mooney, and proposing that sex would cheer her up. Rebuffed, he decided to take his party elsewhere. “Great,” Cavanagh recalls him saying, “if we’re not going to have sex, I’m going back to 7-Eleven to get some beers and cigarettes.”

“You’re not going,” Cavanagh said. “We’re out in the middle of the ocean.”

“I know, I know,” he told Cavanagh. “I’m just going to hang over the side and stretch out a little bit. I’ll get back in the boat.”

Holding onto the side of the raft, Adams slipped into the water. Cavanagh looked away for a moment to say something to Scaling, and when he turned back, Adams was gone. Soon after, the boat began to spin and the water around them started to churn wildly. Cavanagh knew the sharks had gotten Adams, but he was so focused on surviving that it hardly registered that his racing buddy was gone forever.

The three remaining castaways spent the rest of the evening being knocked around as the sharks bumped and prodded the boat. They found something they like , Cavanagh said to himself. And now they want more.

Mooney lay there shivering violently from the cold. In the black of night, she lurched at Cavanagh, scratching at him and screaming. Then she began speaking in tongues. In the morning, Cavanagh woke first and found her lying on her back, her arms outstretched, staring into the sky. “She’s dead,” Cavanagh said when Scaling woke up. “She’s been dead for hours.”

Then a terrifying thought came to his mind: Maybe we could eat her . He was so hungry, so desperately famished, but her body was covered in sores and oozing pus.

Cavanagh and Scaling removed Mooney’s shirt so they would have another layer to keep warm, and her jewelry so they could return it to her family. They still hoped they would have that chance. Then they pushed her naked body off the raft. She floated like a jellyfish, with her arms and legs straight down, away and over the waves. Neither of them were watching when the sharks came for her, too.

After Mooney died, Scaling was troubled that she was lying in pus-infected water and begged Cavanagh to flip the boat over and clean it out. Weak and unsteady, he agreed to try. Standing on the edge of the Zodiac, he tugged the wire and tried to flip it, but he didn’t have the strength to do it alone. Then he gave another tug, lost his balance, and tumbled backward into the water. He tried to get back in the boat but couldn’t. Panic seized him. Every person who had come off that boat had been eaten by sharks. He needed to get back in fast, and he needed Scaling’s help.

Cavanagh begged her to help him up, but she only sat there sobbing inconsolably on the other side of the raft. With his last bit of strength, Cavanagh willed himself over the side on his own. He sat in the boat, winded and seething with anger. The entire time, from when they were on the Trashman with a drunken crewmate, during the storm, and throughout their harrowing journey on the Zodiac, Scaling and Cavanagh had upheld a pact to look out for each other, to protect each other from the sharks, the madness, the others. How could she have left me there in the water? he thought. How could she have let me down? They were supposed to be a team. Now on their fifth day without food or water, he couldn’t even look at her. There were two of them left, but he felt alone.

They sat in a cold, uncomfortable silence until he had something important to say. “Deb, look,” Cavanagh shouted. A large vessel was approaching them. They’d spotted a couple of ships before in the distance, but none were close enough for them to be seen. As it moved toward them, he could see a man on the deck waving. Shortly after, crew members threw lines with large glass buoys on the end of them. But they all landed short, splashing in the water too far away. Undeterred, the men on deck pulled the rescue buoys back and tried again.

Cavanagh, for his part, couldn’t move. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told Scaling. It felt as if every muscle had gone limp. He had nothing left after spending days balancing the boat, flipping it, pulling it, and watching his crewmates die. The ship made another turn. Closer. The men aboard threw the lines again. Scaling jumped into the water and started swimming.

Seeing his crewmate in the water was all the motivation Cavanagh needed. Fuck it , he told himself. Here I go . He rolled overboard and managed to grab a line, letting the crew reel his weakened body in and hoist him up onto the deck along with Scaling. Aboard the ship, Cavanagh saw women wearing calico dresses with aprons and steel-toed work boots waiting for them. They were speaking Russian. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Coast Guard never came to save them, but ice traders on a Soviet vessel did.

The crew gave Cavanagh and Scaling dry clothes and medical attention, along with warm tea kettles filled with coffee, sugar, and vodka. That night, as the Coast Guard finally arrived and spirited the two survivors to a hospital, the temperature dropped down into the 30s. Cavanagh and Scaling wouldn’t have made it through another night at sea.

As Cavanagh was recuperating in the hospital, his mother flew down to be by his side. Seeing her appear at his bedside felt like the happiest moment of his life. His father, however, never came; he was on a sailing trip.

Cavanagh soon returned home to Massachusetts and once again felt the need to keep busy: He immediately began taking odd jobs in hopes of earning enough cash to begin traveling to sailboat races again. Processing what he’d endured—five days without food or water and man-eating sharks—was next to impossible. The Southern Ocean Racing Conference season in Florida started in January, and he was determined to be there, but not necessarily to race. He needed to talk to the only other person who had made it off that Zodiac alive. He had something important he needed to tell Scaling.

A few months later, Cavanagh boarded a flight to Fort Lauderdale for the event. With no place to stay, he slept in an empty boat parked in a field. Walking around the next day, he caught a glimpse of the latest issue of Sail magazine and stopped dead in his tracks: Staring back at him was a photo of him and Adams, plastered across the cover. A photographer had snapped a shot of the two racing buddies just before they’d joined the Trashman . It was like seeing a ghost.

Cavanagh paced the docks searching for Scaling—then there she stood, looking as beautiful as ever. His whole body was pumping with adrenaline at the sight of his former crewmate. He needed to tell her he was in love with her. They had shared something that no one else could ever understand. The bond he felt was far deeper than any he’d ever known.

He moved toward her to speak, but the mere sight of Cavanagh made Scaling recoil, reminding her of the horrors that she’d suffered at sea while in the Zodiac. “I’m sorry, but I cannot be around you,” he recalls her saying. “I don’t want you to have anything to do with me. Please leave me alone.” Dejected and hurt, Cavanagh retreated. Then he did what he’d always done: He walked the docks, banging on boats until he found someone willing to hire him.

As the years rolled by like waves, Scaling became a socialite and motivational speaker, talking publicly and often about her fight to survive. She appeared on Larry King Live and wrote a memoir. She and Cavanagh both continued to sail and ran in similar circles, seeing each other often, and both trying desperately to hide their pain when they did.

Scaling eventually settled down in Medfield, where she raised a family and spent summers on the Cape. In 2009, her son, also an avid sailor, drowned in an accident. Nearly three years to the day later, she passed away in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, at 54. Cavanagh was walking out of a marina in Newport, Rhode Island, when someone broke the news to him. He was profoundly disappointed. Disappointed with life itself. He had loved her. There was no information in her obituary about her cause of death, but he recalls there were whispers among family members of suicide. Cavanagh believed no one could have saved her: She was still tortured by those days lost at sea. He was now the lone survivor of the Trashman tragedy.

Several years later, Scaling’s daughter gave Cavanagh a frame. Inside it was a neatly coiled metal wire—the same one Cavanagh had rigged up to suspend their shivering bodies under the Zodiac and flip the boat to keep it clean. It was what had kept them both alive. Unbeknownst to him, Scaling had retrieved it after the dinghy was found still floating in the ocean. She framed it and hung it on her wall, keeping it close all those years.

Cavanagh remains hell-bent on learning why the Coast Guard never showed up in the aftermath of that fateful storm.

On a cold winter day, I drove to Cavanagh’s home in Bourne, where he lives with his wife, a schoolteacher, and his two children. He still had wide shoulders and a strong face, now layered with deep wrinkles, and greeted me with a handshake. His enormous hands engulfed mine.

The wind howled outside and a fire burned in the living room’s gas stove as he sat down on his couch to talk—for the very first time at length—about his life since being rescued. Above his head was the rendering of a floating school he once wanted to build for the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. It had classrooms, living quarters for the students, and bathrooms, but it never was built. It became one of Cavanagh’s many grand ideas over the years, all of which had to do with sailing, that he never saw to fruition. He wants to write a book, too, like Scaling, but he hasn’t been able to get started.

Sailing is the one thing that has remained constant in Cavanagh’s life. He said the ocean continued to give him freedom, even as he remained chained to his past, to the shipwreck that almost killed him, and to the abusive father who failed him.

While we sat there, listening to the wind, Cavanagh pulled out his father’s sailing logbook. In it were the dates and locations of his around-the-world trip. The day his father set sail in 1982, Cavanagh thought he was finally safe. His mother had just filed for divorce and Cavanagh no longer felt he had to stick around to protect her, so he left home to start his life. His father had invited him to join him on his trip, but there was no way Cavanagh was doing that. He wound up on the Trashman instead.

Cavanagh paused to read his father’s entries from the days that Cavanagh was lost at sea. At the time, his father had been docked and drunk in Bermuda, which lies off the coast of the Carolinas, just beyond where the yacht went down. Then he set sail again into the weakened tail end of the same storm that had sunk the Trashman , not knowing that his son had been floating in that same ocean, fighting for his life and waiting for someone to save him.

Cavanagh remains hell-bent on learning why the Coast Guard never showed up in the aftermath of that fateful storm. He has documents and photos from the official case file after the sinking of the Trashman , but they give few, if any, clues. He has spent decades trying to figure out what happened, and now that he’s the only crew member alive, he’s even more determined to find the truth. He wants to know how rescuers forgot about him and his crewmates, and why. Haunted by his memories, he has driven up and down the East Coast, stopping at bases and looking for anyone to speak to him about the incident. He is still adrift, nearly 40 years later, still searching for answers.

Hundreds of ships go missing each year, but we have the technology to find them

Senior Lecturer in Astronomy, University of Leicester

Disclosure statement

Nigel Bannister works for the University of Leicester. He received funding from US Office of Naval Research - Global to conduct this work.

University of Leicester provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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The seas are vast. And they claim vessels in significant numbers. The yachts Cheeki Rafiki , Niña , Munetra , Tenacious are just some of the more high-profile names on a list of lost or capsized vessels which grows by hundreds each year.

Yet it took the disappearance of flight MH370, now declared lost with no survivors , to demonstrate how difficult it can be to find something in the open ocean. As the search continued, incredulity grew: exactly how, in the 21st century, is it possible to lose a 64-metre aircraft?

There are great unknowns at sea: planes and boats go missing. Illegal fishing and piracy are easy to conduct – and small vessels can smuggle powerful weapons and dangerous individuals. The technology to improve this situation already exists, we just need to make better use of it.

The view from above

Satellites provide the vantage point necessary to monitor large areas of ocean. Spacecraft carrying synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can provide high-quality images with resolution down to a metre, regardless of the weather. But the relatively small number of spacecraft equipped with SAR, and the dawn-to-dusk orbits which most occupy, also limit the times of day when they can provide coverage.

To offer comprehensive monitoring at sea, we need to bring together different types of imaging, including radar and photographic images in the human-visible wavelength. This is often overlooked for maritime purposes due to the effects of cloud, rain, and darkness that limit its use. But there are enough satellites with the capability that could provide excellent coverage.

Detail and coverage

The two key requirements for effective monitoring are high spatial resolution (good detail) and a large field of view (wide area). One tends to come at the expense of the other, so that a device – whether it is a camera, satellite or radar – capable of detecting small vessels will usually only be able to scan an area a few tens of kilometres wide, making it both unlikely that the search area of interest has been recorded and rendering subsequent searches very slow.

But the situation is changing. The number of imagers is growing rapidly. In our recently published study , we identified 54 satellites carrying 85 sensors which offer useful resolution and could be accessed commercially (excluding military surveillance spacecraft). Companies such as PlanetLabs are in the process of launching many more.

While each satellite’s imaging device generates an image track only 10-100km across, the motion of the satellite as it orbits the Earth effectively “scans” that track so that the image is narrow in one dimension but circles the world in the other. With orbital periods of around 90 minutes, one satellite makes around 16 passes over the daylit hemisphere every day. The combined imaging work of all these satellites now make a significant contribution to our awareness of maritime traffic.

Image early, image often

Imagery used in search-and-rescue operations is usually taken after the target is lost. In the case of the Niña which disappeared off the coast of New Zealand, eight days elapsed between last radio contact and the alarm being raised. For MH370, the search area evolved over periods of weeks. In both cases, ocean currents carry evidence away from the accident site, while debris disperses and sinks, making it more difficult to identify by satellite.

It would be far better to have an archive of recent, regularly updated images so that the recent history of a location over a period of several days can be examined. This could offer evidence of the vessel’s course or state, or pick up on areas of fresh, concentrated debris.

Making the best of what we have

Satellites with visible wavelength cameras are generally used for gathering images of land. What if satellite operators could generate revenue by taking images of the oceans? The limited resources on satellites mean that it isn’t generally possible to constantly take images, to store that data and transmit it all in the next available contact with the ground (which may be some time after an image is acquired). As it is, it’s not possible to create a global maritime monitoring system of this kind without purpose-built spacecraft with bigger data storage and more frequent contact with ground stations to download it.

But it is possible to monitor high-priority areas of heavy traffic, protected fisheries and security-critical regions, with co-operation between operators of existing spacecraft (for which there are precedents such as George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project , which uses satellites to gather evidence of atrocities and war crimes), and incentives, perhaps involving maritime insurance companies.

Retrieving hundreds of gigabytes of data a day from satellites requires a new approach to ground stations. One solution may be to “crowdsource”: to create a network of stations operated by small institutions, universities and individuals to spread the burden of downloading data and increasing the periods during which data can be recorded and transmitted.

There are groups working on automated vessel-detection algorithms – and crowdsourcing also has a role here, such as TomNod , for example, which asked members of the public to help inspect images online in the search for Niña. How much more effective could search and rescue be if the power of crowdsourcing was applied to each stage of data acquisition, storage and processing, combined with high-quality images taken around the time the vessel was lost?

• satellite tracking
• Missing aircraft
• Search and Rescue
• Maritime security

Senior Lecturer - Earth System Science

Associate Director, Operational Planning

Sydney Horizon Educators (Identified)

Deputy Social Media Producer

Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy

Search for 3 missing American sailors off coast of Mexico has been suspended: US Coast Guard

They had not contacted friends, family or maritime authorities since April 4.

The search for three Americans missing off the coast of Mexico has been suspended, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

"An exhaustive search was conducted by our international search and rescue partner, Mexico, with the U.S. Coast Guard and Canada providing additional search assets," Coast Guard Cmdr. Gregory Higgins said in a statement . "SEMAR [The Mexican Navy] and U.S. Coast Guard assets worked hand-in-hand for all aspects of the case. Unfortunately, we found no evidence of the three Americans' whereabouts or what might have happened. Our deepest sympathies go out to the families and friends of William Gross, Kerry O'Brien and Frank O'Brien."

The Mexican Navy and Coast Guard spent "281 cumulative search hours covering approximately 200,057 square nautical miles, an area larger than the state of California, off Mexico's northern Pacific coast with no sign of the missing sailing vessel nor its passengers," the Coast Guard said.

Kerry O'Brien, Frank O'Brien and Gross had not contacted friends, family, or maritime authorities since April 4.

The trio likely encountered "significant" weather and waves as they attempted to sail their 41-foot sailboat from Mazatlán to San Diego.

"When it started to reach into five, six, seven days and we started to get a little more concerned," Kerry's brother Mark Argall told ABC News.

Higgins had expressed concern that the weather in that region worsened around April 6, with swells and wind creating waves potentially over 20 feet high. The three were sailing a capable 41-foot fiberglass boat, with similar sailboats successfully circumnavigating the planet. However, the lack of clear information about the sailors' location, partially attributable to the lack of GPS tracking and poor cellular service near the Baja peninsula, has left the families of the missing Americans uncertain about their loved ones' whereabouts.

"We have all been spinning our wheels about the different scenarios that could have happened," Gross' daughter Melissa Spicuzza said.

Kerry and Frank O'Brien, a married couple, initially decided to travel to Mexico to sail a 41-foot LaFitte sailboat named "Ocean Bound" to San Diego after the boat underwent repairs near Mazatlán, Mexico, according to Argall.

MORE: 6 children rescued near water diversion tunnel in Auburn, Massachusetts

The couple decided to hire Gross, a mechanic by trade and sailor with more than 50 years of experience, to help navigate the boat from Mazatlán to San Diego. Spicuzza recounted that friends of Gross would compare him to the 1980s fictional television character and improvisational savant MacGyver based on his ability to repair boats.

"Whatever it takes, he'll get it rigged up. He'll get it working," Spicuzza described.

The Coast Guard believed the sailors left their slip (the equivalent of a parking spot for boats) on April 2. They eventually departed Mazatlán on April 4, based on Facebook posts and cellphone usage.

The sailors expected the trip across the Gulf of California to Cabo San Lucas, where they planned to pick up provisions, would take two days. However, the Coast Guard does not believe the sailors ever stopped in Cabo San Lucas. Since April 4, marinas throughout the Baja Peninsula have not contacted the vessel, nor have any search and rescue crews spotted it.

According to Higgins, the weather worsened around April 6, with winds of 30 knots, strong swells, and waves making navigation more challenging. Spicuzza added that the sail from Mexico to California is inherently tricky since sailors need to navigate against the wind and current.

"From the tip of Baja all the way back up to Alaska, you're going against wind and current, so it's a more difficult, exhausting sail, but of course, doable with the experience that's on board," Spicuzza.

MORE: 1,200 aboard 2 migrant boats rescued in Mediterranean

Spicuzza added that the group's initially planned 10-day journey was likely unrealistic. Sailing against the wind and current would require the sailors to tack frequently, essentially zig-zag to make progress despite sailing into the wind, which could extend the journey to two and half weeks.

Moreover, according to the Coast Guard, the boat lacks trackable GPS navigation, such as a satellite phone or a tracking beacon. The limited cellular service in that region of Mexico also makes triangulating the cell position difficult.

Robert H. Perry, the designer of the 41-foot sailboat, noted that their boat was likely manufactured in Taiwan 35 years ago. Despite its age, the fiberglass sailboat itself was a time-tested, ocean-navigating boat.

The travel circumstances have left family members uncertain about the status of their loved ones. Based on the timing, it appears possible they are "just going to roll into San Diego like nothing happened in maybe about a week," Spicuzza suggested, with the radio silence attributable to some electronic issue. Alternatively, the Coast Guard has worked on plotting where their life raft might have drifted under current weather conditions.

"It's just been a roller coaster of emotions the last several days; I want my dad home, I want him safe, [and] I want the O'Brien's home safe," Spicuzza said. "I'm very much looking forward to sitting around a table with all of them and joking about the time they got lost at sea – that is the hope."

ABC News' Elisha Asif, Helena Skinner, Zohreen Shah, Amantha Chery and Marilyn Heck contributed to this report.

NEW ON YOUTUBE: Cash for Clunkers List

Unlucky Billionaire’s $38M Megayacht Falls Off Cargo Ship, Gets Lost at Sea

The 130-foot boat was being transported by boat so it could compete in a boat race elsewhere on the planet. Because first world problems.

We’ve all heard of the unfortunate story of someone losing their car or motorcycle in a freak accident, but what about losing a $38-million megayacht ? Various international news outlets report that a 130-foot sailing yacht named MY Song was recently lost in the Mediterranean Sea after falling off a cargo ship while in transport. 

You’d think that a boat that fell off another boat would just land in the water and float after suffering some minor damage, right? Unfortunately, this was not the case. According to reports, MY Song fell off its transport freighter and plunged into the Mediterranean after being hit by an unexpected severe storm. Thankfully, it didn’t sink all the way to the bottom, but it did sustain significant damage. Recent reports claim the yacht was last spotted drifting about 40 miles north of the island of Menorca with nearly half of its hull submerged under water.

The boat is owned by Italian billionaire Pier Luigi Loro Piana, and it was on its way to the Loro Piana Superyacht Regatta in Porto Cervo in Sardinia, Italy. It was supposedly being transported on a massive freighter after spending some time sailing around North America.

Pier Luigi is the grandson of Pietro Loro Piana, the founder of an ultra high-end clothing company. Forbes last reported Loro Piana’s net worth at around $1.6 billion.

MY Song’s construction completed in 2016 and in the following year, it won the 2017 World Superyacht Award for the “Best Sailing Yacht ” in its class and size. It also set a speed record while participating in the RORC Transatlantic Race, a 3,000 nautical mile journey from the Canary Islands to Grenada. The boat beat the previous record by nearly 1 hour and 20 minutes. Its mast is over 56 meters tall and the boat was capable of speeds of up to 30 knots.

"We were informed of the loss of a yacht from the deck of the MV Brattinsborg at approximately 0400hr LT on 26th May 2019. The yacht is sailing yacht My Song," said David Holley in an official statement, the chief executive of the logistics company responsible for transporting MY Song. "Upon receipt of the news Peters & May instructed the captain of the MV Brattinsborg to attempt salvage whilst third-party salvors were appointed."

What’s Wrong With All the Ships?

Do recent boat disasters actually point to a global shipping industry in distress?

Are the boats okay?

They seem to be in a tough stretch. A ship called the Felicity Ace is currently afire and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Azores, with a reported 4,000 cars on board, including Porsches, Bentleys, and Audis. The crew abandoned the vessel, en route to the United States, last week, and firefighters are now trying to control the blaze.

In January, a different container ship, the Madrid Bridge, limped into the port of Charleston, South Carolina, after losing about 60 containers at sea. Pictures of the vessel showed one row of the metal boxes collapsed and teetering over the gunwale. Among the cargo lost : highly anticipated print runs of cookbooks from Mason Hereford and Melissa Clark.

A week later, an oil-storage vessel exploded off the coast of Nigeria. Within days, a Mauritian oil tanker had run aground off Reunión in the Indian Ocean. In Peru, workers are still cleaning up a spill that, according to some accounts, occurred when a tanker was rocked by tsunami waves. Experts are nervously watching another tanker off the coast of Yemen, which is slowly disintegrating in the midst of a war and an existing humanitarian crisis.

These cases come just months after the spectacle of the Ever Given, a massive container ship that wedged itself into the banks of the Suez Canal, halted shipping for days, and enthralled a world bored to tears with the pandemic. These incidents are transfixing—a little awesome, in the old-fashioned sense , and a little hilarious, in a very contemporary internet-ironic one —but is the global shipping industry in some sort of collapse?

Read: The big, stuck boat is glorious

The short answer is no. “It’s just that people have noticed,” John Konrad, the CEO of the shipping site gCaptain , told me. Over the past few years, about 50 major ships have been lost annually. (Comprehensive figures from 2021 are not available yet, but Konrad said he doesn’t see evidence of any big jump last year.) Most of the time, the public has no reason to pay attention to these sinkings and collisions. But supply-chain crunches caused by the pandemic have made the shipping system more visible than it has been for decades, spotlighting cases like the Felicity Ace and Madrid Bridge. Meanwhile, more volatile weather caused by climate change and ever-larger container ships mean the risk of losses may be rising.

Until recently, major nautical disasters could seem like a relic of the past, like train wrecks or dirigible crashes. Every year, the German insurance giant Allianz issues a report on shipping and safety, and it captures steady improvement. As recently as 2000, more than 200 big ships were lost. (Don’t call them “boats” unless you’re ready to be corrected by cranky old salts.) By the early 2010s, that number had dropped to about 100 a year. In 2021, just 49 were lost, and 2020 saw only 48 losses. Allianz attributes this to “the positive effect of an increased focus on safety measures over time, such as regulation, improved ship design and technology, and risk management advances.”

Even so, that’s a startling rate of one major ship lost almost every week. Most of them don’t make the news. Though classified as “major,” most of these ships are far smaller than the Ever Given or the Felicity Ace. Their crews also largely comprise seafarers from countries like the Philippines or India, the ships sink far away (the biggest portion of losses is around the South China Sea), and their cargo isn’t something that Americans consumers miss. But when ships laden with things Americans care about, such as cars and cookbooks, start hitting choppy seas, they tune in.

In 2015, the cargo ship El Faro sank in the Atlantic Ocean with American sailors on board—a rare loss from the shrinking U.S.-flagged fleet. The Ever Given snarled Suez Canal traffic headed to Europe, affecting Western consumers and becoming a somewhat blunt metaphor for supply-chain disruptions affecting all kinds of goods. The Felicity Ace was bound for Rhode Island when it caught fire, carrying luxury cars for the U.S. market. One Porsche on board was being shipped to the editor of a popular car-review site .

Even under these circumstances, a major disaster doesn’t always make much national news. In September 2019, a car carrier called the Golden Ray, roughly the same size as the Felicity Ace, capsized in St. Simons Sound off Georgia. No cargo ship so large had sunk in U.S. coastal waters since the Exxon Valdez, and the process of breaking up the ship—one of the most expensive salvage efforts in history—concluded only in October. Outside of the trade and regional press, however, the story barely made a splash.

The pandemic could be a factor in some of these recent accidents. Every link in the supply chain, from truckers to ports to shipboard crews, is subject to strain and fatigue. When the freighter Wakashio grounded off Mauritius in 2020, two crew members had been on board for more than a year, prevented from normal rotations onto shore and trips home because of quarantine rules.

Derek Thompson: America is running out of everything

But two problems do seem to be growing: shipboard fires and containers going overboard, like the ones that sent the cookbooks to a watery grave. The reasons have nothing to do with the pandemic. First, the size of vessels continues to grow, though the crews in charge of wrangling them stay the same size. The Ever Given was one of the largest ships in the world when it launched, at 20,000 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs), a benchmark for container ships. One factor in its grounding was that the huge wall of boxes on board effectively acted as a sail, allowing the wind to drive the ship into the canal’s bank. But ships as large as 24,000 TEUs will soon join the fleet.

“Vessel size has a direct correlation to the potential size of loss,” Allianz notes. “Car transporters/RoRo and large container vessels are at higher risk of fire with the potential for greater consequences should one break out.”

Second, ships are also at greater risk of losing containers, or even sinking, when they hit unexpected storms. Climate change means that rather than being confined to specific seasons, storms can hit at any time. “The weather is getting more unpredictable, and these ships are getting bigger, so they’re stacking higher,” Konrad said. “When the ships get hit in a wave, you get a bigger lever that’s pulling the containers over.” (In a bitter environmental irony, the Felicity Ace fire has kept burning because of lithium-ion batteries on electric cars .) In other words, the recent rash of high-profile shipping snafus may be only a factor of greater attention—but a warming planet means a mounting number of disasters might be just over the horizon.

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Ship carrying thousands of luxury cars sinks in the Atlantic after burning for weeks

Jonathan Franklin

Smoke billows from the burning Felicity Ace car-transport ship as seen from a Portuguese navy vessel southeast of the mid-Atlantic Portuguese Azores islands. The large cargo vessel carrying cars from Germany to the U.S. sank in the mid-Atlantic 13 days after a fire broke out on board. Portuguese navy via AP hide caption

Smoke billows from the burning Felicity Ace car-transport ship as seen from a Portuguese navy vessel southeast of the mid-Atlantic Portuguese Azores islands. The large cargo vessel carrying cars from Germany to the U.S. sank in the mid-Atlantic 13 days after a fire broke out on board.

A large cargo ship that was carrying luxury cars from Germany to the U.S. sank Tuesday in the mid-Atlantic — nearly two weeks after a fire broke out on board, according to Portuguese navy officials.

Officials confirmed that the ship, Felicity Ace, lost stability and sank about 250 miles off Portugal's Azores islands as it was being towed to land. The ship sank in a location outside Portugal's economic zone in an area that's nearly 2 miles deep.

Navio mercante "Felicity Ace" afunda fora da Zona Económica e Exclusiva Portuguesa Hoje, durante o reboque, que se tinha iniciado no dia 24 de fevereiro, o navio "Felicity Ace" perdeu estabilidade tendo vindo a afundar-se. Notícia completa em https://t.co/dxKBKcyN2o pic.twitter.com/yZygL537uk — Marinha (@MarinhaPT) March 1, 2022

In its statement, the Portuguese navy said that only a few pieces of debris and a small amount of oil were visible where the ship sank and that tugboats were breaking up the patch of oil with hoses.

One of the vessels that had been monitoring the Felicity Ace was en route to Ponta Delgada in the Azores to pick up pollution containment equipment, Portuguese navy officials said.

The 650-foot-long vessel is capable of carrying 4,000 cars. It is unclear how many vehicles were on board the ship.

European auto manufacturers declined to comment regarding exactly how many cars and what models were on board the ship, The Associated Press reported . However, Porsche customers in the U.S. were being contacted individually by their dealership.

A burning cargo ship full of Porsches and VWs is adrift in the mid-Atlantic

"We are already working to replace every car affected by this incident and the first new cars will be built soon," Angus Fitton, vice president of public relations at Porsche Cars North America Inc., told the AP.

The Portuguese navy rescued all 22 members of the crew from the ship, which was scheduled to arrive in Davisville, R.I., on Feb. 16. The crew was taken by helicopter to Faial island in the Azores, the AP reported. None of the crew members was hurt.

Volkswagen confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that insurance has covered the loss of its vehicles, which could be at least $155 million , insurance experts told the Journal . The total estimated loss for all the cargo, which included Porsches, Bentleys, Lamborghinis and Volkswagens, is close to $440 million, the Journal reported.

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Billionaire's luxury superyacht slips from cargo ship, gets lost at sea

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The billionaire owner of a 130-foot yacht , named MY Song, is singing the blues after his vessel got lost at sea when it fell off a cargo ship.

The $38 million superyacht, which was on the last leg of a journey that began in the Caribbean, was not secured correctly by the crew, according to the company that transported her , when it fell overboard last Saturday.

The owner is Italian  billionaire Pier Luigi Loro Piana, who is heir to a luxury clothing company. Forbes magazine puts his net worth at $1.6 billion.

"For anyone who loves the sea, his boat is like a second home, and it is as if my home has burnt down," Piana, 67, told Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

ANOTHER ITALIAN VILLAGE IS SELLING HOMES FOR LESS THAN $2 

MY Song, which was built in 2016, was being transported to Ibiza to take part in the Logo Piana Superyacht Regatta, which is running in Porto Cervo from June 3 to June 6, when it broke loose over the weekend. (Baltic Yachts)

MY Song, which was built in 2016, was being transported to Ibiza to take part in the Logo Piana Superyacht Regatta, which is running in Porto Cervo from June 3 to June 6, when it broke loose over the weekend. MY Song won last year.

The yacht has since been located, with salvagers now working to prepare her for tow.

The head of Peters & May, the company that handles MY Song’s transporting, said in a statement to the press: “Upon receipt of the news Peters & May instructed the captain of the MV Brattinsborg to attempt salvage whilst 3rd party salvors were appointed."

LUXURY YACHT TESTER NEEDED FOR $93G DREAM JOB

“The vessel maintained visual contact with My Song until the air and sea search was initiated. As of 0900hr BST on 28th May 2019 the salvage attempts are still ongoing,” David Holley said.

On social media, yachting organizations and publications lamented the misfortune that befell MY Song, a star in the regatta and luxury yacht worlds. Its past honors include Best Yacht at the World Superyacht Awards. (Baltic Yachts)

“A full investigation into the cause of the incident has been launched,” he continued. “However the primary assessment is that the yacht’s cradle (owned and provided by the yacht, warrantied by the yacht for sea transport and assembled by the yacht’s crew) collapsed during the voyage from Palma to Genoa and subsequently resulted in the loss of MY Song overboard. I will add that this is the initial assessment and is subject to confirmation in due course.”

On social media, yachting organizations and publications lamented the misfortune that befell MY Song, a star in the regatta and luxury yacht worlds. Its past honors include Best Yacht at the World Superyacht Awards.

CEO and co-chairman of Italian fashion group Loro Piana, Pier Luigi Loro Piana, poses in Quarona on September 8, 2013. AFP PHOTO / GIUSEPPE CACACE (Photo credit should read GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images)

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GCaptain.com  noted that besides being an award-winning performer in competitions, MY Song was a jewel in luxuriating circles: “The interior accommodation is for six to eight guests including the owner, the focal point being a spectacular deck saloon with hull and superstructure ports, plus skylights providing panoramic outboard views.”

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Search and Rescue How To Find A Missing Boat

Oct 24, 2019 | News

Portrait of an Inessential Government Worker

Glory isn’t part of the deal when you go to work for the federal government., “i’ve only thought about one problem in my  life ,” says art allen. “which is how to improve coast guard search and rescue.”.

Art Allen – Improving Coast Guard Search & Rescue Photographer: Annie Tritt/Bloomberg

October 15, 2019, Updated on October 21, 2019 The following is adapted from a new chapter for the paperback edition of “The Fifth Risk,” which will be published by Norton in November.

I found Art Allen standing on the lawn just outside his front door, a few miles inland from some uninviting Connecticut beach. He was in his mid-60s, and a scientist — but a scientist with a man-of-action feel to him. He wore a Coast Guard Search and Rescue polo and a massive Fenix 3 GPS watch, and he had this snow-white Hemingway beard. Six canoes hung from hooks inside his garage, a scrum of mountain bikes leaned against the wall, and all looked as if they had a lot of miles on them. So did he.

For nearly 40 years, Art Allen had been the lone oceanographer inside the U.S. Coast Guard’s Search and Rescue division. Among other subjects, he had mastered the art of finding things and people lost at sea. At any given moment, all sorts of objects are drifting in the ocean, a surprising number of them Americans. The Coast Guard plucks 10 people a day out of the ocean, on average. Another three die before they’re found. Which is to say that 13 Americans, every day, need to be hauled out of the water or off some crippled sailboat or sea kayak or paddleboard. “I’ve only thought about one problem in my life,” said Art, with an odd little laugh, which sounded half like a chuckle and half like an apology for speaking up. “Which is how to improve Coast Guard search and rescue.”

I’d first learned of Art’s existence back in early 2019, during the 35-day government shutdown. About half the employees of the federal government had been deemed essential for the safety of life and property and been made to work without pay. The other half had been sent home. The line running between the two groups, the essential and the inessential, was oddly drawn. The airport people who make sure that the toiletries in your carry-on can’t be turned into a bomb were required to show up for work. The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents working undercover inside terrorist groups were told to go home. So were the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety inspectors; the people at the Environmental Protection Agency assigned to stop poison from leaking from power plants; and the hundreds of immigration court judges who would decide the fate of thousands of immigrants held in detention facilities.

During the shutdown I’d stumbled upon a very long list of federal workers who had been nominated for an obscure  public-service award called the Sammies . Virtually all the people on the list had been laid off without pay and more or less told by their society that their work was not all that important. I wondered what it felt like to be at once up for an award for one’s work, and required by law not to do it. The list was in alphabetical order. At the top was Arthur A. Allen.

Art hadn’t set out in life to save people at sea; he hadn’t actually set out to do anything in particular except to be a scientist. “I think I was always going to be a scientist,” he said. “Science is driven by the love of the subject. I have an aunt who studies the genetics of mushrooms. I don’t know why she finds mushroom genetics beautiful and fascinating, but she does.” What Art had always found beautiful and fascinating was water. He’d grown up on the New York side of Lake Champlain, and even as a little kid his idea of fun was to dig tunnels to drain snow ponds. He went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and designed his own major, aquatic science and engineering. From there, he went into a graduate program in physical oceanography at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. “Oceanographers come in two flavors,” he said, with the same odd little apology-chuckle. “To find out which one you are, they send you to sea for a couple of weeks. And you either become a theoretical oceanographer — because you throw up a lot. Or you become a field guy. And I was particularly gifted with a strong  stomach .”

Book about a Mexican fisherman who survived for 438 days alone on a raft at sea Photographer: Annie Tritt/Bloomberg

He was also particularly gifted at finding things out. “That was one of my strengths,” he said, but without his odd little laugh. “I could get good data out of the sea.”

The question at the  start  of Art’s career, back in 1984, was where to apply that strength. He’d seen an ad placed by the Coast Guard for a junior researcher, and while the idea of government work wasn’t as off-putting in the early 1980s as it would become in, say, 2019, Art didn’t really think of himself as a government guy. He certainly didn’t have any sense of being on some mission. “I thought I’d give it six months,” he said.

Just then the Coast Guard was trying to figure out how to improve its ability to spot objects on the ocean surface from its planes and helicopters. It was a little shocking how hard it was to see even a small boat from 1,000 feet; if you flew over and didn’t see it, you might never look there again. To see better, there wasn’t much the Coast Guard wasn’t willing to try. Not long before Art arrived, for instance, it’d attempted to train pigeons, riding in cages attached to Coast Guard aircraft, to respond to any orange object in the ocean by pecking at an alarm. The pigeons seemed to have natural advantages over humans as spotters of objects lost at sea. Their  vision  was sharper, and they never got bored or distracted. The pigeons didn’t miss a thing, which turned out to be their downfall. “The problem was that there are orange things that aren’t survivors and things not wearing orange that are survivors,” said Art. “The pigeons drove the pilots crazy.”

By the time Art arrived, the pigeons were gone, replaced by questions that Art did his best to answer. For example, the Coast Guard wanted to know the odds of a plane flying at 500 feet over some object actually spotting that object, so Art threw stuff in the water and made people fly over it and try to see it. The Coast Guard wanted him to find better ways to measure ocean currents and winds, so Art built and bought better gadgets to measure them. The Coast Guard needed a device that might better track what was happening to currents at the last known position of some boat or person. Art helped invent a new buoy to do the job.

When a Coast Guard commander looking for a guy lost at sea, and presumed to be floating on a life raft made by the Elliot company, realized that he didn’t really know what an Elliot life raft looked like, or how fast it might travel in relation to the wind compared to life rafts better known to the Coast Guard, he called Art and asked him — and Art called a facility in Essex, Connecticut, that certified life rafts and had them send him a brochure for one. “I’m just looking at it as a pure scientist,” said Art. “They want to know how these objects drift in the ocean, so I figure out how they drift in the ocean.”

In June 2002, off the southern shore of Long Island, a fishing boat was swamped in a storm and threw the four men on it into 60-degree waters. The men had been competing in a shark-fishing tournament when the storm came through. There were a couple of Mustang survival suits on the boat — not enough for all the men. Before they’d capsized, the men had sent a distress signal that was picked up by a Coast Guard station in New Jersey, but the signal was fuzzy and the Coast Guard had no idea where the men were or even, really, if they were in trouble. The real search didn’t get going until that night, when the boat failed to return to port. It lasted four days.

A human can survive in cold water for maybe 36 hours, even inside a Mustang suit, but the Mustang suit company told the men’s families that anyone wearing the suit could last for eight days. The families implored the Coast Guard to keep looking long past the point the Coast Guard thought there was any point in doing so. Three of the men were never found. The body of the fourth was discovered a week later by a fishing boat 30 miles off the New Jersey coast.

When it was over, the people who had failed to find the men called Art with a question: Who’s right, us or the Mustang company? Art looked into the hypothermia models used by the Coast Guard and found they had some problems, apart from the issues raised by the suit. The service made no allowance for the clothing a person might be wearing under the suit, for instance, or his body fat. It assumed the weather was constant throughout the search and that nights in the water were the same as days in the water. “This was another area of Coast Guard ignorance,” said Art. “Survivability.”

Art sought out scientists who had studied hypothermia, and collected what was known on the subject. Even if they’d been wearing the Mustang suits, he concluded, the men almost certainly would have died within two days. These studies suggested to Art that the old Coast Guard models had been, if anything, optimistic about the ability of human beings floating in ocean water to survive. Never mind hypothermia. A person could go only three days without water and 62 hours without sleep before he lost the ability to keep himself alive. But what really struck Art Allen about the whole incident was that “no one really knew.” No one knew how a Mustang suit, or anything else you might be wearing, might affect your ability to survive. Not even the scientists who studied hypothermia.

Art had started his career as a junior researcher, but a decade into it he was the lone oceanographer inside Coast Guard Search and Rescue. And he began to notice something: The people engaged in rescuing Americans at sea were turning to him for answers to questions he’d never been asked. The questions put to him weren’t questions to which he should obviously know the answer. “It occurred to me,” said Art, “that I was getting these questions. And I realize that if I don’t know the answers, no one does.”

People were coming to him because they had nowhere else to go. “Rather than being the wide-eyed scientist in the background, suddenly I’m being asked for my opinions,” said Art. “It was like they thought, There’s this bearded oceanographer guy out there; maybe he knows.” Usually he didn’t know, but he had his talent for creating knowledge.

The biggest thing that no one knew, he decided, was how various objects drifted at sea. The ocean never stopped moving. Every object was pulled and pushed along by currents and winds. And so if you wanted to know where an object might be that had been spotted, say, five hours ago 20 miles due east of Cape Hatteras, you needed to know the winds and the currents off Cape Hatteras in the intervening five hours.

But that knowledge wasn’t enough: You also needed to know exactly what the object was and how it interacted with the forces of nature. Leeway was the technical term for the difference between the movement of an object and the current that pulled it along. “The Coast Guard has always been interested in physical oceanography — oil spills and icebergs,” said Art. “You got stuff that gets into the water and you want to predict where it’s going to go.” Even if they started in the same place, a disabled fishing trawler and a sea kayak might soon be many miles apart.

Art Allen set out to find what was known on the subject. Shockingly little, it turned out. The history of search and rescue at sea is mostly the story of people neither being searched for nor being rescued. For most of human history, lost at sea meant gone for good.

“It really only started during World War II,” said Art. “There was not much looking for people at sea until we started losing pilots in the Pacific.” Scouring the literature, he found that there was really only one good study of leeway. A Coast Guard commander named W.E. Chapline, who had been stationed in Hawaii in the late 1950s, had grown sufficiently weary of not finding people that he had made tests on the few objects on which people lost in the South Pacific tended to float: a surfboard, a sampan, a small fishing boat.

“Estimating the Drift of Distressed Small Craft” was published in 1960, in the Coast Guard Alumni Association Bulletin. It was 2 1/2 pages long and wholly original and, like a lot of things wholly original, had its limitations, which the author hinted at. “It was difficult at times to obtain sufficient volunteers from among the local small boat owners,” he wrote, “due mainly to the discomfort involved while drifting, the relatively small size of the local Coast Guard Auxiliary, and generally small number of boats available in Hawaii.

Otherwise, the short paper was inspiring, at least to Art. It had been done with care, by a man clearly aware that it might one day be the difference between life and death. It contained new insight — like the fact that a lot of boats don’t make their leeway directly downwind. “I’m reading this and I’m saying, ‘Right on, guy!’” recalled Art. There was no reason that Art Allen, Coast Guard oceanographer, could not study every object on which people might drift upon the sea, and reduce to a mathematical equation how each of those objects moved through the water. There was no reason these equations might not be plugged into every search-and-rescue plan. If you knew where some object had been, and when it had been there, you could predict more or less exactly where it was at the moment you needed to find it. If you knew the currents and the winds — which the Coast Guard usually did — all you needed was leeway.

Norwegian operational drift model using Art Allen’s equations. Source: “US Coast Guard Search and Rescue Mission & Operational Oceanography: History, Model Skill, Future Work” by Art Allen via Forum for Operational Oceanography

Without anyone particularly noticing, or caring, Art gathered every object ever studied — the ones in Chapline’s paper, some stuff the Japanese had tested, and objects that had been tossed into the ocean by the Coast Guard and observed. To these, he added 45 or so objects that he’d studied himself, usually after the Coast Guard had failed to find someone said to be adrift upon them. When he was finished, he had a list of 95 different objects: a Tulmar four-person life raft, a 12.5-meter Korean fishing vessel, a Japanese 13-person life raft, a sea kayak, a 100-gallon ice chest, a 65-foot sailboat, a windsurfing board, a Cuban refugee raft with a sail, a Cuban refugee raft without a sail, an airplane evacuation slide raft that Art had persuaded Delta Air Lines to lend him, and so on.

Some items were redundant. Art’s list ultimately reduced itself to 63 classes of objects. For each, Art created equations to describe their drift. The idea was to build the equivalent of those charts you point to when you ask the airline to find your bags: The greater the range of choices, the more likely you will find a bag that resembles your own — and the people who are looking for it can identify it. The thing that was lost might not be exactly like the thing that had been studied, but the closer it was, the more quickly and surely the Coast Guard could design the search for it.

In 1999, Art Allen published everything he knew in a 351-page treatise called “Review of Leeway.” “I only hope that this report is up to the highest standards that were set by W.E. Chapline in 1960,” he wrote in his dedication. Such was his respect for what Chapline had done that Art retyped Chapline’s paper and inserted it into the back of his own. “Review of Leeway” became required reading for anyone going through the National Search and Rescue School. It made Art Allen slightly famous, in his small world. Search and rescue people in other countries began to call and ask him to come and speak to them, or help them with some specific problem.

Even after Art published his treatise, he wasn’t totally sure that it was having its intended effect. The search and rescue people could now, in theory, use Art’s equations in their searches. But they didn’t have a simple computer program that did the work for them, so it was unclear just how the stuff he had learned was being applied. The truth was that, 15 years into his career, Art still didn’t know exactly what happened in the heat of a rescue because he’d never been on the scene during a search. In May 2001, that changed, after a commander in a field office called and asked him if he’d like to see what they did. “That was the first time I got out of the office,” said Art.

The invitation had come from the office in Portsmouth, Virginia. The idea was that Art would spend the first weekend in May with the SAR operator, the person who coordinated the search and rescues in that particular Coast Guard district. The forecast for the weekend was sunny, warm and unthreatening. When Art turned up late in the afternoon, it didn’t really seem like anything would happen. But not long after he sat down with the search and rescue guy, all hell broke loose. There were a bunch of calls for help, one right after another. One boat had run aground. Another boat had caught fire. Yet another boat had capsized and several people had gone overboard in the Chesapeake Bay.

Across the water people were coming to grief. “What had happened was a dry cold front had come through and no one had seen it,” said Art. The search and rescue operator was dispatching helicopters and cutters as fast as he could, and saving one person after another. For help, he had only a crude computer tool and was having to make a lot of calculations by hand. Art was impressed, but after six hours of drama he could see the guy tiring. “And after all of this,” said Art, “someone calls in at the end of the day and says, ‘We have an overdue sailboat.’”

The overdue sailboat’s last known position was a beach it had left that morning. Its intended destination had been the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It was 20 feet long and equipped with life vests. On board were a man and two women in their 40s, and a 9-year-old girl.

Just how weary the search and rescue guy had become revealed itself when he tried to use a satellite picture to zoom in on the Chesapeake Bay only to realize, after a very long beat, that he was actually staring at the mouth of the Yangtze River in China. Art watched this obviously overwhelmed young man plug crude information into his crude computer tool. He had a fair description of these people’s plans but his program didn’t allow him to input a voyage. Nor could he find good data on the winds over the water — he finally pulled something from an anemometer at a nearby state park. He didn’t even have a good reading of the tides in the bay. On top of all this, he had no drift equations for a swamped skiff, as Art hadn’t studied one. The equations the guy was using came from work on a drifting sailboat done by Chapline in 1960. “I could see he couldn’t adequately plan the search,” said Art. “The tool he’d been given could not help him do what he needed to do.”

Students in immersion suits climb into a raft as part of a safety and survival training program, US Coast Guard Sector Northern New England, Maine Photographer: Gordon Chibroski/Portland Press Herald

And so the Coast Guard went looking for something without any real idea of where it was. The helicopters and an 87-foot cutter searched through the night, and found nothing. Not until the following morning did the sailboat appear, upside down, a long way from where the Coast Guard had been searching. A fishing boat spotted it. Two adults were in the water beside the boat, alive. A 42-year-old woman and her 9-year-old daughter, both wearing life vests, were taken off the hull. They’d gone hypothermic. A few hours later, at a local hospital, both were pronounced dead.

Art had stayed late into the night and seen all this unfold, in real time. “I watched this happen,” he said, rising from his dining room table. We’d been sitting there talking for maybe five hours before he’d thought to mention the incident. “These two were the same age as my wife and daughter,” said Art — and suddenly he was fighting back tears.

He turned to a stack of papers on a bookshelf. He wasn’t a big keeper of memorabilia. He had some books given to him by a Norwegian search and rescue person grateful for the Norwegian lives he had helped to save. He had a coffee mug with a poem in Mandarin — a tribute to Art, written by the Taiwanese search and rescue people, to thank him for saving Taiwanese lives. The newspaper clipping he now produced was not part of some larger collection of clippings. It was a yellowing edition of the Virginian-Pilot, dated May 7, 2001. A front-page article told the story of Jennifer Curtis Byler, 42, and Sarah Byler, 9. “I was just … ” said Art, haltingly. “This was just a real kick in the teeth for me. For me, it was a real turning point.”

Art’s brother, an electrical engineer, was fond of saying that “a good scientist asks the right question and a good engineer solves the right problem.” Art didn’t put it quite this way, but up until May 5, 2001, he’d been more scientist than engineer. On that day, he saw that the Coast Guard needed him to be both. It wasn’t enough to ask, or even to answer, the questions; he would need to solve the problems. Every day there were more and more data that might be used to find people lost at sea that either wasn’t available or was hard to use.

Both the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made observations of winds, currents and water temperature. There were Art’s own studies of leeway, and his equations that described how different objects drifted at sea. What was needed was a computer tool, as simple to use as TurboTax, which instantly grabbed all the relevant data and turned it into a prediction. If Art had been more senior, or more persuasive, he would have created a PowerPoint presentation to sell his superiors on the idea. “I said, ‘I’m not particularly good at making verbal arguments. But I can build something.’”

Four years later, the Coast Guard had a prototype. It would soon be the envy of the search and rescue world. SAROPS, it was called: Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. Art hadn’t built it by himself, of course. No one built anything by himself. But he had taken the lead on most of it and made sure that key information was at the fingertips of search and rescue teams. The SAR operator could now enter a detailed description of the search — two officers, say, peering down from a C-130 flying at 1,000 feet — and SAROPS could calculate the probability of the officers having seen what they were looking for, so they could decide if it made sense to fly over the same patch of ocean again.

The searchers could enter the height, weight and clothing of a person floating in the ocean and, along with the water temperature, figure out how long that person had to live — and so, in the bargain, find out when it was time to call off a search. They could enter the last known location of an object and, because Art had almost certainly studied its leeway, predict how it would move in relation to the winds and the currents.

Often the Coast Guard was unsure exactly what it was looking for. Upright sailboat or an overturned one? A disabled trawler or five fishermen in the water? Now officers could plug multiple objects into their tool and visualize several searches at once. Art’s curious science had yielded information that people could act on.

Search area developed by SAROPS watchstanders looking for a man who went missing in a plane crash off American Samoa in 2014 Source: U.S. Coast Guard

The Coast Guard rolled out its new search tool in early 2007. Art spent two days at each of the service’s nine districts teaching people how to use it — showing them what it was, and what it was not. It was not a simple deterministic device. It did not offer up one distinct answer but a map of probabilities that allowed rescue teams to allocate their search resources in the most likely places. The field people for their part couldn’t quite believe how much more quickly and accurately the new tool allowed them to figure out where in the ocean to look for whatever had gone missing. “The old way took forever to do — it almost took longer to do than the search itself,” said Paul Webb, who ran Coast Guard search and rescue operations in the Alaska district. “You used to launch the planes with a guess. Now you have a search location before the plane is in the air.”

The United States had always been a leader in search and rescue; our country has made more of a priority than any other of saving its citizens at sea. If you were lost at sea there was never much of a question which country you wanted to have looking for you. Now the United States was in a class by itself. Even as Art ran around the country unveiling the new tool, stuff happened that astonished search and rescue people.

For instance, less than an hour past midnight on March 16, 2007, an overweight 35-year-old man who’d had too much to drink tumbled off the balcony of his cabin on a Carnival Cruise ship and into the Atlantic Ocean. But here’s the thing: The man didn’t die. On land, fat will kill you. At sea, it can save your life — and not because it keeps you warm. “Everyone floats,” explained Art, “but the fatter you are the further your mouth is from the water line.”

Someone on the ship, which was 30 miles off the Florida coast, had seen the man go into the dark water and told the captain. The captain had notified the Coast Guard and so the Coast Guard knew roughly where and when the man had splashed down. Still. Spotting a person without a life jacket in the ocean was, as Art put it, “like looking for a soccer ball in Connecticut.”

But now the Coast Guard had a much better idea where to look. The searchers knew the currents and they knew how the man’s body would move in relation to them: his leeway. Interestingly, before Art came along, the assumption was that a person in the water had no leeway. A body was assumed to simply drift with the current. Art had proved that wasn’t true. People didn’t drift exactly with the current and the nature of their drift varied with their circumstances. By the time the man fell off the cruise ship, Art had studied five cases: a person with a life jacket, a person with no life jacket, a person in a scuba suit, a person in a survival suit and a dead person. The people running the rescue plugged in the equations Art had provided for a person with no life jacket. And in March 2007, the following item appeared on a blog under “Cruise and Ferry Passengers and Crew Overboard”:

A 35-year-old man was rescued approximately eight hours after jumping or falling overboard from the ship when it was 30 miles east of Fort Lauderdale. A witness said that the man, who was intoxicated, ran through a window and then fell 60 feet into the ocean — it is not clear whether the window was open at the time. The ship was en route to Nassau and will arrive slightly behind schedule.

They’d found the man 15 miles from his point of entry, floating in the ocean. Had he gone overboard at just about any previous moment in human history, he likely never would have been found. Now the pictures of him flopping down naked but alive on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter were on the front pages of Florida newspapers. With the exception of a great piece in the Baltimore Sun, which described this magical new Coast Guard search tool, the articles mostly told the story of the guy’s miraculous survival. They never even asked the question of exactly how he’d been found.

The answer to that question, at least to the people now using SAROPS, was obvious: Art Allen.

Of course, there was no scientific study to determine the value of Art Allen. “We never take someone and say, ‘Sorry, we’re throwing you back in the ocean and we’re using the old methods to see if we find you,’” said Art. But the response of the people in the field to the new tool was shockingly enthusiastic. “The survivors don’t know what saved them but they owe their lives to Art,” said Geoff Pagels, who runs Coast Guard search and rescue out of Portsmouth. “It’s monumental.”

Despite all the lives saved, Art’s mind found it difficult to move on from the lives that had been lost. The night we were talking in his kitchen, he told me a story: Not long after he had the first working version of SAROPS, he re-created the search for the sailboat that had gone missing in the Chesapeake back in 2001. The new tool automatically pulled in better wind data, as well as the currents and tides, from the day the boat was lost. It knew when the dry cold front swept across the bay and so could estimate when, and where, the boat capsized, and tossed the 9-year-old girl and her mother into the chilly waters. It used Art’s equations for a drifting sailboat — drawing on data that Art had himself harvested. It took only a couple of minutes before up on the screen popped the most likely track the boat had taken. “It took you right to where they’d been,” said Art.

In the fall of 2016, Art told the Coast Guard of his intention to retire in 18 months. When the time came for Art to go in the spring of 2018, the Coast Guard was unprepared. It hadn’t hired his replacement or even given him a junior scientist to train. Like the rest of the federal government, the Coast Guard was aging. At the end of 2018, around the time of the big government shutdown, 18 percent of the civilians employed by the U.S. government became eligible for retirement, and you had to wonder how many Art Allens were walking out the door and not being replaced. What was happening inside, say, the State Department, or the Bureau of Land Management, or the Food and Drug Administration? Art decided to delay his retirement for a year simply because there wasn’t anyone in search and rescue who knew what he knew.

It’s curious how knowledge is at once so hard to create and so easily taken for granted. And in truth it was hard to say exactly what would be lost with Art’s retirement. When the people in the field called Art Allen with a question, it was usually after something had gone wrong. “When things aren’t going right, that’s when I get a call,” said Art. “If things are going right, they don’t need me.” But there were still times that things didn’t go right.

Just before the government shutdown that had pronounced Art inessential, he’d received a call from the Miami district, which had been looking for a missing scuba diver off the Florida coast. Two male scuba divers, one in his 50s, the other in his 20s, had emerged from a dive to find their boat, and its driver, specks in the distance, and strong currents pulling them ever further apart. They were 18 miles from shore. The younger diver decided to swim toward the boat and get help. He never would have made it, but that didn’t matter, as he was rescued by the Coast Guard before he arrived. But in the meantime, the sun had set. The other diver was still out there, alone in the dark, presumably drifting as described by one of Art’s equations.

Art got the call from the search and rescue people that night, after they’d searched the area that SAROPS told them to search and found nothing. A thought occurred to Art that hadn’t occurred to the rescue squad: The guy was trying to swim to shore. Eighteen miles away! The Coast Guard knew, from his fellow diver, that the guy had a scuba suit and orange pool noodles to help keep him afloat. He also had a compass. Art said, Broaden the search, and look closer to shore. “This wasn’t science,” Art said. “It was What would I do if I was in his position?”

The Coast Guard found the diver. “This guy was a survivor,” said Art. “He used his compass. He flipped his mask up and used it to catch rainwater.” On the other hand the guy was still 9 miles from shore, and it was unclear if he was ever going to reach it.

Storage closet where Art Allen kept his gear Photographer: Annie Tritt/Bloomberg

Many months after the Florida incident, and three months into his retirement, Art took me to see his old office in New London, Connecticut. He’d turned over the little access card that opened the front door, so an old friend had to come down and let us in. Art led me down a long hall with shiny white floors and no sign of human life and into a storage closet, where he’d kept his gear. He seemed sort of pleased, but also a little sad, that it was just as he’d left it: the current meters and anemometers and PVC pipes and mannequins still dressed in life vests. Even the orange pool noodles he’d used when studying the progress of ocean swimmers remained coiled where he’d left them, in the corner.

We then climbed three flights of stairs to his old office, not much bigger than a cubicle and sealed with partition walls. At first glance it looked like what it was: an impersonal government office vacated months earlier by some anonymous public servant, waiting for its next occupant. Keys dangled from file cabinet keyholes; reference books filled the shelves.

At second glance, it was still very much a specific person’s office. The fingers of a ghoulish gray rubber Halloween hand poked out of one of the file cabinets. (“It looks like a hypothermia victim,” said Art, by way of explanation.) Upon inspection the books, too, were singular. One was about a Mexican fisherman who had survived for 438 days alone on a raft at sea. The author had sent it to Art to thank him for verifying that the raft could have indeed drifted as the fisherman described (and everyone else doubted).

I grabbed a pamphlet from a stack on a shelf. “The Leeway of Cuban Refugee Rafts and a Commercial Fishing Vessel,” by Art Allen. “There was an earlier study that said it drifted at 4 percent of the speed of the wind and I came up with 3.98 percent,” said Art, with his odd little laugh. “So what did I add?” Under that pamphlet were other pamphlets — all by Art. At the bottom was his 351-page treatise on the leeway of 95 more objects. On the cover was a note. “To my successor:” Art had scrawled in thick black ink. “You will find this report will provide a good background on the search objects in SARS. All the best, my friend. Art Allen.”

“It’s really kind of sad, isn’t it?” he said.

Art Allen had done what he’d done without asking for much for himself. Back in 1984, as a GS-11, he’d been paid less than $30,000 a year. After 35 years, he’d risen to a GS-14, and he’d been paid a bit more than $100,000. He hadn’t even expected the attention of others, outside his small circle of search and rescue people. It was nice that the Taiwanese coast guard wrote poems about him. But that sort of thing rarely happened here, in the United States. And he didn’t expect it to happen: Glory wasn’t part of the deal when you went to work for the federal government. Stability, on the other hand, was. He’d never expected to be chased from his job.

There’d been a moment, a few years earlier, that captured the spirit of Art Allen’s relationship to the society he’d tried to save. He’d flown to Long Beach, California, to help the Coast Guard search and rescue people there upgrade their search and rescue tool. Purely by accident, he’d arrived on the day a ceremony was being held to honor the heroes of a recent rescue. A few months earlier, a Los Angeles man had fallen off the back of his brother’s fishing boat, without anyone noticing what had happened. He’d floated in the Pacific for seven hours. The Coast Guard had plucked him from the water in the middle of the night.

On the day of Art Allen’s visit, the guy who’d been rescued had returned to the Coast Guard station to thank his rescuers. His visit had attracted the interest of local media. A bunch of TV cameras were there to witness the moment as the guy broke down and confessed that the experience of floating for hours in the darkness, and then by some miracle being saved, had left him a changed man. He’d quit smoking and lost 30 pounds and tried to help other people in distress.

Art stood off to one side, respectfully, and watched as the television cameras turned their attention from the man to the Coast Guard patrol that had saved him. “Against all odds, the crew detected yelling and a faint whistle in the darkness,” someone said into a microphone as the patrollers stepped forward, in turn, to receive their medals. Just then an older Coast Guard guy who had worked with Art Allen for many years leaned over and whispered to him, but to him alone: “Nice job.”

Michael Lewis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and his books include “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” and “Liar’s Poker.”This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Bloomberg Opinion: Politics & Policy By Michael Lewis , [email protected] October 15, 2019, 5:00 AM EDT  Updated on  October 21, 2019, 2:59 PM EDT To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Shipley at  [email protected]

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9 Unbelievable True Stories About People Who Survived Being Lost at Sea

The sea can be harsh and unforgiving. These fortunate souls fought back against all odds.

→ Think you can survive anything? Let's brush up on our skills together.

A shipwreck out on the open ocean can be a death sentence. If a rescue team doesn't come in the first 48 hours, it probably never will. Learning to survive will take skill, courage, and a heaping of luck.

Here are nine stories of brave people who got lost at sea, and survived despite the odds.

(The following maps are only rough approximations of route and distance traveled.)

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Filo Filo, Etueni Nasau, and Samu Pelesa

In many Pacific island chains, people use small boats to sail from one island to the next. The islands are close enough together that sailing from one to the other is a relatively simple, cheap, and straightforward mode of travel.

For three teenage boys on the small island of Tokelau, sailing was routine. However, when Filo Filo, Etueni Nasau, and Samu Pelesa set sail on October 5, 2010, it would be a longer trip than any of them were expecting.

Shortly after sailing into the ocean, the three teens lost sight of the shore and became disoriented. Not knowing which way was home, the group became lost, drifting further and further from land.

They had brought enough water with them for two days, but that quickly ran out and they had to rely on rainwater . After a few weeks—with no food and no sign of rescue—they grew desperate enough to catch a bird and eat it.

Meanwhile, after a month with no news, their community believed that the boys were dead. Around 500 people attended a memorial service for the boys, representing about a third of the total population of the island chain.

Having spent more than a month adrift at sea, the three boys had no food and no water, and were suffering from extreme exposure. Their situation was so dire that they began drinking seawater , a sure sign that death is near. With only days or even hours left to live, a fishing boat halfway between Samoa and Fiji spotted them. They had drifted over 500 miles.

The sailor rescued the three boys and took them to a hospital in Fiji, and then back to their homes on Tokelau. They had been lost at sea for 50 days in total.

Brad Cavanagh and Deborah Kiley

Deborah Kiley was no stranger to the seas. She had spent most of her life working as a crew member on yachts around the world. So, she thought that signing up to crew the 58-foot sailing yacht Trashman in October of 1982 was just another job. It would turn out to be anything but .

John Lippoth, the captain of the ship, brought his girlfriend Meg Mooney along for the ride. The two other crew members on the trip were Mark Adams and Brad Cavanagh. The plan was to take the yacht from Annapolis, Maryland down to Florida to meet up with its owner.

The first half of the trip was pretty smooth sailing, although Kiley started noticing things that made her uneasy. Lippoth kept making excuses to go below deck, for instance, and Kiley soon realized that their captain was afraid of the ocean . Lippoth and Adams also spent the entire voyage completely drunk. Of the five people on that yacht, only Kiley and Cavanagh were experienced, capable sailors.

After the boat passed North Carolina, the trip took a turn for the worst. A massive storm appeared out of nowhere, and Trashman headed right into the heart of it. Kiley recalls wind speeds of over 70 knots, and 40-foot waves so powerful they ripped holes in the boat. Two days after they set sail, the yacht, torn apart by the sea, began to sink.

The crew managed to make it to a lifeboat , but not before the ship's rigging seriously injured Mooney, leaving severe lacerations on her arms and legs. Her bleeding attracted sharks, who followed the lifeboat for the remainder of the journey. The crew found themselves adrift with no supplies or water, miles from land.

Two days after the Trashman sunk, Lippoth and Adams, already dehydrated from alcohol and dying of thirst, began drinking seawater. They started hallucinating and rambling incoherently. On the third day, Lippoth—in a state of delirium—jumped into the water and attempted to swim to shore. He was immediately attacked and killed by the sharks . Soon, Adams jumped overboard as well, muttering something about going to get some cigarettes. The sharks attacked him also, so violently that the boat spun around and the water turned red.

That night, Mooney succumbed to her injuries, dying of blood poisoning. Kiley and Cavanagh, the only two left, had to toss her body overboard where she, too, was eaten by sharks. Shortly after, Kiley and Cavanagh, close to death themselves, were spotted by a Russian cargo ship off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The crew rescued them four days after they abandoned ship, and five days after setting sail.

Steven Callahan

Steven Callahan is an expert on sailing. Specifically, a naval architect who has been sailing ships since he was young. He even built his own boat, called the Napoleon Solo , and set sail from Rhode Island in 1981. His travels led him all over the Atlantic: first to Bermuda, and then to the coast of Europe. On his way back, bound for Antigua, he ran into trouble .

About a week after he set sail for home, a storm started brewing. The storm was relatively mild, and Callahan said he wasn't worried. But his boat hit something that tore a gaping hole in the bottom. Callahan suspected it was either a whale or a large shark.

The boat began filling up with water, and Callahan made it to his inflatable raft. But he needed the emergency supplies in the cabin, which was already underwater. Diving in again and again, he managed to retrieve food, water, flares, a spear gun, solar stills, and a handful of other items. All in all, he was particularly well-equipped to be adrift.

And a good thing too, because Callahan drifted on his raft for 76 days. During that time, he faced threats from starvation, dehydration, sharks, and raft punctures. Finally, some sailors off the coast of Marie-Galante, near Guadalupe, spotted him. He had lost a third of his weight and could barely stand, so they took him to a hospital for treatment. However, Callahan didn't even stay the night, opting instead to recuperate on the island, while hitchhiking throughout the West Indies.

Much later, Steven Callahan would work as an advisor on the movie Life of Pi , providing his sea survival expertise to make the film more realistic.

Poon Lim holds the world record for the longest survival on a life raft. It's not a record he hopes anyone will ever beat.

Poon was a Chinese sailor on the British Merchant vessel SS Benlomond during WWII. The ship had left Cape Town, South Africa on its way to New York when a German U-boat attacked it a few hundred miles off the coast of Brazil. That encounter destroyed the ship, but Poon managed to escape with a life jacket. He was the ship's sole survivor.

After about two hours, Poon found a small wooden raft and climbed aboard. Amazingly, the raft contained some survival supplies , like food, water, and flares. But as the days turned into weeks, and his food started to run low, Poon had to improvise.

He began by crafting a makeshift fishing hook and catching fish. With his new food supply and the water from his raft, he felt he might be able to make it. He still had his flares, and all he had to do was wait for a ship to come close.

Then things took a turn for the worst. A storm hit, and Poon lost all his food and water. With no supplies, and close to death, Poon had to go to extremes to survive. With the last of his strength, he caught a passing bird and killed it, drinking its blood to quench his thirst.

Poon realized that if he was going to survive, he would need a more permanent water source. The only one available happened to be protected by many sharp teeth. Still, Poon strengthened his fishing line and started trying to catch sharks. He managed to hook one, and brought it onboard. He drank the blood from the shark's liver to sustain himself.

After 133 days, Poon drifted close to the shore of Brazil, where some fishermen rescued him, and took him to a hospital to recover. Despite being lost at sea for almost half a year, he had only lost around 20 pounds and could walk by himself.

Maurice and Marilyn Bailey

In 1973, Maurice and Marilyn Bailey were planning to live out their dream of moving from their home in England to New Zealand. They sold their house, bought a yacht, and set sail with their possessions. They believed the trip would be a pleasant journey. They were wrong .

The first half of their voyage went well, and they passed through the Panama Canal in February of that year. Soon after, they ran into trouble, or more accurately, trouble ran into them.

While both of the Baileys were below deck, they felt a massive impact. Rushing onto the deck, the couple saw a whale diving below the water and a large hole in their hull. The ship quickly began to sink, and the Baileys grabbed what little they could and headed for their life raft.

The couple was stranded in the Pacific with a few days' worth of food, a compass , some flares, and little else. They collected rainwater to drink, and when their food ran out, they ate birds, fish, and even turtles.

During their time at sea, they spotted seven ships, which they attempted to signal, but no one noticed them. As the weeks stretched into months, they became badly sunburned and malnourished. Their life raft started to deflate, they were plagued by sharks, and they suffered multiple storms.

After 117 days stranded at sea, with no supplies and near the brink of death, they were finally rescued. A passing Korean ship spotted them in the water and changed course to bring them aboard. They could barely move and they were so weak that they couldn't eat solid foods.

The Korean ship dropped the Baileys off at Hawaii, where they immediately vowed to build another yacht and return to the sea, because they clearly didn't get the message the first time. With the proceeds from the book they wrote about their experiences, they did indeed build a second yacht, and spent years sailing around the world comparatively uneventfully.

Rose Noelle Crew

John Glennie, Rick Hellriegel, Jim Nalepka, and Phil Hofman were four friends who decided to take a winter vacation to the island of Tonga. They left on their ship, the Rose Noelle , and hoped for smooth sailing .

On June 4, 1989, three days after they set sail, a massive wave came out of nowhere and hit the ship, flipping it completely upside down and severely damaging it. The crew found themselves trapped in the ship's cabin, which began rapidly filling with water.

They set off a signal beacon in an attempt to get help, but the beacon went unanswered. Alone and trapped in a dark cabin, the crew had to chop a hole in the hull of the ship to escape. Fortunately the Rose Noelle , though now upside down, did not completely sink, and its wreckage served as a twisted vessel on which the men could still float.

A week later, with supplies running out, the signal beacon stopped working, still with no response or rescue. The crew were on their own.

After the ship's water reserves ran out, the crew rigged up a system to collect rainwater and started catching fish for food. They were still adrift, they had food, water, and shelter, so they were in no immediate danger as long as the weather didn't turn.

They drifted in this manner for weeks without rescue. Glennie began diving into the wreckage to recover pieces of the ship they could use. He managed to recover a gas cooker so the four men could have occasional barbecues.

On September 30, 118 days after they were set adrift, the four castaways and the wreckage of the Rose Noelle washed up on a beach in New Zealand. They were extremely lucky. A few months later, the wind and water currents would have taken them in the direction of South America.

Even the location on the beach where they washed ashore was fortunate. A few dozen yards to the left or right were rocky cliffs, and if the ship had landed there, it would have broken apart on the rocks.

Salvador Alvarenga

José Salvador Alvarenga holds the record for the longest solo survival at sea. He was adrift for 438 days, and traveled over 6,700 miles.

Alvarenga is a fisherman, and on November 17, 2012, he set sail from the fishing village of Costa Azul in Mexico. With him was Ezequiel Córdoba, another fisherman, whom Alvarenga had never worked with before.

Shortly after departing the shore, a storm hit their boat. It blew the ship off course, and damaged the motor and most of the electronics onboard. Alvarenga managed to contact his boss on the radio before it died, but he was unable to help.

The storm lasted for five days. When it ended, Alvarenga and Córdoba had no idea where they were or how to get home. The storm had destroyed most of their fishing gear, leaving them with only basic supplies. And with no motor, no sails, and no oars , their boat was adrift.

The two drifted for months, surviving on rainwater and catching sea animals like fish, turtles, and birds. After four months, Córdoba gave up hope. He stopped eating, and starved to death. Alvarenga says he considered giving up too, but persevered.

Even after four months at sea, Alvarenga was not even halfway through his ordeal. He tried signaling every ship he saw, but none of them spotted him. He continued surviving off rainwater and sea animals, and kept track of the time by the phases of the moon.

More than a year after the storm that set him adrift, Alvarenga spotted land. He abandoned his boat and swam for the shore, and found himself on one of the Marshall islands, on the other side of the Pacific from where he started. He was taken to a hospital, where he made a full recovery.

Louis Zamperini

Louis Zamperini first made national headlines in 1938 when he traveled to Berlin to compete in the Olympics. He ran in the 500-meter dash and placed 8th, which is more than enough to earn a spot in the history books. But Zamperini wasn't done yet .

In 1941, just a few months prior to Pearl Harbor, Zamperini enlisted in the United States military. He became a second lieutenant in the Air Force, and when the war began, he was deployed as a bombardier in the Pacific.

In 1943, during a search-and-rescue mission, his bomber suffered a mechanical failure that brought it down. It crashed in the ocean, and eight of the 11 crew members died. The three that survived were Zamperini and his crewmates Russell Allen Phillips and Francis McNamara.

The three crewmates were adrift in the Pacific Ocean, in enemy territory, with no food, water, or supplies. They managed to salvage two rafts from the wreckage of their plane, and collected enough rainwater to survive. They ate small fish and birds.

They drifted like this for weeks. After 33 days, McNamara died, leaving only Phillips and Zamperini. Two weeks later, their rafts washed ashore in the Marshall Islands and the two men were immediately captured by the Japanese.

Zamperini and Phillips were sent to various POW camps, and Zamperini eventually found himself at the Naoetsu camp in Northern Japan. There, he was tortured for two years by infamous prison guard Mutsuhiro Watanabe, one of Japan's most brutal war criminals. When the war finally ended in 1945, Zamperini was released and finally reunited with his family.

Oguri Jukichi

Jukichi was a sailor during Japan's Edo period, about 200 years ago. He was the captain of the freighter Tokujomaru and its crew of 14 men. He was transporting soybeans to the city of Edo, which would become present-day Tokyo, when his ship was caught in a massive storm. The storm damaged the ship's mast and set them adrift .

Very quickly, the crew exhausted their supply of food and water. They began surviving entirely on captured rainwater and the large stores of soybeans in the ship's hold. After several months, members of the crew began suffering from scurvy due to lack of nutrients.

One by one, over months, the crew started dying, while the Tokujomaru drifted further and further from home. After more than a year adrift, only three people were left: the captain Jukichi, and two members of the crew, Otokichi and Hanbe. All three were suffering the effects of scurvy and likely close to death when their ship was discovered off the coast of California in 1815.

The three Japanese sailors became the first people from that country to set foot on American shores. They had drifted over 5,000 miles and were lost at sea for 484 days.

The three sailors returned to Japan after recovering, however Hanbe died during the trip. Upon their return, Jukichi received numerous honors, and was granted a last name, Oguri. Even 200 years later, Jukichi still holds the Guinness World Record for longest time adrift at sea.

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Meet the adventurers scouring the sea for long lost treasures

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More than four million shipwrecks are said to be hidden beneath the waves. BOAT meets the bold adventurers dedicated to discovering them - and bringing their cargo to the surface.

Suspended in 57 metres of murky water in the Java Sea above an enormous pile of cups, plates and jars, Luc Heymans had an eerie feeling. “I felt like I’d had one too many drinks,” he says.

He wasn’t intoxicated. What made him dizzy, aside from the depth he was no longer accustomed to, was the realisation that he was looking at a treasure of unimaginable value. What lay beneath him that day in February 2004 was the wreck of a 10th century open deck cargo ship and a half a million artefacts piled on a tumulus more than 30 metres high and spread over an area of nearly 1,600 square metres. “I knew I was in front of something phenomenal,” he says. The unidentified wreck was later called Cirebon, after a village 145 kilometres away on the coast of the island of Java.

Heymans spent 20 years as a world-class sailor before embarking on new adventures on board a converted Russian trawler that he chartered to various organisations. One of his clients was renowned underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, who has brought to light civilisations that vanished in cataclysms and ships lost on ancient trade routes.

Heymans worked with Goddio in the Philippines before he decided to go it alone. “In the Philippines, you get a lot of information but very little of it turns out to be real, ”he says. “We wasted a lot of time, but it was fun.”

Then he got an interesting call about a wreck in Indonesia. Local fishermen are often the best source to identify wrecks. They know their waters better than anyone and can identify variations in colours and currents that can escape others. Sometimes a clue to what’s lying below comes to the surface, like a piece of pottery snagged in a fishing net. It was fishermen who tipped off the authorities about what became known as the Cirebon wreck. Heymans had heard lots of stories by now, but this time the local intel had been good. The wreck was real, and it was amazing. He negotiated with multiple Indonesian government modalities and permits, set up his company Cosmix Underwater Research and set out to work with a team of 75 people, 25 to 30 of them working on land to desalinate the pieces retrieved from the ocean floor. In all, it took 22,000 dives – each one lasting 25 minutes followed by around 90 minutes of decompression – to get most of the artefacts out.

He worked closely with specialists in ancient wood and metals and several museums, most notably The Royal Museum of Mariemont in his native Belgium, in addition to the Indonesian government who at the time proved less interested in the historical significance of the wreck than its monetary value.

The ship, somewhere around 32 metres, is thought to have sunk in the year 970, falling prey to the area’s strong currents and a heavy load of raw materials and goods from East Africa, Persia, India, Southeast Asia and China.

The discovery of this wreck showed historians that Islam had already reached Indonesia in the 11th century, two centuries earlier than commonly thought. Among the artefacts were Islamic prayer beads and a mould that served to make plates engraved with the name of Allah, plus 150 pieces in crystal rock, including a small fish that was designed to hold incense or perfume – one of Heymans’ favourite pieces. While aspirating the sand, the salvage team used a screen to prevent small pieces from getting trapped, recovering multiple coins, 4,000 rubies and 11,000 pearls in the process.

The recovery of such treasures is usually contentious. “Treasure is trouble,” says John Chatterton, an American wreck diver, who co-hosted the popular television series Deep Sea Detectives – and this find was no exception. When estimates for the hundreds of recovered objects reached sums in the tens of millions of dollars, the Indonesian government baulked at the agreement it had struck with Heymans and threw two of his head divers in jail. Eventually, after a much-publicised auction failed to attract bidders and the government was unable to find fault with the wreck salvage company, the Indonesian authorities relented. Cosmix was allowed to take the 50 per cent share that had been agreed to and quietly found a buyer. Qatar Museums was interested in what the treasure said about the country’s extensive historic trade connections and acquired the pieces.

Selling artefacts is what sets underwater archaeology and treasure hunting apart. But for a private salvage company, that is the only way to recoup expenses and maybe even make a profit, although that’s not easy.

Even successful treasure hunters, like the late Mel Fisher who became a multimillionaire after a nearly two-decade-long-search for the treasure of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha followed by a dogged legal fight against the state of Florida, have said they’re in it for the adventure. The gain is never certain. The old adage of finder’s keepers is more often than not a fallacy.

“You get out what you put in it,” says Jimmy Gadomski, a technical diver and yacht captain who has worked the wreck of the Pulaski, a steamship that sank off the coast of North Carolina in 1838 along with 128 of its crew and passengers and all their belongings. “There is money to be made, but the majority of this industry is going to be based on the thrill and excitement of treasure hunting.”

Finding shiny pieces of anything on the ocean floor often means entering a world of lengthy legal entanglements. Admiralty law is keeping courts busy globally, pitting investors, institutions and even entire countries against salvage companies. Spain has been particularly active in blocking dispersion of treasures it claims it owns, a fact that Heymans finds particularly ironic: “Where did Spain go steal all of this in the first place?”  He is also not a fan of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, which effectively prevents private companies from working wrecks 100 years and older. Few public institutions have the funds to salvage and preserve wrecks, and over time they degrade or fall prey to looters. “In the end, there remains no information for anyone,” Heymans adds.

More than 60 countries have signed on to the convention since 2001, the US being one exception, and that has redefined the business of treasure hunting at a time when it is easier than ever before to reach the bottom of the ocean.

This was very much on the mind of wreck divers seeking a pirate ship off the Dominican Republic in 2008, adding time pressure to the search. Chatterton and his partners were hired to locate the Golden Fleece, a ship that had been captained by British pirate Joseph Bannister. They were mindful the window was closing as the Dominican Republic looked to sign the convention. The country’s waters had been for years some of the most fertile for treasure hunters, along with the Bahamas and the American Southeast.

The floundering economies of Europe, and particularly Spain, fuelled the growing appetite for gold and silver extracted from the mines of the New World. During the early part of the 16th century, “virtually all shipping between Spain and New World was directed at Hispaniola”, according to pioneering treasure hunter and underwater archaeologist Robert F Marx. “Throughout the 16th century the waters of the New World were more or less a ‘Spanish lake’ and virtually all ships were Spanish built,” he writes in Shipwrecks in the Americas. The voyage was dangerous, the waters treacherous and five percent of the Spanish fleet never made it back home. Often the ships were wrecked in relatively shallow water and there were early attempts to recover the treasures they carried, even by contemporaries. However, early divers could not rely on much more than exceptional lung capacity, strong muscle and occasionally crude diving bells. More modern versions of these were used in early attempts to recover wrecks with some success.

Much more sophisticated technology has since come to the rescue. While technical divers are still essential to the recovery of sunken artefacts, a host of equipment is making it easier to pinpoint the location of wrecks.

Blue Water Rose , for example, a 24-metre commercial vessel operated by Blue Water Ventures International to search the Pulaski wreck is fitted with a side-scan sonar, caesium magnetometers, Overhauser gradiometers and advanced mapping and metal-detection software. It is also fitted, like many such ships, with prop wash deflectors that blow water straight down to create holes in the sand that divers then search for artefacts, pieces of iron, wood, anything that can establish the identity of the wreck. It is in one such hole that Gadomski found his most significant piece yet, the base of a candlestick with the inscription “SB Pulaski”, which established the identity of the wreck – and conferred rights to the salvage company.

Whereas in the 1970s treasure hunter Teddy Tucker surveyed the waters around Bermuda from a window washer chair hitched to a hot air balloon, today, ultralights that fit on a boat deck can be an integral part of the toolbox.

Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and pocket subs are also affording underwater explorers new opportunities to go deeper and find wrecks where no one could go in earlier years. The late Paul Allen was fascinated with battleships from the Second World War. His Vulcan organisation used ROVs to confirm locations of wrecks detected by a battery of high-tech equipment able to scan the sea floor. An early mission using his explorer Octopus resulted in the recovery of the bell of British Navy ship HMS Hood from the deep North Atlantic in 2015 and the largest navy wreck ever found, the Japanese battleship Musashi, among others.

A couple of years ago, it was a different Allen and his fleet that made the cover of BOAT International’s US Edition. When he retired, Carl Allen decided to pursue, at least some of the time, his long-held passion for treasure hunting. “It was Fisher and his revelation that the ocean floor was basically littered with treasure that sparked the fertile imagination of a 20-something amateur diver. Instantly I got the disease, I almost went to work for the man,” he says.

After that meeting, off and on when time allowed, he did some diving around Puerto Rico and the Turks and Caicos and researched a famous wreck in the Bahamas. Once he was free from his daily business duties, he set out on an actionpacked retirement plan. He assembled a fleet for his company Allen Exploration , acquiring a Damen support vessel with space for an Icon A5 aeroplane and a Triton 3300/3 submarine to run alongside his 50-metre Westport , Gigi . And then, having negotiated permissions with the Bahamian government, he began surveying the waters where the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas met her demise in 1656. Of all the galleons, she was one of the most famous and Allen had been studying her for years. “I don’t need the money; I am in it for the history,” he says.

Marx, who has been called the true father of underwater archaeology and was later knighted by Spain, located part of the wreck in 1972. A couple of wreck salvage operations took place since but, as far as records show, only managed to find a minimal amount of coins or gold, or at least far less than what she was known to carry. Often the galleons also carried contraband far exceeding the declared goods in their castles. The Maravillas’ manifest kept in the “General Archive of the Indies” in Seville’s old merchants’ exchange was thousands of pages long and Allen, like many others, believes the bulk of the treasure, including a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary and child in solid gold – a way, Allen says, for the ailing King Philip IV to buy his way into heaven – are yet to be found. Allen’s search was paused after Hurricane Dorian’s destruction refocused his efforts on helping the Bahamas recover, followed by Covid-19 this year. But plans are afoot for the creation of a museum dedicated to the wreck.

On the other side of the planet, Heymans spends a lot of time on his 26-metre sailing catamaran Lonestar, which he charters, but the lure of sunken treasures isn’t diminished. “It goes back to childhood,” he says, “What do kids do in their sandbox? They dig for treasure. It’s true what they say: adults are still children, only the toys get bigger.”

When we caught up with Heymans in Indonesia in May, he was evaluating another wreck from which was recovered a cannon dated from 1617 that belonged to the East India Company. “If this interests someone, even a TV company, to do a partnership with Indonesia, this is certainly an interesting wreck and an opportunity to do a great archaeological operation,” he says

All told, there are an estimated four million wrecks beneath the world’s oceans, from the antiquity wrecks of the Mediterranean to modern commercial wrecks. And it seems every so often, treasure just washes up on a beach.  But where is the fun in that? It’s the search that is so exciting.

“Treasure hunting conjures up many romantic notions, but in addition to shipwrecks there are aircraft, military hardware,” says Rob McCallum, co-founder of EYOS Expeditions, who has spent his fair share of time exploring the deep as a diver and deep-submarine expert. “Each item represents a piece of history, a rich tapestry of archaeological artefacts stretching back through time and spread across the seafloor.”

Treasure for the tking

The Treasure of Lima

British Captain William Thompson went rogue in 1820 after he was hired to carry the Peruvian capital’s riches to safety on board the Mary Dear. Instead, he and his crew headed for Cocos Island, 500km off the coast of Costa Rica, where they buried the treasure, including gold statues of Madonna and child – or so the stories tell us. Pirates were also said to regularly stash their loot on the island. Yet more than 500 expeditions have failed to turn up much more than a few coins. Among interested parties over the years were Lord Fitzwilliam, who arrived on Cocos on board the yacht Veronique. Sir Malcolm Campbell built Blue Bird to sail to the island but died before he could set sail. Tara Getty, who bought Blue Bird, picked up the mantle a few years ago, taking his family on an adventure that included a stopover in Cocos, thus realising Campbell’s dream (read the full story at boatint.com/gettycocos).

The San Miguel

This Spanish galleon was trying to escape a hurricane in 1715 when it was wrecked off Amelia Island in Florida. It was the fastest in a fleet of 11 and loaded with the greatest cargo – its treasure is estimated at $2 billion. Amelia Research & Recovery LLC has been searching for the wreck for several years, but the ship and her treasure have yet to be found.

Santa Maria

One of the three ships from Christopher Columbus’s fleet to the New World was reportedly lost off Haiti on Christmas Eve 1492. In 2014, experts contested the claim of a treasure hunter who professed to have found her. She may still be out there or, as some purport, may never have sunk at all and may have been beached by Columbus and later burned by indigenous Haitians.

Flor del la Mar

This 360-tonne Portuguese merchant vessel sank in a storm while navigating the Strait of Malacca in 1511 and was ripped in two. The ship, according to Robert F. Marx, was “the richest vessel ever lost at sea, with its hold loaded with 200 coffers of precious stones, diamonds from the small half-inch size to the size of a man’s fist.” Treasure.net puts its value at $2.6 billion.

First published in the September 2020 issue of BOAT International.

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‘We’re a dead ship’: Hundreds of cargo ships lost propulsion in U.S. waters in recent years

While the ship that felled the francis scott key bridge in baltimore suffered a total blackout, such losses of engine power — including near bridges or ports — are hardly a one-off.

Less than two weeks after Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge was destroyed by an out-of-control cargo ship, another huge container ship passed beneath a busy bridge connecting New York and New Jersey and then suddenly decelerated in a narrow artery of one of the nation’s largest ports.

“We’re a dead ship,” said a voice over the maritime radio a short time later, invoking an industry term that often refers to a ship that is unable to move on it own.

Three tug boats helped shepherd the APL Qingdao — a vessel more than 1,100 feet long and flying under the flag of Malta — from where it lost propulsion near the Bayonne Bridge to a safe location, authorities said. The ship dropped anchor just upstream from the even busier Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which carries about 200,000 vehicles per day.

The April 5 incident is one of hundreds in which massive cargo ships lost propulsion, many near bridges and ports, according to a Washington Post analysis of Coast Guard records.

The findings indicate that the kind of failure that preceded the March 26 Baltimore bridge collapse — the 984-foot Dali is believed to have lost the ability to propel itself forward as it suffered a more widespread power outage — was far from a one-off among the increasingly large cargo ships that routinely sail close to critical infrastructure.

Around Baltimore alone, ships lost propulsion nearly two dozen times in the three years before the tragedy last month, the Post review found — including a November 2021 incident in which a 981-foot container ship lost propulsion for 15 minutes soon after it passed under the Key Bridge. In 2020, a ship the same size as the Dali lost propulsion “in the vicinity of the Bay Bridge” near Annapolis, records show.

Adding to the danger, experts say, is a lack of consistent rules on when cargo ships should be escorted by tug boats that can keep them on course even if engines turn off. While tugboats escorted the Qingdao, as was called for under local guidelines in the New York area, those attending to the Dali departed before it struck the bridge in Baltimore, where such decisions are left to ship captains and local pilots, the specially trained sailors who guide ships in and out of ports.

Container ships like the Dali and the Qingdao have doubled in size over the past two decades, experts said, while some American ports — built up over centuries around busy and cramped waterways — have struggled to adapt.

“I don’t think we’ve understood fully the consequences of these ships, of these large ships, operating in these ports,” said Aaron Davenport, a retired senior Coast Guard officer and expert in maritime safety with the nonprofit research organization Rand.

The Post analysis found that 424 cargo ships longer than 600 feet reported losing propulsion — meaning the engines were shut down — in U.S. waters over the past three years. About a quarter of the incidents occurred near a port, bridge or other infrastructure, the analysis found.

The records on propulsion loss were up to date through March 17, before the incidents involving the Dali and the Qingdao. After reports of the Qingdao incident surfaced on social media , the Coast Guard said the ship suffered a loss of propulsion.

In some cases reviewed by The Post, engines suddenly cut out. In others, crews were compelled to shut them down to deal with operating problems. The owner and operator of the APL Qingdao said that its engine was shut down in a “controlled” manner after an engine alarm was triggered and that the ship did not lose electrical power.

Tracked locations of APL Qingdao

A tug arrived to help the vessel, according to Marine Traffic data. Two other tugs were already nearby, serving as escorts.

AIS data show a drop in the speed of the Qingdao between 8:10 p.m. and 8:22 p.m.

Coast Guard received a report of a loss of propulsion around 8:30 p.m.

Kill Van Kull

Verrazzano-

With the help of tugs, the vessel arrived at Stapleton Anchorage, where it stayed overnight for repairs. It departed the next morning at 6 a.m.

Sources: MarineTraffic, Maxar via Google Earth

SAMUEL GRANADOS / THE WASHINGTON POST

Verrazzano-Narrows

Kill Van Kull waterway

Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge

Staten Island

In Baltimore, a pilots’ association has said the Dali lost engine and electrical power before it hit the Key Bridge on March 26, and National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said investigators believe problems with the electrical system were connected to the loss of control of the ship. The FBI has opened a criminal probe that will look at least in part at whether the crew left the port knowing the vessel had serious systems problems, The Post reported this week.

The Coast Guard reports identified several instances of ships striking objects after losing propulsion, including in one case a grain dock in the Lower Mississippi River. Other vessels were reported to have run aground near infrastructure after losing propulsion.

Coast Guard investigators found many causes for propulsion loss, the records show. In some instances, a total loss of electrical power led to an engine shutdown; in others, the electrical system stayed online, but propulsion was lost because of mechanical and equipment failures. Valves malfunctioned, seals failed, and filters were clogged.

In some cases, poor maintenance or deterioration were blamed for faulty equipment. In others, human error was blamed, including one case in which a ship got underway while an engineer was still doing work on the fuel system. In dozens of instances, investigators reported that tugboats had assisted ships to safety after they lost propulsion.

Ships are at particular risk of losing propulsion when crews are maneuvering in confined waters such as ports, which can place additional demands on power systems, according to a 2017 report by the London P&I Club, a leading maritime insurance firm. Crews changing the type of fuel being used while the ship is underway to comply with regional environmental regulations has also increased the number of propulsion-loss incidents, the report said.

Joseph Ahlstrom, a professor at the State University of New York’s Maritime College, said in an interview that the frequency of propulsion loss points to a risk that must be better managed. Ahlstrom said he hopes the use of tugboats — which routinely help ships dock and undock but can also guide vessels that have lost propulsion to safety — would become more widespread after the Baltimore disaster.

“Most regulations are written in blood,” Ahlstrom said. “It takes something like this for people to say, ‘Whoa, we should do something.’”

‘Our ports are vulnerable’

Ships traveling in U.S. waters are required by federal law to report any loss of propulsion to the nearest Coast Guard command. The Post reviewed hundreds of such reports filed to authorities along the coasts, focusing on those involving ships greater than 600 feet.

While some of the 424 incidents occurred farther from shore in rivers and bays, in 103 instances, the ships suffered a loss of propulsion near a port, bridge or other infrastructure, according to the Coast Guard records.

Capt. John Konrad, founder of the shipping news website gCaptain , said The Post’s findings were cause for concern.

“Our ports are vulnerable,” said Konrad, who was first to report on the Qingdao incident in New York. “America has to decide — do we want to invest in vessel traffic service, stronger bridges, better maritime Coast Guard investigators? Or do we want to roll the dice?”

In the case of the Agios Dimitrios, the ship that lost propulsion in 2021 after passing the Key Bridge as it sailed toward port in Baltimore, investigators concluded that an electrical fault made the engine nonresponsive. Two tugs had been with the ship at the time, and a third joined to assist it back under the bridge to an anchorage near Annapolis for repairs.

Global Ship Lease, owner of the Agios Dimitrios, said in a statement to The Post that the crew followed “established operating protocols.”

“In close coordination with local tug operators and the Coast Guard, the vessel was able to undergo prompt repairs and proceed without further incident,” the company said.

In March 2022, an engine problem and strong winds combined to push a 1,200-foot container ship out of a shipping channel near Norfolk, Coast Guard records show. The chief engineer of the Toledo Triumph requested that the ship’s engines be shut down after engine room fire alarms went off.

At first, according to the investigation report, the ship remained under control. But water leaking from an engine cooling system turned to steam and tripped a separate alarm, preventing the crew from restarting the engine. As the huge ship lost speed, it began to drift, and — pushed by winds of almost 40 mph — it eventually ran aground. The ship suffered no significant damage and freed itself as the tide rose.

Shoei Kisen Kaisha, the Japanese company that manages the Toledo Triumph, declined to comment.

No uniform standard for tugboats

There is no single standard for the use of tugs to escort large ships in and out of ports in the United States, experts said. Instead, their use is determined by a patchwork of federal and state laws, formal guidelines, long-standing practices, the judgments of individual pilots and the financial incentives of ship owners.

As container ships have become larger, maritime officials in New York and New Jersey have developed standards for managing the arrival into the port operated jointly by the states, issuing guidelines on tides, visibility and the use of tugs.

For vessels 997 feet and longer, the guidelines say, two tugs should be on hand at the Narrows, the stretch of water between Staten Island and Brooklyn. As many as five tugs can be required for the largest vessels passing through the Kill Van Kull, the tidal strait between Staten Island and Bayonne, N.J.

Federal laws passed since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill require tug escorts for oil tankers heading into Prince William Sound in Alaska and Puget Sound in Washington state, with a similar state law governing ports in California.

The Maryland Port Administration, which oversees the Baltimore port, and the Virginia Port Authority both said the use of tugs is a decision left to ship captains and to pilots.

Joseph D. Harris, a spokesman for the Virginia agency, said the weather, the size of a vessel and the volume of traffic are all factors pilots take into account in making their decisions.

Jennifer Carpenter, the chief executive of American Waterways Operators, a trade group for tug companies, said that given the diversity of ports in the country, different practices make sense. “It is important to take a port-specific look at what are we trying to do here? What kind of traffic do we have here? How fast are they going? How well are our bridges protected?” Carpenter said. “Those are all things that should go into an analysis.”

Tug escort services cost thousands of dollars an hour, according to rate sheets published by major operators. Experts say some that ship owners are reluctant to use them as they look to keep costs down, and that some port authorities oppose tugboat mandates for fear that charging extra fees will make them lose business to competitors.

“A ship owner and his money are very hard to part, and unless you require it, they’re not going to do it,” said Walter Nadolny, a professor emeritus at SUNY Maritime College. “They’re not crazy about spending the money.”

A ‘dead ship’ in the Kill Van Kull strait

The Qingdao arrived in New York on April 2 and, during a three-day stop, unloaded about 40,000 tons of imports, largely from India and Pakistan, ranging from steel pipes to jasmine rice, according to cargo records.

At 7:29 p.m. on April 5, it set off from Staten Island’s Howland Hook Marine Terminal, bound for Norfolk. The ship was escorted by three tugboats.

The Qingdao passed under the Bayonne Bridge, connecting New Jersey and Staten Island, at 8 p.m., according to records from the shipping data service Kpler. About nine minutes later, as it moved eastward through the tight Kill Van Kull strait, the ship slowed, eventually to 0.5 knots or about 0.6 miles per hour.

At 8:17 p.m., tugboats began an operation to assist the Qingdao, Kpler records show.

At 8:20 p.m., a voice on a marine radio channel covering the area said that the Qingdao was experiencing difficulties. “He has lost propulsion,” the unidentified voice said. “Looks like he might be a dead ship there.” The Post found recordings of the remarks by reviewing marine radio traffic archived by Broadcastify .

Federal regulations define a “dead ship” as one that has lost electrical power and for which backup systems “for bringing the main propulsion into operation” are not available. Other authorities and maritime groups use the term for a vessel that has lost propulsion and steering.

At 8:24 p.m., a different voice came over the radio to say the Qingdao “has lost engine power temporarily, has lost engine power but has regained it back.” This person said the ship was headed for the Stapleton anchorage site near the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which links Staten Island and Brooklyn.

About 35 minutes later, a third voice on the radio said “dead ship, just give me a little bit of time here,” as an alarm seemed to blare in the background, and then a moment later says “so we’re a dead ship.”

The U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement that the Qingdao reported at about 8:30 p.m. that it had lost propulsion in the Kill Van Kull. “The vessel regained propulsion and was assisted to safely anchor in Stapleton Anchorage … by three towing vessels,” the statement said.

Jennifer Petrisko, a spokesperson for CMA CGM, the French shipping giant that owns the Qingdao, said in emails to The Post that the incident began when the ship’s main engine alarm sounded soon after it departed New York, “restricting full maneuvering.” She did not respond when asked why the alarm activated.

The loss of propulsion was “a controlled, agreed upon shutdown of the main engine with approval of the pilot and vessel command to temporarily fix an alarm,” Petrisko said. She added that after inspections and tests, the ship was declared seaworthy and was cleared by the Coast Guard to travel to Virginia. Records show that it departed Stapleton around 6 a.m. on April 6.

Records show that the Qingdao also experienced an engine problem that led to a loss of maneuverability as it left Savannah, Ga., on July 30. The Coast Guard found that the crew had replaced fuel injectors with parts not recommended by the engine’s manufacturer and had failed to keep fuel at a proper temperature, according to a summary of the investigation.

Petrisko did not respond to questions about that incident.

Samuel Granados contributed to this report.

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2 people dead after vessel capsizes on Newfoundland's west coast

4 survivors airlifted and brought to hospital.

Social Sharing

Two people are dead following a vessel capsizing on Newfoundland's west coast Sunday morning, near the community of Lark Harbour.

Long Range Mountains MP Gudie Hutchings posted on social media that two men had died.

"The sea giveth and the sea taketh away. I am devastated to hear two young men have perished at sea. All the love and prayers in the world are needed now for the families and the Lark Harbour community and fishing communities everywhere," she wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The Fish, Food & Allied Workers union also sent its condolences to the families impacted by this tragedy and the communities of York Harbour and Lark Harbour

"One life lost at sea is always one life too many. These lives were far too young to go," said FFAW-Unifor's statement on Facebook.

In a post on the Lark Harbour Facebook page, the town said the town hall would be opened for people to gather Sunday evening "as a gathering spot for our residents to support each other in this time of grief."

Premier Andrew Furey also said his heart was with Lark Habour and he'd spoken with Mayor Maria MacDonald, as well as Hutchings and MHA Eddie Joyce. 

"I will be there to support the community through this challenging time," he wrote.

Four people airlifted

Capt. Trevor Ackland, spokesperson for the Joint Task Force Atlantic in support of the Joint Rescue and Coordination Centre in Halifax, said four people were airlifted from a beach on the west coast and brought to hospital after the vessel was found capsized.

He said the centre responded to a call from the Maritime Rescue Sub-Centre in St. John's for assistance after reports of people in the water.

Ackland said a Cormorant helicopter was dispatched from the Search and Rescue Squadron in Gander to the scene, which was near Molly Ann Cove.

"Once they arrived on scene, they proceeded to pick up and airlift four persons that were located on a beach," Ackland told CBC News.

"And they transported them to another location where they met with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and then those individuals were transported to the hospital," said Ackland.

Ackland said he couldn't speculate on fatalities but the four people were alive when they were airlifted.

Fish harvester Sam Anderson was fishing in the area around Molly Ann Cove and Rope Cove around 11 a.m. Sunday when he spotted a cabin on fire on shore.

He saw a couple of men on the beach, he said, with a capsized vessel nearby.

"We followed the procedure, you know, contacted the coast guard radio and we tried to get him. We couldn't get at him because the waters were too shallow and nothing we could do," Anderson told CBC News.

He said it was a remote area with no roads.

Download our  free CBC News app  to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador.  Click here to visit our landing page .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Whitten is a journalist and editor based in St. John's.

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3 Men Rescued from Pacific Island After Writing ‘Help’ With Palm Leaves

American rescuers found the lost sailors on a tiny uninhabited island in Micronesia with a damaged boat and the word spelled out on the beach.

By John Yoon

Three men who were stranded on a remote Pacific island for more than a week were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after spelling out “HELP” on a beach using palm leaves.

The lost men were found on Pikelot, an uninhabited island about 100 miles northwest of their home, alongside their damaged boat on Sunday by an American military aircraft, the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Guam said in a statement .

The men, who were experienced mariners in their 40s, set sail on March 31 from Polowat Atoll, an island that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia, in a 20-foot open skiff powered by an outboard motor. After their unintended delay, the Coast Guard said, the men had been safely returned home Tuesday evening.

The search began on Saturday when a woman sent out a distress call to the Coast Guard, reporting that her three uncles had not returned home after almost a week away. The Coast Guard embarked on the search with a U.S. Navy aircraft crew.

Pikelot is a tiny dot in the Pacific Ocean covered in palm trees and bushes, measuring less than 2,000 feet in length. The Micronesian island was part of a search area that the Coast Guard said spanned more than 100,000 square miles.

This week’s rescue was not the first from Pikelot involving huge letters spelled in the sand. In 2020, three other men whose boat ran out of fuel wrote “SOS” in the sand , allowing them to be spotted by American rescuers.

In this week’s search, a breakthrough came when a Navy reconnaissance aircraft that was dispatched from Okinawa, Japan, spotted the men from the air.

“In a remarkable testament to their will to be found, the mariners spelled out ‘HELP’ on the beach using palm leaves, a crucial factor in their discovery,” Lt. Chelsea Garcia, who coordinated the search and rescue mission on Sunday, said in the statement.

The aircraft crew deployed survival packages to help the men before the Coast Guard dropped them a radio a day later from a military aircraft sent from Hawaii, establishing a line of communication.

“They expressed a desire for assistance in returning to Polowat,” the Coast Guard said, adding that the men had said they were in good health and had access to food and water, but that their skiff had been damaged and its engine was not functional.

On Tuesday, a Coast Guard ship, the USCGC Oliver Henry, arrived at the island and picked up the men to bring them home.

“It’s incredibly rewarding to see the faces of those we’ve helped,” said Lt. Ray Cerrato, the commanding officer of the ship.

A similar rescue also took place in Micronesian waters in 2016 when three men whose boat was overturned swam two miles to reach a tiny island, on which they wrote “HELP” in the sand . The Coast Guard rescued them.

Two other people who went missing later that year were saved from a Micronesian island after writing “SOS ” in the sand.

John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news. More about John Yoon

TrendyDigests

Mystery Surrounds North Korea's Missing Submarine Lost at Sea

Posted: April 22, 2024 | Last updated: April 22, 2024

In early 2016, a North Korean submarine, number and class unknown, mysteriously disappeared off their coast. Despite extensive search efforts by North Korea, and US  monitoring, the vessel was never recovered.

According peculation suggests the sub may have sunk, potentially as an obsolete vessel."Vanished Beneath the Waves: The Mystery of North Korea's Missing Submarine".

The vanished submarine was reportedly operational off the North Korean coast when contact was lost. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, reported, “About week ago it went missing and the speculation is that it sank,” adding, “The North Koreans have not made an attempt to indicate there is something wrong or that they require help or some type of assistance.” The U.S. military, along with its South Korean counterparts, kept a vigilant eye as the North Korean navy scoured the ocean for the missing sub, with the presumption that it may have experienced a catastrophic failure during maneuvers.

North Korea’s fleet, estimated at around 70 submarines, is a mix of midget boats and larger vessels that can hold crews of up to 30 or 40, most of them being old diesel models capable of little more than coastal defence and limited offensive capabilities.Joe Bermudez, an analyst specializing in North Korea, noted that while the vessels are of “reasonable quality,” they often repurpose civilian materials for military use and suffer from low maintenance standards compared to other East Asian navies.

The regime of Kim Jong Un has emphasized its underwater capabilities as a threat, particularly to South Korea. In a troubling precedent, the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan in 2010, which resulted in the loss of 46 sailors, was attributed to a torpedo launched by a North Korean midget submarine, highlighting the asymmetric threats posed by Pyongyang's aging but potentially lethal submarine fleet.

More recently, North Korea unveiled a new submarine, the Hero Kim Kun Ok, believed to carry nuclear-armed missiles. This advancement in North Korea's naval warfare, demonstrated by the launch of the "tactical nuclear submarine No. 841" in September 2023, indicates an ongoing commitment to enhancing their offensive capabilities despite international sanctions and economic hardships.

Amidst these developments, the United States and South Korea have continued to bolster their own defensive measures, with joint military exercises described as the largest ever. The recent statement by KCNA warning of a “pre-emptive retaliatory strike at the enemy groups” involved in these drills showcases North Korea's perennially combative stance.

Pyongyang announced it intended to counter the drills with an "operation to liberate the whole of South Korea including Seoul" using an "ultra-precision blitzkrieg." In response, South Korea's defense ministry urged Pyongyang to cease making threats or engaging in additional provocations, as reported by Yonhap news agency.

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