Spoilers for All is Lost starring Robert Redford below, look out.
On two occasions while Redford is adrift on his life raft, he is passed by enormous cargo ships and attempts to signal them with flares, once at night and once in broad daylight. On both occasions, the ships don’t seem to notice him, and no one can be seen on board the ships. What are the chances that such a ship would not notice something like that? Surely they have regular watches? They were going very fast and passed quite quickly, so is is possible that people on watch could have looked away long enough to miss it?
Secondly, if they did notice, what would they do? I’m guessing it would take a very long time for such a ship to come to a stop, by which time the life raft would be far behind them. Do they have small boats that they could launch while in motion to recover the survivor?
Large cargo or container ships have radar and sonar in order to scan for something that might present a danger to the ship. They don’t have people with binoculars constantly standing on deck looking out at the horizon for something that might show up. For 99.9999 % of the time that would be a complete waste of resources. If they were aware of an SOS in the area they might put people out to look for a boat or raft, but otherwise they would be busy doing other things.
As far as seeing something, reacting, and then intercepting something like a raft you can imagine how hard it would be to slow down and stop a huge ship and then turn it around to pick someone up. I believe many large ships have small inflatable boats they can deploy for a variety of maintenance tasks, so presumably they could use one to intercept a raft once they could slow down enough to launch it… which can take quite a while.
Thanks, that all makes sense. I guess it’s an even more unfortunate thing for Redford that he wasn’t able to send out a distress call before his radio was ruined. Otherwise maybe they would have been watching for him.
I guess in a situation like that, it might be more likely for the cargo ship to relay what they saw to the local Coast Guard or whatever they have in the area, than to try to effect a rescue themselves. Given the location of the raft, I guess they could easily extrapolate where to look for it by the time they got search parties out.
Redford’s disappointed reaction both times to the non-reaction of the cargo ships, as if he thought something should immediately happen, goes along with my general perception of the character, that he’s a competent sailor, but not experienced enough to really deal with an emergency of this magnitude. He makes a lot of dumb mistakes, wasting multiple flares on cargo ships not the least (or last) of them.
I haven’t seem the movie, but if I was on a raft, with little or no food or fresh water, bobbing on the open seas, I would try everything I could think of to try and get someone’s attention, but if nobody is looking for you it makes it much harder. I’m not even sure if a plane flying overhead is likely to see a flare in broad daylight, even if they were looking for you.
I can sort of understand the ship missing the hand flare during the day, but there’s no way they could have missed the aerials at night, even if the ship was somewhat passing by.
This, and some other unbelievable contrivances made the film annoying to watch.
Large container and bulk carrier ships have a minimal crew, often fewer than a dozen, and in broad ocean most spend their time below deck, with a single pilot. It is not at all implausible that they could miss a flare signal, and while to not attribute negligence or intentional malice to container and commercial ship crew, those that I’ve met have enormous contempt for recreational sailors (and all too often well deserved). They just don’t devote their time to doing more than basic duty in observing small craft, and (rightfully) expect smaller craft to be observant and in communication in shipping lanes.
If I recall the film correctly, the Redford’s character had effected a repair of the breach, pumped the hull, and is then overtaken by a storm in which the boat is rolled and demasted. He reenters and remains with in the (at that point intact) cabin during the storm and awakens to find that his patch is leaking and the boat is foundering, after which he deploys the raft and abandons ship. The boat was not foundering at the time that he fell to sleep, and was probably too exhausted to recognize that the boat was sinking. This is not unrealistic at all.
There are a number of nitpicky technical problems with the film (How does his boat strike a submerged container hard enough to breach and not awaken him? What is he doing with a sextant but not an EPIRB or a handheld radio for on-deck communications?) and the character is clearly out of his depth in terms of sailing experience (when recovering the sea anchor he makes the rookie mistake of approaching the container from the windward side and running into it bow first which could have been disastrous) but in general the film was a frighteningly accurate representation of how a sequence of challenges can threaten anyone in a small vessel. Submerged CONEXs and other cargo pose a statistically significant hazard to smaller craft, and weather heavy enough to roll a seaworthy yacht is a problem even for the most experienced sailor. When single handing a boast in broad ocean area there is always the threat of not being able to respond to damage or hazard due to the need to sleep and is undertaken at significant risk regardless of experience and skill level. The details that the film gets correct–such as the attempted repair, deployment of the life raft, and the effects of being on ocean for days at a time–are essentially correct and accurately portrayed.
As for the second question of the o.p., such ships will have a lifeboat (like the one seen in Captain Phillips but typically do not have a gig or other smaller boat for ship to shore transit. These vessels, especially CONEX carriers and ROROs are specifically designed to go from port to port, and unlike cruise liners or smaller naval and coast guard craft, are not designed to stop offshore and use small craft for crew/passenger transport or reprovisioning. They also move very quickly and would take several miles to perform a man overboard drill by which time the contact may be lost. Although they technically have a duty to render aid I’m doubtful they would try to stop but rather would deploy an aid as available and contact the nearest coast guard or naval vessel with position data to effect a rescue.
Overall, I think it was a well done movie, but I had the same nitpicky issues as StrangerOnATrain-he should have had an EPIRB that he deployed right after discoving the hole in the hull, and a hand held radio in a plastic bag somewhere. I would also have a mini-beacon in my life raft, and some more emergency provisions.
And if I were sailing alone, I’d have:
-A float plan that friends/family are checking to ensure I’m following it
-A website that can track my progress with a beacon that shows my position periodically
-The nicest flare gun I can manage, as well as a strobe or two to set off.
Also, he was able to quickly learn to use the sextant and find latitude AND *longitude *with it. Remarkable.
Forgot to add: I’ve been involved in a few rescues where my crew effected a long-range rescue by directing a freighter or a tanker to pick up people in rafts and disabled boats. The skipper of the ship will bring the ship about so that they approach the raft and bring them in the lee of the ship, then the ship drifts on to the raft, with the intention of the raft aligning with the ships embarkation ladder.
Doesn’t always work that way - on a rescue 600 nm east of Bermuda, a tanker tried to rescue a raft, but accidentally ran over them, knocking the survivors out of the raft. The survivors made it back into the raft and were eventually rescued by the tanker.
Perhaps, but I’m not sure even someone trained could differentiate a raft from the normal flotsam and jetsam you find floating in the water. Even if it WAS somehow noticed it would certainly pose no danger to a huger supertanker and would be ignored as a result.
There is a wonderful little book called “Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea” by Steven Callahan. The author was in sailboat that got wrecked, and spend a couple months in an inflatable life raft drifting across the Atlantic. It has been a while since I read it, but he mentions similar situations, where large commercial ships do not see his flares (I don’t remember the exact circumstances, whether night or day for example). He is only rescued when he drifts into coastal waters in the Caribbean and is rescued by a much smaller fishing boat.
Commercial freighters are big, but they are pretty sparsely manned. They’re not like a whaling ship that would constantly maintain several lookouts. For the most part, they don’t care about other ships in the area, as long as they aren’t going to run into them.
Edit: From the wikipedia description, Callahan says that he spotted 9 ships during his crossing, none of which saw him.
Radar would pass right through an inflatable raft unless it were specifically made of a material that reflects radio frequency signals. Sonar (which reflects off of the acoustic boundary between water and much less dense air) will just reflect off the surface, and even if the vessel is equipped with sonar it wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a lifeboat and the wave surface.
After the demasting, he went below to think and a wave hit and he was thrown forward and hit his head on the mast support and was knocked out. When he woke up, the cabin was knee deep with water so he abandoned ship.
Shamozzle may be thinking about the first of the movie. After striking the container, he half-heartedly starts the repair and half-heartedly starts manually pumping the bilge (no bucket?) then changes clothes, watches the sunset and spends the night sleeping with water still in the boat and hole still in the hull. The next day he finishes pumping the bilge and doing that awful hull repair.
There are a hundred of those “Waaa?” moments. If you look closely, the water was seat cushion deep when he decided to abandon ship, but it was mid thigh deep earlier after striking the container. The hole was above the waterline too, it had just taken on water during the storm. He also had half the mast left, the boom and plenty of sail. A competent sailor would have jammed a table against that hole and covered it with some spare sail on the outside, then rigged a sail and gotten her home. “Always step up into the life raft,” as they say.
It is a good movie about losing hope, surviving, etc. It is not a good movie about sailing any more than Cast Away was a good movie about flying a plane. In fact, there’s probably about the same amount of each. He’s running bare poles 5 minutes into the movie and they stay that way until the boat sinks. Meanwhile, he does some things that look sailory but mostly aren’t.
Radar can find find rafts - there have been experiments to the efficacy of detection going back quite a few years: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a115641.pdf
I’ve been on SAR cases where we found a raft using radar, and I know there are tables in the Coast Guard Addendum to the National Search and Rescue for detection of rafts without radar reflective material on them: http://www.uscg.mil/hq/cg5/cg534/manuals/COMDTINST%20M16130.2F.pdf
(check section H, table H-25).
Now, I couldn’t tell you about detection of rafts using the navigation radar on the bridge of a container vessel (not without research, at least). First: Those radar are used for navigation and avoidance of other vessels, so may not be as able to find small targets as a surface search radar of the kind used by the Coast Guard or the secondary sea service, the Navy.
Second: I don’t know how the radar on container vessels are set up with sweep width, getting rid of clutter, etc. If they have their radar range set up to >30 miles, they may have an impossible time seeing a small contact.