Longest time spent in a lifeboat

[A.R.Cane]

@Common Tater

Well, 34 days is nothing to sneeze at, guess I remembered it as being longer too. I remember Dixon relating that between the three of them, they never had in total more than one good meal, (if you consider raw fish a good meal in itself) and very little fresh water, which they obtained by soaking rags after a rain. They did manage to catch a shark and eat part of that, along with an Albatross, iirc. The very high point of the trip - one day, Tony Aldrich said “I feel a coconut”. What?? He must be mad.

Then “No, I felt a coconut bump me under the raft!” This may not sound like much, but it had some oil and water inside, and meant they were likely getting closer to land. No protection from the sun, and they were all very cramped on a tiny raft. My copy was a wartime edition - cheap, pulpy paper, but it was a hardback w/ black&white photographs of the raft itself. Unfortunately the very best stories of survival and the like will probably never be told.

I’d forgotten about the coconut, but I remember the albatross. They tore it apart and ate what they could, I think it may have been the first food they caught, then left the carcass in the bottom of the raft. One of them woke up during the night and saw something glowing in the raft. Turned out to be the flesh of the bird. Then they all wondered if they’d poisoned themselves, until they figured out that the bird had been eating phosphorescent sea creatures which then permeated its flesh.

[Scruloose]

@Arnold Winkelried

Wouldn’t the most useful thing be something that would concentrate sun rays to heat up sea water and distill sea water to turn it into something drinkable? Does a portable apparatus like that exist?

Indeed it does exist. Some life rafts are equipped with portable solar stills and/or desalination tablets.

Also a GPS hand-held device and a satellite phone?

Even better: an EPIRB

[j_sum1]

I came to post the Rose Noelle. Guys were adrift on upturned boat for 119 days. But I see that someone has beaten me to it. I think that is the longest mentioned so far.

Unless you count Shackleton and his men on the Endurance. Not strictly a life raft, but between having their boat stuck in ice, setting up camp in the ice when their boat was crushed and floating about in their life boats trying to get to elephant island, the men did not touch land for 18 months.

[Common_Tater]

The problem with any kind of search at sea, it is just about impossible to spot anyone or anything from the air, it’s just too vast. “The Raft” guys were even lucky enough to have a spotter plane fly in their general area, but it didn’t spot them, but unlucky enough to lose virtually everything in the plane - it sank too quick. They likely would have had at least some rations and water onboard, not to mention a thermos of coffee, ciggies and, by god, bourbon. So, they went from “Gee, I wish the matches didn’t get wet. Well, we’ll get picked up in the morning” to “Boys, there goes our one and only chance at rescue.” After all, there was a war going on.

There are portable, hand-held sea-water desalinators that come with life-boat survival kits. The problem at sea w/out fresh water is eventually psychosis takes over, and the unfortunate victim suddenly believes it’s perfectly OK to drink seawater, and goes swimming off for the coke machine juuust over there… not. cool. at. all.