Some puzzling aspects to this:
The text indicates their problem was an engine failure, caused by “bad weather” (??)
If they had anything resembling normal sails aboard their sailboat, they should have been able to average 3 kts (very slow).
The distance from Hawaii to Tahiti (their destination) is around 2300 nautical miles; averaging 3 kts, this should take around a month.
“They originally thought they would be able to reach land by relying on wind and sails.” (Yes - it’s a rather common sailor’s tactic.) Did they give up on this, and decide just to drift?
Two months into the voyage, they started sending distress radio calls - but these were not heard because they “were not close enough to other vessels or shore stations”. So for a voyage across the remote Pacific they had no normal long-distance radio, nor any sort of emergency beacon or satellite link?
They were worried about shark attacks, claiming that “a group of seven 30ft-long sharks slapped their tails on the hull of the ship one night.” But anything near that size would be harmless; the largest dangerous shark reaches about 20ft.
It is curious how they couldn’t sail to land. They don’t have to find Tahiti, if they just headed west they would have hit the Asian mainland somewhere, and certainly been close enough for their distress signals to be picked up.
I have no expertise in sailing but I assume a few bad assumptions and decisions could have also left them going in circles or trying to sail against a current or something, which would just mean they weren’t experienced enough for such a voyage.
The MSNBC article said first a piece of the mast called a spreader failed, limiting their maneuverability. The storm that flooded the engine came a week later.
No need for “experience” to know one needs more than a rubber inner tube to sail across the ocean. I will not even attempt to list everything they should have had on board, but a MF/HF radio transceiver (along with the emergency antenna you have in case the main antenna depends on the mast) and a GPS EPIRB should have got them rescued pretty quickly.
The story struck me as fishy :D. First, they supposedly had enough food to last a year. Why? But even with adequate food and water, the women and their dogs all look too healthy to have been lost at sea for five months. They should be thinner, more scraggly looking, and tanned to a crisp.
When planning to sail a couple thousand miles across the Pacific, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing ever to learn something about the creatures you might encounter.
The MSNBC article says the fish in question were tiger sharks, which apparently reach a maximum length around 14 ft. (Though I can believe they may look bigger to those who believe they are under attack.)
They had plenty of food, and a water processing machine which, under normal when shit happens rules, should have surely broke down. It didn’t, and they basically had a very long, boring cruise to nowhere.
They could pass for people who’d been rescued after 5 days adrift. They certainly were not sailors. :rolleyes:
A spreader is a horizontal structural member that connects the mast to one of the stays (wires/cables) that go to either the port or starboard side of the boat. This helps provide a better angle to hold the mast up when the stay on that side is under load. If a spreader broke they should have been able to remain under sail on the opposite tack and/or sail with a reefed sail.
I saw the tail end of a blurb about this on the news last night, but my buddy was telling me about it today, and according to him the two “sailors” had very little experience sailing. If that is true (and I can’t say I know for sure), they had absolutely no business trying to sail from Hawai’i to Tahiti.
There are areas of light winds between Hawaii and Tahiti. But once they decided not to continue in that direction they should have been able to pick up the trade winds south of Hawaii which would bring them toward Asia.
I would think any reasonably competent sailor, or any moderately competent person at all, would have been able to jury-rig some kind of sail that would enable them to do more than drift.
Everything about this - the lack of communications equipment, the lack of competence to deal with a broken mast or engine, the lack of sailing ability, the lack of knowledge of sea life - screams that these women had no idea what they were doing. They only survived by taking the advice to carry a huge supply of food and water purifying equipment.
I’d consider it more a near-miss for a Darwin Award, but yeah, they had no business making any kind of long distance sailing voyage,
And did they let anyone know where they were going? If someone knew where they were supposed to be, and knew that they weren’t there, then there would have been ships out there looking for them, close enough for their stupidly-inadequate radio to reach. And why the heck weren’t they continuously sending distress signals? The only way to know there are no ships in range to receive them is to send them and not get a response.
That they were actually headed to someplace near where they ended up (western Pacific, south of Japan, 5000+ miles from Tahiti)? What would be the advantage of claiming they were headed to Tahiti?
The spreaders are a bit hard to see in that photo. They stick out of the mast just a bit above the head of whoever is climbing the mast. Neither spreader appears broken but one might be. Hard to say from this angle.
The main sail is secured around the boom. It appears to be a properly secured sail that has been lowered. No reason to think that sail was damaged.
Worst case if one spreader really was damaged is that the main sail only gets raised part the way up the mast and the excess sail is secured to the boom with pieces of rope (the sail gets reefed). Should still be able to use a jib for a headsail which flies between the front tip of the deck of the boat and the top of the mast. In short, they should have been able to sail relatively normally in any downwind direction, within a 180 degree arc. And they could probably make modest headway on an upwind course up to 65 degrees off the wind.
Their intended course from Hawaii to Tahiti would be a bit east of due south. Prevailing winds and currents would tend to pull them west, requiring a more upwind heading. If they found themselves overwhelmed by that then the Marshall Islands would have been at an easier heading. Somehow I doubt they had sufficient skill to get themselves to nearer landfall.
