Hey, if it worked for Timothy Treadwell… Oh wait, it didn’t.
Hey, although they did not have an EPIRB, they did have a geiger counter. :smack:
I wonder how they cooked their oatmeal and pasta. 
Fromhere:
I rather doubt that Murphy was completely responsible. I suspect that she hadn’t tested them out before departing or maybe just hadn’t learned how to operate them.
Well to be fair, it *did *work. Until one day it didn’t.
These ding-a-lings’ half-assed approach to both sailing and to surviving worked. Until it wouldn’t have.
They just had the great good fortune to A) have a lot of food, B) not encounter much in the way of truly dangerous weather, and C) bump into the Navy before luck buckets A & B gave out.
As has been said up-thread, IMO if we re-run this experiment 100 times, the other 99 pairs of ding-a-lings are likely dead.
Here’s the thing I’d be interested to speculate about:
Let’s say they hadn’t bumped into the Navy and the food supplies eventually run out. Who ends up eating who in what order? My bet is the last survivor of the four is a dog.
I suspect you’re right. The women would have starved to death before eating the dogs. Not so much the reverse.
The latest report by the AP says that they did have an emergency beacon, but never turned it on. Other parts of their story are also being called into question.
They could have eaten one of those 80 meter sharks.
I’m just impressed that they were able to purchase a weather satellite.
"National Weather Service records show no organized storms in the region in early May. "
Maybe it was non-union?
sounding hoax-ish…
No truer words have ever been typed into the intertubes before.
To paraphrase from above:
Bringing radios you haven’t tested, don’t know how to operate and/or never turn on is indistinguishable from not bringing them.
But it strains credulity to hear that the extent of their SatPhone use was “It didn’t seem to work” and that, while believing they were close to death, they couldn’t trouble themselves to activate the EPIRB.
Clearly, we don’t yet have the full story.
nm
I don’t know about theirs, but with the one I had, you activated it by turning the knob. The only knob. With fancier models, you use a switch. The only switch. I’m not aware of any EPIRBs that have both a knob and a switch.
The only thing challenging about an EPIRB is resisting the urge to turn the knob. It’s a guy thing.
Agreed. That was kind of what I was getting at by citing (and correctly parsing) a couple of different articles which, taken together, give you the idea that maybe they had a diet that included more than just oatmeal and pasta. OTOH, Chronos expressed a belief that they had been eating absolutely nothing but oatmeal and pasta for months on end, which strains credulity and isn’t backed up by any news article.
My guess is that they were content to limp about indefinitely, but figured that the trawler tow would bounce their sailboat apart, so they decided to stay with their sailboat and wait for the navy rather than abandon their sailboat and hitch a ride with the trawler. The only thing certain about the affair is that they were dumber than their dogs’ dog shit.
The big question now will be “made for TV movie” or “Netflix serial”?
… or a spot on “World’s Stupidest [Whatever]”
The cynical part of me is beginning to wonder whether this was the whole point. Hey, let’s pretend we’re lost at sea, then get ‘rescued’ and negotiate for the movie rights. Nothing these days seems to be genuine.
If I can veer off in a Cafe Society direction for a moment, may I suggest that anyone avidly following this story might enjoy the book, “And the Sea Will Tell,” by Vincent Bugliosi?
It’s an oldie but goodie true crime tale, and - in a feat that is pretty much the exact opposite of what seems to have happened here - includes the story of a plucky (though possibly guilty of being an accomplice to murder) young woman who basically taught herself how to navigate, mid-ocean with limited tools, to a tiny atoll. A great story, on many levels.