In looking at the boat it appears to have some kind of moss or growth on the hull.
I have seen that on boats that have been tied up for a long time or beached with one side exposed I just wonder if that growth is the same on the other side of the boat.
The story may never be proven to be false but the Post story sure raises some red flags.
also how do you know you are going to die within 24 hrs after having food water etc.
They also claim to have contacted someone and were told they would have to get to the other side of the island before they could be helped?
just guessing that in a few weeks they will be found out as frauds if they try to make money off this deal. Maybe somebody will figure out what island they stayed on for the last few months
It’s clear at this point that much of their account does not conform to reality. What’s not clear, however, is how much is fabrication, how much is exaggeration, and how much is hallucination. Is Appel an intentional hoaxer, a pathological liar, or just delusional? Based on current information, my money is on “crazier than a shithouse rat.”
-It’s obvious that the “force 11” storm that Appel claimed they encountered shortly after leaving Hawaii never existed. But would a hoaxer fabricate something that could so easily be refuted? Surely they could have come up with something like rogue wave to account for disabling their mast and engine if they were hoaxing. That would have been difficult to disprove.
So they actually do appear to have reached the vicinity of Tahiti. Why they did not continue is obscure.
-Appel claims to have gone to “Kiribati” (which she mispronounces in the interview; the official pronunciation is “Kiribass”) en route to Tahiti but was unable to enter the lagoon to repair the mast because the entry was too shallow to admit their boat. There is no island of “Kiribati”; it’s the name of a nation that includes dozens of islands. News accounts seem to assume that she meant Kiritimati (Christmas Island),* the largest island in Kiribati between Hawaii and Tahiti, which has a huge lagoon which they could easily have entered. I suspect that they actually hit Tabuaeran (Fanning), which is closer to Hawaii and has a smaller, shallower lagoon.
If Appel’s a hoaxer, she seems to be as bad at it as she is at sailing. I think the information is more consistent with her being a total whackadoodle.
*My favorite fact about Kiritimati is that the main towns are named London, Paris, and Poland.
This event, the early news coverage, and the thread here are an interesting Rorschach test.
What strikes me are the number of people who take the conflicting and incomplete reports and move from there directly to “Hoax!”. This is the mild safe (?) version of what drives CT thinking.
Most of us have consumed mass quantities of dramatic entertainment over our lives, whether that’s in books, TV, movies, etc.
Entertainment that is carefully crafted to ensure the characters do things for motivations the audience can see (because those motivations are carefull shown to us). And which unfolding story is told in a coherent logical fashion building-block fashion. Last of all Checkoiv’s law applies: any apparent loose end or random detail appearing in the early scenes will eventually serve some purpose later.
Real life executed by real people has exactly zero of these attributes. Real news reporting of even simple events has no completeness and no logic to which details happened to be noticed, written about, and not edited out.
At the end of the day, applying our dramatic “whodunit” watching skills to real world news events is an unproductive habit. Carried to extremes it leads to CT thinking, where every gap in the story (and there will be massive ones in any real story) is considered proof of malfeasance. Carried only a little way, it still leads to lots of unwarranted conclusions. Such conclusions might or might not turn out to be true. But they will be unwarranted based on the flimsy and partial “evidence” of uncertain accuracy they’re based on. And given the jillions of possible branches in any decent-sized story, the odds on unwarranted conclusions turning out to be right are slim.
As I used to say in other contexts: Good judgment applied to no data is no better than guesswork.
Am I allowed to think that their account is sketchy at best and to find it suspect without actually crying HOAX? I won’t declare definitively that they’re shysters, but having several decades of sailing experience, while recognizing that the reporters may not, I still think something doesn’t smell quite right.
There aren’t conflicting and incomplete reports, though. The sailors have provided one unified report of their trip and represented that it is complete. The problem so many people are having with it is that it’s implausible.
This is so far from the actual situation that I’m not sure I’m not being whooshed here. All they’ve given (Appel mostly) have been disjointed, sometimes incoherent interviews that in no way purport to be complete, give no real timeline, and which are inconsistent and self contradictory on many points.
The news reports, especially the initial ones, further confused things by leaving out information in the interest of brevity, or by misstating or misunderstanding things. For example, instead of the list of supplies Appel gave, they mentioned just “rice and pasta”; they said that they had packed a year’s worth of food (when Appel actually said she packed six months that could be stretched to a year); and they failed to understand Kiribati was the name of a country rather than an island.
If anyone has an explanation for their not turning on that beacon because they were waiting for a “real” emergency(???) and their declaration that they were sure the boat wouldn’t last another 24 hours I sure as fuck would like to hear it.
I was too brief, so let me rephrase. There is one source (the sailors), in the sense that we are not getting information about their trip anywhere but from them. There is one complete story (they hit a storm, lost the engine and the sails, and drifted until they were found), in the sense that they aren’t saying that there is more that they haven’t shared.
People aren’t skeptical because there are competing accounts of the trip, nor because the news reports have been fragmentary or incorrect. They’re skeptical because the story coming from the people on the boat, taken at face value, presents implausibilities.
I don’t take the fact that the story from the sailors is disjointed and internally inconsistent to mean that there are conflicting reports waiting to be sorted out, such that we’re wrong to start thinking whether there’s some sort of hoax. Rather, that’s just more evidence of the unreliability of their account, which in my view raises the possibility of a hoax of some sort rather than reducing it.
I think this is a textbook example of the adage: Don’t mistake for subterfuge what can be more easily explained by stupidity, followed by lies in an attempt to cover up the stupidity.
There are certainly problems with thier story. It may be due to rationalization or faulty memories or insanity (munchausen but not by proxy?). Proballay just two people who got in over thier head and don’t want to admit thier mistakes
Brian
(if that previos post is not a whoosh, EPIRBs are sattelite based unless it its a really old 121.5 unit)
I am getting that they did not think their situation was life-threatening, but near the end of their oddysey, they encountered a fishing boat, and instead of boarding that boat (maybe due to language differences, or the presence of the dogs), were being towed by it. But in the process of being towed, their sailboat was getting damaged, so they untied and were adrift again until the US ship found them.
If their boat was damaged during towing, and they were adrift again with a damaged boat, why not THEN activate the beacon - that is what I am wondering as well - because then they would have been in a life-threatening situation, as claimed.
Not a whoosh, just a dumb question apparently. I didn’t know much of anything about EPIRBs. I’m familiar with personal emergency beacons like Spot or DeLorme.