Just had to share one of the small “good news” stories in the face of all the tragedy in SE Asia:
Tough kid. Kind of reminds me of “the Unsinkable Molly Brown”.
That’s amazing!
Ah, that’s nothin’. Paul Harvey reported today that a girl and two younger children survived by floating on the back of a python as thick as a telephone pole! When they got to dry land, they rolled off and the python slithered away!!!
There have been remarkable instances of people surviving adrift on the open ocean.
From the book *Surviving the Extremes{/i]by Kenneth Kamler, MD:
Lucien Schlitz and Catherine Plessz survived two weeks in the Medditerranean in a 6 foot life raft. Due to multiple capsizes of the raft, they had absolutely no food, water, or supplies.
Dougal and Lynn Robertson and their two sons survived shipwreck off the Galapagos, at sea for 38 days
Maurice and Marilyn Bailey survived 117 days in a life raft on the Pacifc.
The record is possibly held by Poon Lim, a Chinese sailer serving in the British merchant marine during WWII. After the ship he was on was sunk in the Atlantic by a Germain U-boat he survived over four months on the open ocean on nothing more than a wooden “raft” (debris from his ship) with no source of fresh water other than rain. He fashioned fish hooks by pulling nails out of the raft with his teeth and shaping them by hand. Quite a resourceful guy. When he was picked up off the coast of Brazil he was 30 lbs lighter than before his ordeal but otherwise in good health.
So, we could hear yet more stories of survivors clinging to debris for days before being picked up or washed ashore. We can surely hope.
There was a story about a baby on CNN the other night. The parents were swept away (they survived), but the baby in the house did not get swept away, but was left on a mattress and survived by floating on that mattress for several hours. This baby was 3 weeks old.