Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea

This third installment to our 2021 Siblings’ Book Club has has been on my shelf for probably 20 years. Books of survival are, perhaps, my favorite genre of all, yet for some reason I had always avoided taking this one on. Thanks to my sister who recommended this, and thanks to everyone for voting it into first place!

Adrift is the true and desperate story of Steve Callahan’s seventy-six days in a life-raft dubbed Rubber Ducky III, following the unexpected sinking of his actual boat, Napoleon Solo, about 800 miles west of the Canary Islands. He wrote this book three years after his adventure, allowing enough time for his body to heal, for the reality of his survival to sink in, and for his brain to be able to view it all with slight objectivity. Writing from notes taken in his sailor’s log, from memory, and from rescue details supplied by his family after the fact, Callahan spins a harrowing tale that deserves to be read more than once.

Key elements to this story include Callahan’s own spirituality/worldview, his intense creativity, and his will to survive. Considering his spirituality/worldview, he’s not an Atheist, yet he also doesn’t quite hold to any particular religious concept of God. He believes in a creator, and that all created beings are brothers and sisters. He considers the whale to be his spirit animal, and he considers the flesh of the dozen or so dorado-fish he ate as a gift from the universe.

Considering Callahan’s intense creativity, virtually every page of the book includes some means he conjured up of fixing his broken spear-gun, the hole in his bottom tube, or the deflating solar sills aboard his raft. His name isn’t Jerry, so I’ll say he “Steven-rigged” some masterful fixes on this voyage, and this is one element of survival non-fiction that fascinated me the most. Perhaps that why Apollo 13 is among my favorite space movies of all time. Yet also part of his creativity are the many illustrations he himself inked for the sake of this book, clarifying his descriptions and helping us see not merely with our minds’ eyes these pieces of equipment and aquatic life which really existed.

Considering his will to survive, all of us readers in the Book Club struggled here. Some wanted to know what kept him going, form where his hope sprung. I sided more with the camp that said he didn’t need a specific hope beyond “life.” At one point late in the book he discussed how suicide never entered his mind, despite the thirst and the incessant pain from his boils, and the constant battering of the fish from beneath. All he looked forward to was survival, so the thing that kept him going (in my opinion) was merely Life.

Many poignant and teachable moments exists in this book, and I suppose they would be grand topics for discussion (i.e. “What would you throw in your go-bag?” or “Which of your current skills would have helped you survive—or killed you!—were you thrown into Steven’s predicament?”), but one moment stuck out to me more than others, and I had actually shared this as an illustration in a Bible Study this week.

It’s Day 45. The lower tube on Steven’s raft has a gaping hole, and he has been trying desperately to figure out a way to prevent the ties he’s applied from slipping off. Meanwhile, he is forced to pump hundreds of times more often than normal each day, and the saggy floor keeps his body and sores dunked in the salty water and suffocated by the loose rubber. He can find no comfortable position in which to sit, kneel, stand, or lie down. And what’s more, he’s just struck a dorado with his spear gun, which has wriggled free, unscrewing his metal spear tip with it! What a desperate time! He’s not yet in the pits of despair, but here’s nearing them, circling them like a plane that’s run out of fuel.

My question is this: had Callahan known that he still was to face 31 more days at sea, would he have given up at this point? Day to day, he lived with the hope of sighting a ship, and flare after flare had been wasted on passing liners that never noticed him. With all these downturns happening at once, and the pain of his festering sores eating into him every moment of the day, would have have quit, knowing he was only 3/5 through his ordea?

I think of people who say such things as, “I want to know God’s will for my life,” or, “I only I could have a glimpse of the future, then I would trust Him more!” But would they? What if God allowed a glimpse of what was to come, and He said, “You’re going to struggle financially for the next seven years, during which time you’re father will die, and you’ll gain fifty pounds. Then you’ll get a better-paying job, but a co-worker will spread lies about you, and you’ll lose your reputation in the eyes of everyone there, which will cause you to have a stress-induced heart attack. And then you mother will die.” Would knowing all this boost one’s confidence in Him? We know that the future isn’t all roses. And yet we also know that, in the end, God wins, and we get to share in that ultimate victory. So would the details of all that awaits really boost our confidence? Or would it only serve to embolden our anxiety and fear and makes us want to give up long before these horrible ordeals hit?

All I’m saying is that Callahan’s will to survive existed within the context of never knowing what tomorrow would bring. He clung to hope in the unknown. We followers of Christ have a similar hope, yet our hope rests not merely in the unknown, but in the Known-yet-Unseen. Does it matter that I don’t know the future? Of course not. No one but God does. Yet it does matter how I view that future: as in the hands of a God Who loves me, whose ways are not my ways, and whose thoughts are not my thoughts. In fact, our thoughts aren’t merely “different,” but as separate “as the heavens are above the earth.” That’s something in which I can be grandly confident.

This book did not squelch my fears of the ocean, but it did land easily within my life of top 5 favorite Adventure books of all time, along with the following:

• Alive! by Piers Paul Read (1974)
• Endurance by Alfred Lansing (1959)
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1996)
• The History of the Donner Party by C.F. McGlashan (1880)

Other recommendations from our Book Club for survival stories as grand as this include:

• Touching the Void by Joe Simpson (1988)
• Between a Rock and Hard Place by Aron Ralston (2004)
• 8 Men and a Duck by Nick Thorpe (2003)

I’m always looking for recommendation in this similar vein, so what others would you recommend?

©2021 E.T.