How I survived for 38 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean
For Sandy Robertson, June 15 1972, began as a calm day afloat on a small patch of the mighty Pacific Ocean, 200 miles west of the Galapagos.
The then 12-year-old was at the helm of the Lucette, an ageing, 43ft wooden schooner, with his older brother Douglas by his side. Together with the rest of their family, the boys were sailing around the world, and the going on this particular morning was good.
“The conditions were fine and the Lucette was sailing really well,” says Sandy, now 64. “Everyone’s spirits were high and we were looking forward to the journey ahead.”
Sandy’s twin brother Neil, parents Dougal and Lyn, and Robin Williams, a 22-year-old Welsh statistician who had joined the family on their adventure across the world’s largest body of water, were below deck at the time as the Lucette made headway for the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia.
But the tranquillity wasn’t to last. Without warning, there was an almighty crash, sending the mug of coffee Sandy was holding flying through the air. While he managed to remain upright, with one hand still on the wheel, Douglas was knocked off his feet.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have hit something and Dad is going to kill me’,” says Sandy. In fact, something had hit them, three times in quick succession.
“I turned around in the cockpit and saw a pod of killer whales in the ocean,” says Sandy. “I looked into the engine compartment where my father was and I could see water.”
The Lucette had been attacked by orcas. There was one hole in the aft cabin and one in the head – where the toilet was. Within seconds, it became horrifyingly clear that the boat was sinking.
The 38 days which followed marked a struggle for survival – one that still resonates more than half a century on, for its demonstration of the indomitability of the human spirit.
The voyage of a lifetime
It was four years earlier, while following Sir Robin Knox-Johnston in the 1968 round-the-world yacht race from their home in Staffordshire that Sandy and his family were first inspired to embark on an escapade of their own.
Dougal, a no-nonsense farmer who had served in the Merchant Navy, and midwife Lyn had married almost two decades before, in 1951. Four children followed.
But life was difficult, and by the time they watched Sir Robin complete the first single-handed non-stop circumnavigation of the globe, they had grown tired of eking a living out of their dairy farm at Meerbrook, near the market town of Leek.
Within two years, they had sold-up and invested their life savings in the Lucette, a 50-year-old, 19-ton schooner.
On January 27 1971, their sailing dream finally came to fruition when they set off from Falmouth harbour on the journey of a lifetime. Daughter Anne, then 18, Douglas, then 17, and twins Sandy and Neil, then 11, all had zero sailing experience.
“We had spent six months living on the boat in Falmouth, getting everything ready, and not once did Dad take us out round the bay for a gentle sail,” says Sandy. The family did prepare, however, by having their appendixes removed to avoid any bouts of appendicitis during their trip.
From Falmouth to the Galapagos
The first leg – a journey of more than 820 nautical miles to Lisbon – was blighted by gale-force winds, and Lyn, Anne and the twins were crippled by seasickness. But by the time the family had reached the Portuguese coast, after 11 days of sailing, they had discovered their sea legs, each familiarising themselves with the workings of the boat.
Over the course of the next six months, they travelled coast to coast, journeying from Lisbon to Las Palmas, on Gran Canaria, followed by the Caribbean. It was there, in the Bahamas, that Anne met a man and fell in love. After travelling with the group for a while, he and Anne eventually abandoned the trip, returning to Nassau. The rest of the family went on.
In July 1971, the Robertsons arrived in Miami, where in a stroke of luck that would later prove decisive, they met a fellow sailing family who kindly gave them their life raft. Dougal also bought a 10ft fibreglass dinghy, which they named Ednamair – after Lyn’s sisters, Edna and Mary – from a local school.
Following a brief visit back to the Bahamas, the group eventually departed Miami in January, 1972, headed for Panama via Jamaica, among other stops along the way. After arriving in Colón in late March, Dougal set about turning the Ednamair into a sailing dinghy. It was also where the family met Robin, the Welsh statistician, who was a sailing novice.
Robin was backpacking around the world and was particularly keen to get to New Zealand. After learning of the Robertsons’ plan, he asked if he could tag along in return for giving the twins a few maths lessons along the way. Dougal and Lyn quickly took him up on the offer.
They set off in mid-May and by June 1 1972, the family and their plus one had reached the Galapagos Islands, where they immersed themselves in the local flora and fauna which had so fascinated Charles Darwin during his own visit to the remote volcanic archipelago 137 years earlier.
The visit would prove to be their last moments on land for nearly six weeks.
‘Whales! Whales!’
The boat “was in perfect working order” as they set off from the Galapagos on June 13 1972, Sandy says. But within two days disaster struck when a trio of orcas delivered a series of blows to the Lucette.
In what would prove to be a fortunate twist of fate, the attack came just moments after Dougal had abandoned an unsuccessful fishing attempt. A stickler for keeping a tight ship, their father was always telling the boys to make sure they stowed the fishing line away. But on this occasion, they hadn’t, leaving it lying out onboard instead.
“It was 9.55am and I had just been given a cup of coffee. Then suddenly there was an almighty crash and the cup of coffee was airborne,” says Sandy. “Douglas was screaming, ‘Whales! Whales!’”
Water began flooding into the Lucette, forcing Dougal to try to plug one of several holes created by the orcas with a pillow. But realising he was fighting a losing battle, he gave the command to abandon ship and freed the inflatable life raft and the Ednamair, which were tied together. Within little more than a minute, the family and Robin had gathered all they could in their arms and leapt into the ocean.
“Mum gave me a bag of red onions. I stepped off the boat and rolled onto my back clutching them,” says Sandy.
Panicked, the group scrambled their way to the life raft one by one. All of them were barefoot, and dressed in shorts and T-shirts. As they regrouped, they picked through the supplies they had managed to scoop up before abandoning the Lucette – among them Lyn’s sewing kit, the bag of onions, 10 oranges, six lemons and the fishing line.
The 8ft by 6ft life raft was equipped with a survival pack including flares and a knife, as well as rations amounting to a day’s worth of food and water for 10 people.
“I saw the top of the Lucette’s mast disappearing under the water,” says Sandy. “Neil then started crying and Mum was comforting him. He said: ‘I’m not crying because we’re in a life raft, I’m crying because we have lost the Lucette.’”
Heading for the doldrums
Before the family began their fight for survival, they bickered. There was no help on the horizon, they had no map, no compass and nobody was aware of their situation.
“Blame was being levelled. Mum told Dad he had put us at risk. Douglas told them both to shut up, and said that we had to get on with what we needed to do day to day,” says Sandy.
Sparked into action, Dougal vowed to his family that he would make sure they made it back to land alive. He hatched a plan to sail north, towards an area known by sailors as the doldrums – a belt around the Earth near the equator, where the northeast and southeast trade winds meet and rainstorms are almost constant.
“Dad knew that going north we would hit the doldrums. That was our point of call for collecting water to drink,” says Sandy.
But the journey would take more than two weeks, meaning survival in the meantime depended on capturing the little rainwater they could using a catchment panel on the raft and apportioning it accordingly. Dougal rationed it stringently – allowing for one sip each per hour. At their lowest point, the group of six were surviving on only a mouthful each a day.
Food supplies soon dwindled. After about six days, a precious stash of glucose sweets and high-protein biscuits was almost all gone. “We learnt to eat them in a million different ways. I would eat them all at once and then spend the next three hours bringing them back up into my mouth and eating them again until there was nothing left,” says Sandy.
A week after being forced to abandon the Lucette, the group saw their first glimpse of hope – it proved to be fleeting. “A cargo ship passed us, about a mile or so away. Dad sent flares up, but it just sailed by,” says Sandy.
‘We were covered in thick black excrement’
Later the same day, the group managed to successfully catch their first turtle using the raft’s rescue line. An aborted attempt just days earlier had seen a turtle nearly rip the life raft to shreds with its claws before the group tossed it back into the ocean.
Almost every part of the animal was devoured. “Dad pumped the blood into a jar. He drank the first mouthful and then passed it round. If you were last to drink, the serum had separated and you had to put your finger in and whisk it around before you drank it,” says Sandy. “We would also roll the eyeballs around our mouths for ages until the membrane dissolved and they popped. They tasted salty.”
The group also made their way through every last morsel of the oranges and the onions salvaged from the Lucette. “We ate every last bit – the skin, the lot. Nothing was wasted. If I eat an orange or a red onion now, I go straight back to the life raft,” says Sandy.
Lyn did her best to comfort the others, using bits of sail to craft makeshift bedding and rubbing turtle oil into their skin to help keep them warm at night, when the days gave way to plummeting temperatures.
Despite her best efforts, conditions were becoming increasingly wretched. There was a constant pool of saltwater mixed with human excrement and turtle offal in the bottom of the raft which left them all with boils.
One particularly grim incident involved her using the liquid to administer enemas aimed at rehydrating the group. Robin refused, but Dougal, the twins and Douglas recognised that it was for their own good.
“We had a rubber tube from the raft ladder and Dad sharpened the end of it. Mum used turtle oil as lubricant. Gravity meant you were filled up with the dirty water,” says Sandy. “Bear Grylls swears by it, but what he doesn’t tell you is that what goes in has to come out. The following day we were covered in thick black excrement. Even by our new standards, it was disgusting.”
I spy and a lack of sleep
On the 15th day of their ordeal, the group finally reached the doldrums. But there was little respite to be found, and within 48 hours, life aboard the raft had taken another downward turn.
“The seams started to wear and water started coming in,” says Sandy. “You were sitting there with it up to your chest. You would fall asleep and your head would hit the water and wake you up.”
Equally worrying was what was going on outside the raft. The minnows the group had been catching were attracting bigger fish and with them sharks, which began circling the vessel, occasionally nudging it too.
It was at this point that the group made the decision to jump ship to the bailed out Ednamair. Once aboard they adapted their survival tactics, using the dinghy’s mast to hang up the fish they caught, allowing them to dry in the sun and therefore last longer.
“One of the nicest things we ate on board was some flying fish we found inside a dorado’s stomach. It tasted marinated and all the scales had come off,” says Sandy. “Also the best-tasting meat was the stuff that was green and slimy, essentially rotting – it was soft and tasted beautiful.”
Despite routine catches, the group was losing weight fast. They talked about food for hours on end, taking it in turns to reveal what their first meal would be if they made it to land.
“Mine was steak, egg and chips and a can of Coke. We also invented a café called ‘Dougal’s’ and we would take it in turns to invent a menu,” says Sandy.
The six leant on such games in an effort to keep morale from hitting rock bottom – “I spy” among them. “We weren’t allowed to do anything outside the dinghy as it was invariably only something beginning with S. Sea, sky, sun…” says Sandy. Day 20 of being stranded, July 4, saw them celebrate Lyn’s birthday with a feast of turtle meat and dried dorado.
But while spirits were generally high, logistics proved a continual challenge. Fitting six people in a 10ft boat meant that they were literally sitting on top of one another, and it was impossible to jump into the water when nature called.
“The freeboard was four inches above the level of the sea, so we couldn’t get out to go to the loo because we would have sunk the dinghy,” says Sandy. “So we had to go where we were and it just covered everybody.”
To make matters worse, there wasn’t much sleep. “We took it in turns to sit on the centre thwart because it was so cold at night and this meant you avoided the water in the bottom of the boat,” says Sandy, who contracted pneumonia while at sea.
The prospect of death was discussed. Lyn said that if Sandy died, she would get in the water with his body and die with him. Boils and ulcers ravaged all of their bodies. “If you touched them they were so painful and the salt made it worse,” says Sandy.
‘He held onto the flare until the tips of his fingers were burnt’
Day 28 brought with it enormous swells – 20ft waves that crashed down around the boat, requiring it to be constantly bailed out. Sodden, the family pressed on, heading north-west, and within two days had edged back into the northern hemisphere – confirmed by Douglas’s reading of the night sky.
Calmer waters awaited them there, at least for a few days, but the threats were unrelenting.
“One morning I was flicking the water with my finger to make ripples,” says Sandy. “Just at that moment, a white-tipped shark fin came out. It must have been following us for days and eating all the turtle shells and remains that we had been throwing into the water. It was bigger than the boat. If it had hit us, the boat would have capsized.”
Nearly six weeks after the orcas wrecked the Lucette, salvation finally came early on the evening of July 23 1972 – day 38, when the group spotted a boat while playing a game of I spy.
“Dad said, ‘There’s a ship over there! Pass me the flares!’” says Sandy. “He set off the first one and waited. The second one was a dud. Then he stood on the centre thwart and set fire to the sail with the final flare. He held onto the flare until the tips of his fingers were burnt.”
The boat, a Japanese fishing vessel called the Toka Maru II, was on its way to the Panama Canal. Its watchman fortuitously saw the red arc of the distress flare lit by Dougal.
“They came alongside but they couldn’t speak English,” says Sandy. With the Ednamair surrounded by sharks, the rescuers hurriedly dropped a rope ladder into the water, allowing Sandy and his twin brother to escape the dinghy first. The others followed.
“I climbed up the ladder and saw Neil lying on the floor and I wondered what was wrong with him,” says Sandy. “Then as I tried to stand up I collapsed too. Our ankles were so weak we couldn’t stand.”
Once they were all off the Ednamair, Dougal pleaded with the Japanese crew to bring the dinghy on board. Kindly, they agreed – it now sits in the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall.
After feeding them a meal of bread and butter accompanied by black coffee, their saviours were quick to usher the group into the showers. “We had basically just stepped off a floating abattoir,” says Sandy. “We were covered in boils, sores and excrement. The skin was peeling off our fingers. We had no idea we smelt.”
Next, the family and Robin were given some sushi and noodles. “I remember still regurgitating my food. Dad asked me what I was doing. He hadn’t realised I had been doing it before,” says Sandy.
Borrowing money for a boat back home
The Ednamair was bobbing around some 300 miles west of Costa Rica when the group was rescued. They had travelled more than 750 miles by raft and dinghy in total.
The Toka Maru ferried them to Panama City, where the world’s press were waiting as the group stepped foot on land again four days later on July 27 1972. Robin and the family were immediately checked over by medics. By now, Sandy was coughing up white phlegm and had to be treated with antibiotics as he battled a confirmed lung infection. All of the group had also lost a considerable amount of weight, haemorrhaging up to 13kg (28lb 10oz) each while at sea.
After almost a month spent recuperating in Panama, it was eventually time to travel back to Britain onboard the MV Port Auckland. “We had to borrow money from the government to get a boat home to Liverpool,” says Sandy.
Anne awaited them there, though readjusting to normal life wasn’t easy and often Sandy wished he was back atop the deep waters of the Pacific, a world away from the rediscovered boredom of maths classes and regimented tea times.
“My first day back at school I wanted to be back on the raft. It was terrible,” he says. “In the middle of the Pacific there was nothing to complain about.”
Looking back now, Sandy believes his father’s determination to save his family would have seen them survive the ordeal even if they hadn’t been rescued.
But he admits the family struggled upon their return, shuffling between staying with cousins to living in a hotel, a caravan and then rented accommodation.
Sadly, Lyn and Dougal’s marriage didn’t last. “Dad ended up moving to Greece to write his book, Survive the Savage Sea, and we would visit in the school holidays. He then moved to France,” says Sandy.
Lyn eventually returned to Dougal’s side when he became terminally ill later in life. She nursed him right up until his death in 1991, and seven years later, was buried alongside him.
Sandy went on to become a mechanical engineer. He carried on sailing and even brought his own four children up on a 100ft trawler moored in Shoreham, West Sussex. He and his wife Deborah, 61, now have nine grandchildren.
The brothers remain close and still keep in touch with Robin, who lives in Bristol.
Sandy recently flew out to Japan to meet the captain of the vessel that rescued them all. “I also met some of the crew. It was emotional and very rewarding,” he says.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sandy says his experiences more than half a century ago have come to define his life ever since, informing his sense of resilience and self-sufficiency.
“Everybody has an inner warrior,” he says. “Man is a hunter. There is a drive within you to stay alive. My attitude is now do or die, get on with it.”
Besides, he says, no matter how difficult life on land occasionally gets: “Worse things happen at sea.”