Rescue in the Pacific: A True Story of Disaster and Survival in a Force 12 Storm

Tony Farrington

Sometime around 1989 or 1990 I picked up a copy of Steven Callahan's Adrift. Something about the cover or the subtitle ("seventy-six days lost at sea") or something else caught my attention. Reading the story of thirty-year-old Steven Callahan, setting off on a solo trip from the Canary Islands across the Atlantic Ocean for the Caribbean, I found myself swept up in the adventure.

Six days into his trip, Callahan's boat sinks and he resorts to his five-foot life raft. With just a little bit of food and about a gallon of water, he survives on raw fish and instinct for seventy-six days.

Callahan mentioned a book by Dougal Robertson, in which Robertson tells of his own adventure lost at sea with his family. The Robertsons survived thirty-seven days in a small life raft. I looked for the book but found that it was out of print. Oh, well. There's always computer books to read.

Then several months later I was at the local library's annual book sale when I spotted a book cover featuring six people in a tiny boat - Robertson's Survive the Savage Sea - discarded by the Marion Public Library. $3.64 later and I reading a classic survival tale.

Now I was hooked. But there is little to read in the genre. (A stop at Amazon.com today yielded no relevant hits.) Imagine my surprise in 1992 to find another Callahan title: Capsized, co-authored with James Nalepka. Capsized is the story of four men - acquaintances at best - trapped in a capsized trimaran for four winter months in the South Pacific.

I had long given up hope of finding any more "lost at sea" books. Then the other day I ran into Rescue in the Pacific.

This book is unlike the others in that it is written by an outsider who listened to the story unfold over short-wave radio from the comfort and safety of his yacht in Auckland, New Zealand. And the period of survival was relatively short; just a couple of days. But the power of the sea and the determination of those at its mercy are just as evident in this work.

In June 1994, a rare "weather bomb" broke loose north east of New Zealand. About sixty pleasure craft, enjoying the beautiful weather, had set out for Tonga on a 1000-mile journey. Several unexpectedly encountered this storm.

The book is the story of the rescue of the crews of several of these boats. It is written in an interesting style, which, for the most part, dedicates a chapter or two to each of the individual boats. But the chapter generally starts with the rescue boats arriving, then flashes back to calmer weather and brighter spirits a few days earlier and follows the doomed crew into the storm. An interesting story-telling technique.

Along the way we get to know the rescuers as well as the rescued. Radio operators, flight crews, and merchant seamen went without sleep for several days as they coordinated the rescue effort.

If you're a sailor, you'll get a lot more out of this book than I did. It's loaded with terminology that makes little sense to the uninitiated, and also with advice from the captains of each vessel on how to prepare for unexpected emergencies. It was fairly good reading but you need to have either an interest in sailing or the weird compulsion I have for survival stories in order to get much out of it.