The story of how three crewmen lived more than a week in the middle of the Pacific in a wrecked sailboat with almost nothing
crew, Pete Brown and Jun "Sumi" Sumiyama, set off from Japan on their way to Hawaii in a 42-foot sailboat, the Coco-Haz III. They had four weeks to cross the world's largest ocean. The boat's owner, a retired Japanese dentist, needed the trip done in a hurry—he'd lose a boat slip he'd rented if it didn't arrive in time. Carney didn't think they would make it on schedule, even if everything went right. But things went far worse than he imagined when two catastrophes left them stranded in the middle of the sea.
Here is Carney's story, as told to Outside.
It was morning when it happened. I got my raingear on and went up on the deck to make some changes to our course. I stuck my head up, and I couldn't believe it—the mast was gone.
One of the shrouds that connected it to the ship just broke, I guess from metal fatigue. I've been sailing most of my life, and not only has this never happened on any boat I've been on, but I don't know anybody else who's had this happen to them, the mast just snapping like that.
It was December 19, and we were about a thousand miles from Oahu, Hawaii. We had lots of fuel, so we thought we could just motor in. The next day, a storm hit us. The seas were at 10 to 13 feet, nothing too dangerous. But as soon as night fell, there was one wave that went by, and we all looked at each other thinking, Whoa, that was a big one.
The next wave didn't just roll us, it picked us up and threw us. We landed upside down in the sea.
It was incredibly violent. What they show on TV, when the camera goes up and down and things are falling? It doesn't do it justice. Stuff was flying everywhere. The battery came blasting out of the engine compartment and shot through the cabin like a rocket. We got thrown around pretty good, and we were all bruised and cut. Sumi hit his head. We didn't know how bad it was until later.
The three of us were standing on the ceiling, and the water was coming in fast. At first it was shin-deep, and then it came up to our knees. In no time it was at our thighs. The hatch was up in the front, underwater. I kept picturing what that would be like, opening that hatch and coming out on the surface during a storm. We would be in the middle of the ocean with nothing.
I was sure that this was where we were going to die, right here in this storm, in this water. I was thinking, God, this boat's got to right itself. Sailboats are designed to flip back over if they roll, but you never know what's going to happen at sea.
Finally, it did roll. But even though the boat was upright, we were waist-deep in water, with the storm sending in more every time a wave broke over us. The engine was flooded. Most of our fuel went into the ocean. We lost our navigation, all our electronics, nearly all of our fresh water—everything. We were dead in the water and adrift.
We did our best to bail. The waves were slamming into us, and the hull started to crack. If we had a breach, the boat was going to sink in about 30 seconds.
The storm didn't break, and it was miserable. We were cold, and everything was wet. No dry clothes, no dry beds. We went on starvation rations, like five almonds per day. By rationing what little water and food we had left, we thought we could make it maybe 40 or 50 days. I had never seriously faced my mortality before. Everyone knows they're going to die. But they don't think that they are going die in 50 days.
The storm finally broke after 36 hours. We estimated that we had about 700 miles to go, so we rigged up a makeshift sail from the boat's bimini top, kind of like a convertible top for a car. With that, we could make one or two knots, but if the current is one or two knots against you, you're not going anywhere.
