Rather than be a "forum hog," I'll post these together:

1.) I'm reading a book called "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook." It is bit of a tongue-in-cheek survival manual that discusses the basics of situations like "How to Fend off a Shark," "How to Survive When Lost in the Desert," etc. Anyway, there is a list of supplies under the "How to Survive Adrift at Sea" that includes the usual VHF radio, drinking water, signaling devices, etc. and something they call a "handheld watermaker." This sounds to me like either a fictional item in an otherwise sound list, or perhaps another name for something I'm familiar with. Any thoughts?

2.) We always hear more stories of folks who almost didn't survive or just plain didn't survive some emergency situation than we do folks that did the right thing and did survive. Certainly, there are lessons to be learned from both, but I was wondering if anyone knows of some reading material about people who were faced with a survival situation and succeeded. Reader's Digest occasionally contains one of these stories, but I'm looking for longer, more involved narratives to read. Any thoughts? By the way, I already have "The Long Walk" by Slavomir Rawicz, which I highly recommend.

Thanks.

FWIW, in the sailing world a "watermaker" is a high-pressure reverse-osmosis desalinator. The fact that these have become economically feasible (barely) fairly recently has effectively doubled safe cruising range, though it's too early to see much impact. They have recently been getting more and more energy-efficient, to the point where some can be powered not just with wind generators, but with solar panels.

This has a potential long-term impact not only on life at sea, but on what areas of the world may be "habitable". There are many thousands of very attractive islands that have no permanent population simply because there's not enough fresh water. That may change now, for better or worse.

I've seen some models that have manual-pump backups in case the elecric pump system fails. I hadn't noted hand-held versions before, but it seems a natural for a life raft. They're NOT cheap, and make no sense away from seawater.

On your second point, nothing comes to mind at the moment, but I have been frustrated more than once reading survival stories- even book-length- by the lack of detail. I think what happens is that the editors and publishers get into the act and decide that "no one wants to read all this boring day-to-day stuff", and you end up with a narrative that tells what happened, but now how. Very frustrating.

Re >>something they call a "handheld watermaker."<< sounds like a Pur Survivor desalinator.

As for books, the only one springing to mind at this early hour is Adrift by Steve Callahan. It's pretty readable recounts some of the improvised repairs and mental hardships faced by a solo survivor. I think Doug reviewed it on his list. I know there are others that I've read but I really need to get some caffeine going to free them from the recesses of my memory.

For something a little off the regular survival track try Lost Moon by Jim Lovell. It's the true story of Apollo 13. Not much useful in your day to day scenario but a good survival story none the less.

Ed

Hey, thanks for reminding me about "Lost Moon." I love that kind of stuff, and I had forgotten that I wanted to put it on my "To Read" list.

I found this book: "Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls : True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors" to be a very interesting read about survival. It's just not one account but a multiple survival situations starting in 1800s and ending in modern times.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0395911508/ref%3Dnosim/equippedtosur-20/102-5145177-9074524
Matt

>>"no one wants to read all this boring day-to-day stuff",

Except when the survivor cuts off his own arm and survives in spite of his or best effort.

Acually, most sucessful survival stories are likely bland because folks did the right things like have a trip plan, use their head and are "saved" before things become critical. BTW, read Chris' narative of a sucessful survival situation on the California Channel Islands in Lessons Learned So Near, Yet So Far. I hope anyone out there that has had a survival experience would consider documenting it and submitting it ETS for postin. We'd all love to learn from success and not just mistakes.

2) stories of folks who did the right thing and survived abound - they are called biographies! For those who survived harsher situations get biographies of adventerous people. Seriously when folks are confronted with a situation and they do the right things and pull through they may be credited with common sense, bravery, foresight but they make lousy news. That is because they didn't have to cut their arm off to survive, instead they poked the rock with a stick first, jumped back when it shifted and let it tumble to the canyon floor harmlessly and then they contineued on with their walk in the wilderness and came back on time to the preplanned meeting point, hooked up with the folks that were expecting them and went out for a beer with their buddies and went on with their lives. Catch the headlines - "Man hikes known, blazed trail in National park for 1 day and returns on time alive!" read all about it! You heard it here first!

Yep.

Some suit decides the exact details are boring, and deletes them. I asked someone who is not into preparedness about this sort of detail the other day, and their response was, "Who cares about that, anyway? Just cut to the chase."

Sigh.

A book I am starting to read is "No Surrender My Thirty-year War" by Hiroo Onoda.It is the telling of the last Japanese soldier to surrender(in 1974)after thirty years in the Philippine jungle.I'll report when I'm done and what thought of it.It should be interesting any way.

Boatman
John

One movie I'd like to see is Werner Herzog's 1999 documentary "Wings of Hope", about 17-year old Juliana Koepcke who was the only survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian Amazon.

From the review at Wings of Hope (Werner Herzog, 1999)

"[Herzog] was in the Lima, Peru, airport on Christmas eve, 1971, trying to get to the Aguirre [film] set out in the jungle. A full plane took off without him, and 92 passengers and crew disappeared off the map in a fatal crash. One passenger survived, a 17-year-old German girl named Juliane Koepke. For Wings of Hope, Herzog decided to relive his trauma of that fateful 1971 night by locating Koepke, having her tell her extraordinary story, and asking her to recreate her trek back to civilization, seventeen years after..... Koepke had been raised by her German emigre parents on an ecological site in the jungle. She had grown up with survival training. ... Therefore, she realized that she had to locate flowing water and follow it downstream, until the water turned into a navigable river, where natives might find her..." (from the film review at http://www.geraldpeary.com/reviews/wxyz/wings-of-hope.html )

i have seen a documentairy on discovery channel a long long time ago, featuring that story. If remeber correctly she wasn't the only survivar from the crash, but she was the only one that didn't stay at the crash scene ( she didn't knew that ). the others died there...

I think I first read this story in a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" article. And they said the same thing - quite a few people survived the crash, but everyone just sat around waiting to be rescued - none of them survived, in the end.

I suppose whether Koepcke did the "right" thing or not is probably undecidable; lots of people do the "right" thing and don't survive, lots do everything wrong and muddle through anyway. But she appears to have remained cool and made rational decisions, and in the end, she did survive.

A true survival story were the people invvolved seemed to do the right thing turned up in the papers a few weeks ago here in the UK. Can't remeber the exact details, but a couple of experienced mountaineers got caught in an unexpected (i.e. not forcast) storm on a planned climb and were stranded. After a day or so they sent a text message to a friend in London who managed to notify the rescue services of their exact location. After a couple of attempts they were brought down safely not much the worst for wear.

Will try to find the article and post a link....

Another "off the regular track" book I enjoyed was "Emergency!: Crisis in the Cockpit" by Stanley Stewart. None of it involved "survival" in the sense we discuss it but it was interesting to read about how professionals responded when all the chips were down.

Stewart's over-riding criterion when selecting these incidents was that they all be non-fatal incidents.

If you're interested in this kind of survival story, http://www.panix.com/~jac/aviation/UAL232-atc.html has transcripts of the actual conversation between United Airlines Flight 232 and Air Traffic Controllers, July 19, 1989. (This was the flight that crash-landed at Sioux City Gateway Airport after losing all three hydraulic lines in a freak accident.)

Thanks for the tip on the Stewart book.

Pretty eerie to read the transcript from UAL 232. Is that the one that they have video of? I think I've seen it on Discovery Wings.

It was a famous crash. The news media was on hand (I think) and they got complete footage of the crash. Astonishing to realise that almost 2/3 of the people on board survived.

The crash was used as the model for the plane crash in the Jeff Bridges movie "Fearless".