The waters between California and the Channel Islands can be as treacherous as any body of water in the world. Unlike a license to operate a motor vehicle, anybody can get behind the helm of a vessel. Several years ago a young woman was rescued in the harbor. She purchased a 'boat', outfitted the running lights with colored candles in mason jars, enough hardcover classic books to ballast a galleon and a macrobiotic diet of rice. She fully intended to circumnavigate the globe! No radio, no knowledge of navigation and an engine that caught fire. Reading of an individual's tenacity and ingenuity should be tempered with the mistakes that got them in the situation to begin with. Saint Elmo was watching over this guy ;O)

While the Santa Barbara Channel waters can be treacherous, they usually aren't. This is actually a very good place to be shipwrecked, with a historical survival rate far better than many other notorious localities, like the English Channel.<br><br>And, yes, human error is a huge component of most of these epics...

Yes, it is amazing that this guy survived for 3.5 months collecting rain water and sea turtles and birds. You have to admire his stamina. <br><br>But I really see this as a failure in many ways, too. On a single day-sail he lost his mast, engine and radio? My guess it that the condition of that equipment must have been poor upon departure for all to fail at the same time. Nobody missed him? Even though he had rigged a small sail to the stub of the mast and could have made landfall in any easterly direction, he failed to do that? No backup radio, cell phone, flares or signal mirror? He was mighty lucky that the drug plane spotted him when it did, because apart from delaying his own death, it seems like he was doing very little to aid his recovery.<br><br>But maybe there is more to the story than I read. It would be interesting to read the book that will probably be written about it.

Too true - now that I know a little bit about survival, I'm amazed by what the press considers a "miraculous survival story". Often, the greatest threat to the person's life and limb is their own stubborn stupidity. Something that most of the people on this forum would likely consider a pleasant evening out of doors is turned into a "miracle of survival" because the individual <br>(a) kept walking through waist-deep snow (often without a map or even a vague sense of direction);<br>(b) sweated up a storm;<br>(c) ate snow because they were thirsty; and<br>(d) kept walking until it was too dark to build a shelter.<br><br>I read about an Inuit (Eskimo) hunter who won the Canadian Medal for Bravery for travelling over 65 miles alone on a snowmobile, in temperatures of -50, to a remote mining camp to get help for a hunting companion and his 13-year old daughter who'd been severely burned after their hunting cabin caught fire. Their only radio had been in the cabin when it burned down. (The other hunter died; the girl was saved.)<br><br>My brother, who was the town doctor in Inuvik for a year, snorted and said the whole party deserved a medal for stupidity, for only taking one radio, and not arranging a regular call-in schedule with someone back in town. He'd seen the results of people going off into the frozen tundra with the unthinking assumption that nothing would go wrongggggggg