Description
Illustrated by the author
When Steven Callahan's small sailing boat was sunk by a whale west of the Canary Islands, he found himself alone in the mid-Atlantic in a five-foot inflatable raft with only enough food and water to last eighteen days. Pounded by storms, scorched by the tropical sun, buffeted by dorados and sharks that attacked the raft, he drifted week after week. He distilled water by the spoonful with a primitive still and hunted fish with a makeshift spear.
Seven ships passed him by, the raft leaked more and more, the still collapsed and, reduced to spearing fish with a butter-knife, Callahan wasted to barely seven stone. But on the seventy- fifth day he spotted land, and the next morning he was picked up by fishermen from a Caribbean island sixty miles from his original destination. The fishermen had been attracted by the school of dorados that had followed the raft across the Atlantic, providing Callahan with food, companionship and, finally, salvation. In seventy-six days Steven Callahan had drifted eighteen hundred miles, the only man in history to survive more than a month alone at sea in an inflatable raft.
This is the story of Steven Callahan's historic raft voyage, told in his own words. It is one of the greatest sea adventures of all time.
ISBN:9780395382066
