Thinking Sideways: Lost Boats Found

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking sideways. I don't know. You never know what stories
of things we simply don't know the answer too. Hey there,
this is Steve joined by and Joe and you slap

(00:25):
us in this steamy, hot little room, and what do
you get? You got thinking sideways podcast because we're a
little room and we're melting right now. It's really hot.
It is hot, and we go to great lengths to
make sure that the sound quality of our podcast is high,
which means no fans. Yeah, I literally cannot read the

(00:46):
text in front of me on the paper because I'm
kind of sweating on it. It's kind of a gross thing.
Your eyes are sweating? Is that like the man version
of crying? Uh? Well, everybody, Uh, I know, we've done
this before, and we decided, based on some some listeners suggestions,

(01:08):
that we were going to do another show of shorts
because we've got a number of stories that don't quite
flush out to a full one, so we decided we
just bring them all together and make one big show
up also because we're all wearing shorts. All right. Well,
let's let's get into the first of our stories today,
which I guess somehow I got voted to go first,
So we're gonna talk about We're going to talk about

(01:31):
the crew of the Sarah Joe. Okay. The Sarah Joe
is a is a story that starts in Hannah, Hawaii,
which is I believe is on the is on It's
in Maui County. But I couldn't figure out if that
was actually on the island of Maui or not. Did
you not? Just like Google Map? I did Google Map,

(01:51):
but Google Map wouldn't say this island's name is Maui.
It was really being a jerky. Yeah, I don't know
how to use maps. I know it's on the windward
side of Mali, the westward side. Yeah, he's using body
talk exactly. So the story starts on February eleven. We've

(02:13):
got five local men. Their their construction workers. They've been
working on a friend's house who is one of the five,
and they decide, you know, we just need to take
a break and we're gonna take a fishing trip for
the day. These five men, their names are Peter Hanschett,
Benjamin Colama and I'm gonna do my best with this.

(02:34):
Ralph mala Kaya Kiny Scott. I think it's Malaya Kiny.
It might be my Malaya keiny, I'm not sure. And
the lastly, the last gentlemen on here would be Patrick Woesner. Uh.
They all set sail for this trip. They borrowed a
seventeen foot Boston whaler which had the name of Sarah Joe,

(02:57):
thus the name of the story. The crew of the
Sarah Joe and they said, hey, it's first thing in
the morning, we're to take off. And they leave, first
thing in the morning. Weather's nice, weather's fine, they leave.
Nobody really worries about it, except that afternoon the season,
the weather gets a little nasty, the seas start to
get rough, and by that evening it's a terrible storm

(03:21):
has hit the island, to the point that a brother
of one of the men who was on the boat
said that it was the roughest that he had ever
seen the sea in that area get. So it turns
out going fishing wasn't such a hot idea. No, it
wasn't the best idea. Why didn't they just check like
yahoo other or something? Exactly, yeah, exactly, they're according to

(03:47):
this guy, that the swells were forty feet and breaking
at the crest, and the winds were more than fort
that's huge season. It's actually when you're in seventeen ft boat,
I kind of wonder why they didn't just head right
in when things started to kind of turn and the
wind picked up, Well, go ahead. I was just gonna say,

(04:09):
I think we've talked about this fairly recently, that it
turns out that one of the safer places to be
in bad weather is at sea. Obviously like not in
a tiny boat, though not in a tiny boat. But
if your choice is you know, you've kind of missed
your window, right, maybe you're like too far out. If
your choices stay at sea and try and write it out,

(04:30):
or try and make a super dangerous docking to get
off this boat, you're probably just going to decide, well,
we'll just see if we can't ride out these waves,
instead of having no idea that this is not the
worst of it, but it's going to get worse. Yeah,
exactly exactly the point everybody starts getting concerned. So we've

(04:50):
got Peter Hanschett. He's one of the guys that was
on the boat. His father John got concerned and decided,
even though this weather was terrible, to go out and
look for him, and he was joined by a gentleman
by a marine biologist in the area named John not
In I believe it's how you pronounced his name. And

(05:11):
Captain Jim Cushman, who was with the Coast Guard, the U. S.
Coast Guard, and these two actually came in. They came
in by I believe it was the third day that
the boat had been missing, So it wasn't that they
all went out right away, but over time these people
joined the search. No trace was ever found of the
Sarah Joe in those searches. By the way they did,

(05:32):
they did also search by plane, etcetera. They did, they
sent out planes. I think they looked for about a
week or two. The accounts very in the reporting that
I found, but they were I mean, it's huge area,
and the season are pretty quick moving in that area,
so it except where you're gonna look, kind of expands
really fast. Well. And also, I mean, you know, it's

(05:55):
like you're lost at sea, right, It's not like if
you get lost in the wilderness, people can you know,
like find traces of you because you've like bumped into
a tree or like you're leaving tracks behind you. Yeah,
piles of poop are like fire and camp debris like
this is the c It moves so quickly. Like you know,
Steve was just saying, you know, it's not like you're

(06:17):
gonna just miraculously find like some pieces of the boat
just just floating wherever. I mean, you know, it's so yeah.
I mean, you know again the CEA, it's harder trace.
I always think, oh, yeah, because there's no fire or whatever. Exactly,
there's there's no obvious signs left on the surface. I
think it's where we're headed with. Yeah, I mean they

(06:38):
can sink without a trace. Yeah, and so nobody found
any sign of them. Now we step forward ten years later,
it's and if you remember John Notton, he was one
of the guys the marine biologists. He was on a

(06:59):
while life expedition on a toll which is called and
you're gonna have to help me out here if I
butcher this Tony or Tonguyk something like that. Well, this
a toll, which is part of the Marshall Islands, is
two hundred miles two thousand miles west of Hawaii, which,

(07:24):
to kind of give people a scale for in the
global scheme of things, if you look at Hawaii and
then you go west, it's halfway between Hawaii and New
Guinea and the Philippines, which is it's yeah, and it's
an itty bitty a toll. It's really small, and I'll

(07:46):
get into some of the basic basically that's yeah. Yeah, um, well,
not discovered a boat on the island. It was a
small boat, and he was kind of confused, and he
checked it out and then he saw the registration number
and he recognized that it was registered in Hawaii. And
several from several feet from the boat he found and

(08:08):
again this is where the accounts very a little bit.
He found either a a grave marked with heaped stones
with a cross made out of driftwood, or a shallow grave.
In either case he found in that either sticking out
it's sticking out somewhere from it a jaw bone, human job. Yes,

(08:32):
And the coastguard got involved because there was a body
part of a body anyway, and they be traced to Hawaii. Right,
not that the coastguard, just like there's body parts on
an island, some island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Yeah,
I think the boat had a registration number or something,
and he right, and you know, it's it's kind of

(08:52):
like every state has a certain way of making your
license plate numbers. Well, he recognized the registration number being
a Hawaii number. I'm guessing it means it starts with HI.
But so I know he didn't dig up the grave,
but he did he grabbed the job own and take
it back with him. I couldn't find if he picked
it up and brought it back with him or if
somebody else came out and collected it and figured it out. Yeah. Well,

(09:18):
you know, obviously the coast Guard, like we said, got
involved and they figured out that through the dental records
that the job bone belonged to Scott Mormon, which was
one of the five of the men that were missing
on the Sarah Joe, and the registration was that it
was the Sarah Joe. So here's the Here's I mean,

(09:40):
this is one of many weird bits. So the job
bone and the boat being they're not weird enough. But
here's another weird bit. It's entirely possible, based on the
currents of the ocean, that over the course of three months,
a boat could drift from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands.

(10:00):
The problem is, however, is that there was a government
survey all the islands previously to this discovery, and that
that was done in about and when of what the
Marshall Islands. Yeah, and the Marshall Islands, Oh gosh, who
owned Who is it that is registered under? I want

(10:24):
to say it's the French, but that is absolutely wrong.
But they went there and they did a survey because
they check out wildlife and all that kind of stuff,
which would be four years after the Sarah Joe disappeared.
There's no boat there. They didn't record that there was
a boat there. So after that time frame the boat

(10:46):
mysteriously came aboard and mysteriously this body was buried on
the on the atoll. Just just doesn't make any sense
because it's a weird amount of time. It's conceivable though,
because I mean, it may be that the body and
the boat were sort of washed shore, but they got
covered by sands and then later on weather and waves

(11:08):
and wind uncovered them again. That's ye, that some of
somebody came along and buried the body and put across
up there. Yeah, so it's possible. It's also possible that
these guys who were actually being paid to survey the
islands were actually sort of took them, did some shortcuts
it didn't go to every single one of the one
of them that they were supposed to be. And that's
a good point because this particular toll is the north

(11:32):
most toll of the Marshall Islands, so it's the farthest
north of the group. So it may have been that
during the survey they were running a little behind some stuff.
Nobody's going to know that we didn't go there. Well
let's just call it good. Yeah. I don't know that
that's really the case, but this has led a lot

(11:53):
of people to try and figure out, well, what happened
to the crew and how did the boat get here?
And the theories that I've found there's there's not a lot,
but there's a couple. And the first one is, well,
it's kind of Scooby doo hinky. That's that's my best

(12:16):
way to describe this. And I found this on a
blog and this is the only place that ever said
I found this, But we'll just go ahead and run
with it. Is The theory is that a the crew
survived the storm, but for whatever reason, their boat was incapacitated,
so they're just floating at sea and they're found by

(12:40):
another vessel. That happens to be pirates are, so we're
going with pirates here. A confrontation ensues and at some
point Mormon is killed and his body is left on
the boat, and then the other crew members are taken
off of the boat and they just they just leave

(13:01):
the boat. I'm guessing the idea was to scuttle it
and let it sink, to hide the evidence and let
the body is sink well. And the other thing is,
if I'm a pirate, why would I scuttle a perfectly
good boat that I could scrape all of the registration
off and then resell. Because the value is not in

(13:23):
the people, it's in the boats. Yeah, they had nothing
useful ondem except for some beers they could actually keep
it for a for a tender for their boat. Did
that to re name it? Because can you see Sarah
Joe pirates? You know seriously? Yeah, yeah, it didn't seem
like a very pirate theme name. Well, that's that's the
first theory that we've got. The second theory is that

(13:47):
everybody went somewhere. So run with me here with this,
because this is this is part one. This theory is
kind of kind of splits off. So this is part
one of the every body else went somewhere. Some Mormon
stayed with the boat, and everybody else left mysteriously. There's
a lot of theories trying to explain why the boat

(14:11):
and Mormon, like I said, ended up on the island. Okay, Well,
if we think about the storm that was reported, this massive,
massive storm in this itsy bitsy boat for all intensive purposes,
a tiny boat in a giant storm, it's quite possible
that through the swells, people were getting washed off the boat.

(14:33):
So it could be that Mormon Odysseus style ties himself
to the boat. Well, he ties himself to the boat
thinking everybody else has been washed overboard, and I don't
want to go overboard because these kind of this Boston whaler,

(14:54):
it doesn't have what's the term joe when you've got
an enclosed cabin. It's got a close cabin, that's the
exact word. It's an open boat. So he may have
tied himself on thinking, well, if a big wave hits,
at least it won't knock me overboard. These boats. I

(15:14):
don't know if we've talked about this yet, but the
Boston whalers, they're reported to be virtually unsinkable. The gimmick
has always been for the company that makes the Boston Whalers,
they will take a saw to their boat. I think
was in the sixties. The guy who started the company
took a big saw, cut the boat in half and

(15:38):
then motored the back half and towed the front half
behind him. Because they're built with a styro from hall
with fiberglass around him, so they will float regardless. So
he might have known this and said, well, the boat's
not gonna go down. I'm just gonna hang on for
dear life. Yeah, yeah, okay, so let's just that he

(16:00):
did that. I guess. Yeah, they'll float regardless. Anything will
float regardless, unless like literally it's just filled with water,
you know, which a forty foot swell would do. You
would swamp a boat because you know this is having
looked at pictures now, it is literally just like the
hull of a boat. It's not there's just no it's
just it's a windshield or a windscreen and a steering

(16:23):
wheel and open boat. Yeah, that's all these seventeen footers are.
So I can imagine if they were in forty ft
swells that it could have taken on a whole buttload
of water. And just and washed a couple of guys over,
and in desperation, what do I do. I'm going to
strap myself in because it's better to go down with
the ship. Well, you know, the ship's probably not going
to go down if you know about the boats. They

(16:45):
might go to the water level, but it won't go
all the way under right, it's so buoyant. Okay, So
we've got that. The theory then runs that he dies,
whether that is Mormon dies from an injury that he
sustained when the boat's being flipped around, or he's tossed

(17:05):
around or what it might be, or he survives the
storm but then dies of dehydration or starvation. He's he's
tied to the boat. He's now he's now permanently with
a boat that he can't get off of, which was
a great idea when there was a storm, yep, but
maybe not so great after the fact. Regardless, he stays
with the ship. The body stays with the ship, and

(17:28):
it floats and runs aground on this atoll. At that point,
somebody else before not in finds the boat and they
find the body, and out of respect, they bury the body.
And there's actually a little bit of evidence that adds

(17:51):
some credibility to that theory. All the reports say that
when they found the body or found the jaw bone
and they started digging the grave, they also found three
quarter inch by three quarter inch strips of paper with
foil on top of paper, so it was a stack
of paper, foil, paper, foil, so on. So it's a

(18:12):
stack of these. This is evidently something that is done
in a Chinese burial ritual, and that's to represent money
and fortune in the next life. So people have theorized
that it might have been some guys who are from
China fishing in the area illegally. They find the boat,

(18:33):
they find the body, they bury it, they leave this
bit of a token as a custom to ferry him
into the next life with good fortune. But they don't
tell anybody because they're they're illegally. And the last thing
I want to do is report that I found this
body when, oh, by the way, I shouldn't have been
here in the first place. Is that the case. I

(18:55):
don't know, but that's what folks have theorized. And I
tried to find information about this supposed burial ritual. I
found a lot of stuff that talks about there's the
Chinese tradition where you burn effigies of things that you
own in honor of your ancestors. So if you've ever

(19:17):
been to like I've been to Chinatowns where you go
into the store and paper cars and paper TVs and
paper dresses and all these things their effigies that you
burn in respect to your ancestors. Because your ancestor doesn't
want you to actually burn the real thing because that
would be a waste of money, but to burn these
things in respect for them to help them in the

(19:38):
next life. I don't know if if that's what it was,
but they say that that's what was found with the body,
so lend some creedence. That is part one of this theory.
Part two diverges a little bit. Part two says that
Warmon wasn't the only one who survived and made it
to the atoll on the martialized lens. This version says

(20:02):
at least one other person from the crew would have survived,
and that they both made it to the Marshall Islands
and tried to live their shipwrecked until they could be rescued.
The issue is that this is a toll. If anybody
wants to take the time to look this up on
Google Earth. It's not a pleasant place. It's extremely arid.

(20:24):
There's vegetation, but it's nothing that you would want to
really eat. I mean's grasses and some bushes, but not
food stuff. And how far is it from the closest
next closest island. It's a couple well, it's it's like
a hundred or from the next toll. But that's the thing.
It's a series of a tolls and then there's open

(20:47):
ocean and then more tolls. And a toll, for anybody
doesn't know, is literally a coral reef that has built
up high enough to catch sand and then it creates
and a toll typically will create a lagoon in the center.
So this thing is kind of a a D shape,
and the boat hit on the right hand curve of

(21:07):
the D and that's where they found it because that's
where the majority of the sand is at. That's a okay, yeah,
I was, you know, I was thinking, well, maybe this
person could have like escaped down the atolls to the
Marshall Islands, which are inhabited and have some times of society,
and but this is this is very far away. Yeah,
that's a that's a huge distance to travel. Yeah, and

(21:29):
here's here's okay, So technically speaking, you could possibly survive
if you were living on this atollw what what's the
distance to the net the very next door at all?
Though we're talking. Yeah, that's why it's over miles if
I remember correctly. I don't have the number written down,
but I know it's it's a disk. It's it's not

(21:50):
like you could swim there in a day in shark
infested waters, because they're literally it's shark infested waters. But
you could live on the island sort of off of
the vegetation. Well, there's a well, there's fish, there's a
ton of migratory birds that come through there, crabs, so
you can get protein. But the problem is water. Fort

(22:16):
of annual rainfall on this at all, So that's not
a lot of water. If you've got something to catch
the water, that's great. But if you're just trying to
live off of it pooled up, you are jacked. You're
completely adolest. There's no way to make that happen. As
the boat was the boat smashed when they found it.
It doesn't say I know it wasn't in good condition,

(22:39):
but it doesn't say what condition the boat was in.
I know that one of the family members has the
boat now and they have it as a bit of
a memorial, and they mean because it's it's been the
it was sev so we're at thet five year mark,
so they just did a memorial at the thirty five
year mark. But I don't know that the boat is

(23:02):
seaworthy in terms of being able to actually go out
and motor around in it. I just thought that to
make a nice water basins, have the boats clean the
boat out and set it out there to catch rain water.
I'm gonna guess it probably had holes in it, and
it's probably too big for one man to drag on
his own. Maybe two could do it. But we we

(23:23):
I mean, we've we've gone pretty far into the conditions
on this a toll. But the theory is is that
Mormon dies and then this other person, through some means,
decides to get out of there. My friend has died,
all my other friends are dead. I got to get
off of this place, and somehow tries to swim away

(23:47):
to find something closer for whatever reason. Well, he obviously
tied some sea turtles together exactly. That's what I would do,
because sea turtles are do this, whoa do Yeah, yeah,
it's exactly yeah. But I mean the problem with the
theory is, how would this person, other than swimming, try

(24:11):
to leave because it seems like a foolish venture if
to try and swim hundreds of miles or again, I
don't think you can see the other tolls, right, but
I guess it um a little matters like how banged
up the boat was slash, how much of the boat
they found, like if it had been cracked into he
could have, like you know, makeshift paddled this boat out,

(24:35):
since apparently they float if they're you know, cut into
three pieces. Even you know, you you find a stick
or something that will allow you to paddle, and you
just say, well, you know, I can't see another island,
but I can't live here, so I'm just gonna take
my chances and paddle on out. But well, the hard

(24:56):
part is, and what we don't know is did whoever survived?
If there was this other survivor, I would think if
I was going to go on the open sea on
a itsy bitsy piece of styrophoe and try and paddle
my way away, I'd want to have supplies as in water,
So is there anything that they had whole water, because
if you just go out on the paddle out on

(25:18):
the ocean, within five hours you're dawned. Well, it kind
of depends on what was left in the boat, Like
say they went out with at least one cooler, and
if they had to have the fourth thought to strap
it into the boat, then you know, and it didn't
get lost in the storm, then the cooler could actually
hold water. Um, they might have had other things like
Baylor's on board. Yeah, I mean, but the problem is

(25:43):
there's not standing fresh water for you to collect. I guess.
The other thing is, like you do dumb things to
survive sometimes, like humans are great at making decisions in
survival mode, and oftentimes they're just super stupid decisions like right,
you've just watched your friend I. You're super dehydrated, you're malnourished.

(26:03):
You think, well, I can't live here, don't have any
fresh water, but better go out again. You know you're
not that desperate, you know you do anything right. I mean,
And there's there are by the way, they're they're they're waste.
If you have if you have the problem with too
there are ways to desalinate water and purified water. You know,
plastic clear plastic sheet doesn't check every time, you know,

(26:25):
and so it's a it's a drip system. Yeah, absolutely,
really easy to do if you have if you're lucky
enough to have some plastic sheeting they may or may
not have had, right, Yeah, I guess something you're collected in.
This doesn't address like the first theory that of course
popped into my head was aliens. You're laughing, but seriously, like, okay,
so if we if they really didn't find it when

(26:45):
they did that geographic surveyor so you're you're using the
time lag, okay, yeah, they like and then yeah, okay,
something weird happened and then they popped out or you know,
a little bit of it dropped out. You know, they
seem to have disappeared for a really long time. Is
it possible that the survey crew just didn't hit that

(27:05):
at all? Sure? But is it also possible that like
there was some kind of time lapse and they just
weren't there? Also? Sure? You know, you know, who's what
who's to say that, like they can't say another island
in between? Surely there are more islands in between. Hawaii
and these atolls. Who's to say they didn't hit another island,

(27:26):
stayed there for as long as possible, and then realize, crap,
we can't live here anymore, or decided, oh we are
going to live here, but our friend Mormon is dead,
so let's give him a sea burial, send him out
to see. I mean, there's this is one of those
ones right where there's like so little information that there
are a multitude of crazy and that's all we know

(27:49):
is they disappeared on that day and ten years later
the boat and a buried body was found. Was it
a full buried body well or was it just but
not not all the bones were actually in the grave. Yeah.
I I didn't get the impression that the entire body
was there. The impression I had was the only thing
was there was a job on, which would be wrong.

(28:10):
I had heard that somebody else later on found a
bunch of bones like vertebrate and stuff like, not in
the grave, but like down by the water and the rocks,
you know, near the water or something. Weird. It's so weird, yeah,
I mean, there's there's all these there's a lot of
weird conflicting stuff, and there's The problem with this is
there's been a lot of interpreted writing about the story,

(28:32):
as in people are taking liberties with it. And I
know people take liberties with stories that we report, that
we talked about all the time, but these people have
turned it more into the story of the Sarah Joe
and so they've you know, they write, this is what
the crew did, and this is what they we're feeling,
and on and on and on. Um. It's it's like

(28:53):
that Movidra. Yeah, it's like the movie what is the
Greatest Storm? The perfect story, the perfect story. Yeah, they
don't know exactly why, but somebody went ahead and his
dramatizing it on their blog or on their free riding space,
and then that gets mixed in. Right, What we really
know is boat disappeared, boat found, job, bone found, and

(29:16):
I don't I mean other than the fact that okay, well,
if truly it was found with this paper foil system,
I could see that that being applausible explanation. But I
have no idea what happened to the rest of the crew,
nor what happened in the ensuing prior ten years. We
assuming that they all five survived the storm and they

(29:38):
found themselves obviously they must have been out of fuel
or maybe their engine crapped out so they couldn't get
back to Hawaii. So they were adrift for a long time.
And of course now that some of them might have
been injured somebody assuming what, or another would have died
the hydration. And what do you do. You can either
eat him, you know what, does nothing to happen, or

(29:59):
more clearly, they just pushed him overboard and give him
a barrel at sea, because you can't have a rotting
corpse in your boat. Uh, that will kill you faster
than anyhing else. Yeah, and so and that might have
been the case that they kept dying off and getting
thrown in the sea. Only one guy was left and
he died eventually. And just you know, I spent years
after that drifting in the boat, or months at least.

(30:20):
And like Devin said, he could have gotten stuck on
some of their a toll for a while before being
broken loose and sat on onward. And yeah, I I
can't believe that they made it to any island. Yeah,
I know, it's very it's amazing that they made land anywhere. Yeah,
it kind of is, Yeah, because boats drift for years
and years and years and it never come aground. Maybe

(30:40):
who knows, maybe he actually circled the world a couple
of times. Who the hell knows, it's possible. This is
such a good segue into my boat story. We should
probably start on a year boat story, because really we've
run mine into the ground. No pun intended. The boat
ends up on an island, Yeah, my mine. Also it's
you know, a boat on an island that a boat

(31:01):
shouldn't be on, right, Yeah, I'm just gonna jump right
into mine, you guys. So we're gonna talk about Bouvet Island.
It's literally the most middle of nowhere you can be.
It's widely touted as the most obsolete, not obsolete, what's
the word I'm looking for, isolated, I want to be. Yeah,

(31:26):
that's actually southeast Oregon. It's um um four hundred miles
south southwest of the tip of South Africa and about
eleven hundred miles north of Antarctica, so it's in the
Arctic Circle. But it's just, I mean, it's so far

(31:47):
away from everything. There's there's really nothing around. There's nothing
around it. Yeah, it's it's totally inhospitable to life. About
nineteen square miles large of it is a glacier, again,
totally inhospitable to life, and as is the case with
many tiny, tiny islands, apparently, uh, they're super popular. So

(32:12):
this island was first sighted. I'm just gonna give you
guys a little history to like inform where we're going
with this. Um. The island was first sighted on January one,
seventeen thirty nine, by Jean Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier.
So that how you would say that great, my my
French is really good. He that the island was later

(32:32):
named for him. Unfortunately, this guy, you know, it was
January one, he was probably super hungover. It wasn't great
at accurately recording things because he wrote down the wrong
coordinates and effectively lost the island until eighteen o eight.
It's losing an island. The island. It's super tiny, right,

(32:58):
It's so tiny and so out of the way. It's
not even like there's an island like right close to it, right,
like like we were just talking about with the atolls
there within three hundred miles of each other. Right this
actually yeah, this this is like a fun little bit.
Thompson Island was said to have been close by quote unquote,

(33:20):
it didn't never give like any kind of modical nautical
miles or anything like that. But as it turns out,
that was just a phantom island. It was. It was
never an actual island. They were like, yeah, there's an
island close to it, kind of it's called Thompson Island.
It's It's another mystery in and of itself, the fact
that like four or five different people said, yeah, there's
an island over there, and it just never really existed,

(33:41):
it turns out. So we'll talk about that maybe some
other day. So in eighteen o eight, British whaler named
James Lindsay spotted Bouvet Island and you know, named it
after himself. Like yeah, so it's called Lindsay Island for
a while. And then in George Norris claimed the island
for the British Crown and named it Liverpool Island. Liverpool

(34:07):
later my favorite shaped pool. So excited about this island
that one there, Well, that's it, right, somehow super fopular island.
That's not the end of the history of it. Later
in seven Norway decided, oh, actually that's our island because
we're really close in proximity to it somehow. Uh So
they landed on it and declared it was the Dependency,

(34:29):
and they renamed it after the original finder, Dudekay. Technical
it is the technical term finder dude. Yeah. So in
nineteen seventy one it became a nature preserve, although I'm
not sure what they're preserving. I think ice maybe. Yeah,

(34:49):
I think there are they. I'm sorry, they call them
sea elephants. Okay. In every literally every account I read
of this, they talked about the cl elephants and I
had to google it. What's the elephants were? I think,
I think it's sea lions, but apparently other people call
them sea elephants. Somewhere between nineteen and nineteen fifty eight,

(35:12):
some volcanic activity or maybe a landslide created a brand
new ice free rocky part of Bouvet Island, and it
included a small lake or lagoon. Always a lagoon, they always, Yeah,
it's like the atolls. They always call them a lagoon.
But I guess if it's a body of water inside

(35:36):
an island, then it's you know, I tend to think
that a lagoon is attached to the outer to the ocean,
so it's kind of like a harbor. Yeah, and this
was hard to kind of I guess us out. I
looked at some drawings that expeditions had done, um, particularly
pertaining to this little new bit and the mapping of it,

(36:00):
and I couldn't get a really really good sense of
if it was a landlocked lake or a lagoon that
like fed into the ocean. So that, again is information
to keep in your mind as we talked about this story,
because it drastically changes how weird the story. Well, and

(36:21):
there's there's there's maybe I'm jumping ahead and the fan
tell me, but I remember seeing the photo and I didn't.
I never saw an outlet of the la dude. Well,
but it depends on what angle that photo was taken from,
because it's my impression that it was taken from a
boat as they left the island. And I don't want

(36:41):
to get too far ahead. Yeah, So, and actually I
don't know if anybody's ever got for a way through.
And it's not that big, and nobody even knows it
could be six inchest deep. I mean it could just
be a big puddle. Well, actually we'll get to that.
So this is an ice free area of Bubet Island.
And as we previously for well for now, well, actually

(37:02):
the um as we discussed it is great glacier. This
is the seven percent that is not. And a geologic
survey expedition that went there measured the ground temperature, stuck
a thermometer into the ground. It is seventy seven degrees fahrenheit.
So it's volcanic. It's super hot that area. That's yeah,
that's super warm. But for ground in general, I think

(37:24):
seventy seven degrees is pretty freaking warm activities. I don't know.
I'm pretty sure I could stick a thermometer in the
in the front yard right now and close. Sure. But
for a place that's glacier, oh yeah, so it's not
glacier that was in that that measurement was taken, so
you can assume that that is the cooled version of

(37:47):
the area that we're about to talk about or have
been talking about. Again, accounts very but in nineteen sixty four,
either a helicopter or a British naval ship set out
to explore this little bit of land because Norway it
owns it now, so of course the British Navy took
an extra big interest in it. Again, politics are hard

(38:09):
to tell the tiny little places like this. I was
thinking that it was that was a Norwegian ship or
something like that that had a helicopter pad and a helicopter.
It was British. Yeah, for sure. That's the one thing
I am sure of in this story is that it
was British. Yeah. They they go to explore this little

(38:32):
bit of land. Um, they took some scientific measurements. Um.
And remember this little bit of land is ten years
old at the time. They take scientific measurements. They you know,
kind of take a look around. Oh. And also they
find a life raft in the middle of the newly
formed lagoon. A life raft but actually digging a boat. Yeah,

(38:54):
like a life like an old timey life raft wooden.
And from the map that I dot and again I'm
not saying with certainty that this is how it is,
but it looked like it was cut off from the
ocean with scree which is what they call um jagged rocks.
So a man by the name of Alan Crawford was

(39:15):
a part of this expedition and wrote a book about it,
and he described the site Joe, would you chose my
like go to reader, Yeah, what drauma, we wondered was
attached to this strange discovery. There were no markings to identify,
so old internationality. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do
it with the dumba accent on the rocks the hundred

(39:36):
yards away. It was a forty four gallant drum and
a pair of oars with pieces of wood and a
copper flotation or buoyancy tank opened out flat for some purpose.
Thinking castleways amount have landed. We made a brief search
but found no human remains. So puzzled understandably, the expedition
snaps a photo of the boat with an elephant seal

(39:57):
close by. Another reason why they might have been in
a rush to get out of there and headed off
because their window of time to leave this island was
limited because the weather is so bad. In fact, this
expedition had to sit at sea for like five days
because the weather was so bad that they couldn't land,

(40:17):
and their entire expedition accounted for minutes. Yeah, they were
on the island, if I remember correctly. So that it's
not a very thorough investigation. It's not. If you can
stick with us, that mystery deepens a little bit. In
nineteen sixty six, two years later, you know, give or

(40:38):
take a couple of months, another expedition made its way
to Bouvet Island, this time allowing much more time for study.
They were really interested in that new area and now
it had formed, and why it was remaining glacier free.
And they spent a lot of time looking at the
lagoon as well, because they thought, oh, this is inhospitable
kind of area. It's subarctic, and we're really interested in

(41:02):
what kind of life thrives in subarctic temperatures. They did
a lot of measurements in the lagoon, talked about the
different types of algae that had flourished there despite the cold,
but never once mentioned the fact that there was a
lifeboat in there, or oars or anything else on the
shore around the lagoon, which leads many people to believe

(41:26):
that two months later the lifeboat, ors buency devices, whatever,
we're all gone. M hm, that was only two months later,
two years years? Ask the two months? Sorry, I'm sorry now?
Can I can I ask something to clarify because I
didn't understand in the description? Is the buoyancy tank laid

(41:50):
out flat? Does that mean somebody took a It was
a copper tank and they hammered it open and hammered
it flat. That's my understanding of it. And I wish
that that picture was better. There's just the one picture.
It's pretty picture. It's a pretty crude picture. But so
you can see the lifeboat and an elephant seal, but

(42:11):
you can't thought at first I thought the seal was
the tank. Until I realized it was a seal. I
felt really dumb. Yeah, like an elephant a seal shaped tank. Yeah,
there's none of the other You can't see this stuff
that that was apparently on this Okay, And so that
for me is like a big I can explain away
what happened there. If it's like kind of like just

(42:34):
an inlet lagoon that opens up into the sea and
has just a boat floating in it, right, But if
it's a landlocked lagoon, this is a much larger mystery
to me, right, yeah, right, yeah, well yeah, I mean,
I don't even understand why somebody would take a tank
and hammer it flat. That's a lot of freaking effort.

(42:55):
But I don't know if we're if I'm jumping ahead here,
but I mean, okay, I can see somebody taking the
time and effort to drag a boat in. I can
see him dragging their oars in, but cutting in half
or mashing flat a copper tank. It's just a weird thing.

(43:15):
Doesn't make any sense. I was a theory, okay, okay,
and I don't know are there but we're not at
that theory. Okay. I'm sorry. That's that's fine. I like
jumping around and I have I think four theories that
I'm going to go through one. The first one, the

(43:36):
most romantic one, is that there was an actual shipwreck
and there was an actual lifeboat that happened to find
this island, and there were survivors that tried to live
on the island and perished. Of course, their skeletons were
never found. Of course, you know, who knows. Maybe the
sea elephants dragged him into the water. Well, as you say,

(43:56):
there's there's no there's no structures in terms of land mass,
it's of any kind that you could use for protection
from the weather. Yeah, so your run away they blow around.
I gotta say, that's uh. That latitude is fifty four
degrees south, which is what we call the furious fifties. Yeah,

(44:17):
it's serious. It's dripping winds. Yeah, I've actually been at
that latitude. That's Sway, Argentina, which I spent several days
in is it's almost the exact same latitude. And actually
in the summertime it's pretty warm and nice. It's not
as inhospitable as you would think the latitude, but the
wind is ferocious. Yeah. So, and there are a lot
of problems I have with this theory, right And granted,
you know the tank pounded flat. It speaks of kind

(44:40):
of a desperation that you want to attribute to people
trying to save their lives. But there was there were
no skeletons found, there were no signs of camp, there
were no signs of attempts forages. There's no signs of like,
you know, somebody trying to kill a sea elephant or
anything like that. Well, there's there's nothing on there's nothing

(45:02):
there to burn beside the boat, so there's no gonna
be no signs of fire that if you kill one
of those cea elephants, good luck, because they're they're massive.
But okay, let's say you steal a pop well there,
you know, their bones are about the size of yours.
And if these are ripping winds with massive waves, at

(45:24):
some point I can see that all being washed away.
I don't see what are the signs of quote unquote
camp there would be, Well, it can't be like camp fires,
for example, there's nothing on this island to burn rock.
So here's my number one complaint with this whole thing
is that anybody, well, in my mind, anybody who's in
a survival situation, particularly with a lifeboat like this, knows

(45:49):
that the way that you survived that situation is you
pull that lifeboat up on shore and you make it
your shelter. There are numerous, very well to document cases
of people surviving for months, very extended amounts of time
that well, but that's right, okay. So and again that's

(46:11):
where you know comes in, like it depends on where
their waves hitting this shore or is this like a
fairly calm lagoon kind of area when did believe me,
the wind down there is strong enough to take a
boat like that and knock it over and push it around. Right,
But so you assume that if if they're using this
as shelter, they found a way to secure it. Yeah,
probably he's probably piling rocks around it and such. But

(46:32):
eventually when they're gone, you know, the wind works at
loose and flips, flips it around, pushes it around. And
I'm going, but you would see those rocks, the piles
of rocks, Yeah, probably, but they might have looked fairly random.
That wouldn't have been right up against the boat by
that point in time. Well, let me let me I mean,
I know I'm jumping off the track here, but okay,
So the island was quote unquote first officially discovered in

(46:55):
the early se and there were whalers in that area
or a couple hundred years. So wouldn't it be possible
to to follow your I'm going to use the boat
as my shelter theory to say that. But let's say
before this this fallout area became this, this slide area happened,

(47:17):
that maybe somebody had been using their boat as a
shelter on the ice and then died there, and then
when the ice crumbled because of this slush out, the
boat was left behind and everything else was buried. Because
the boat is big enough, it would bounce on top
of the this landslide. It's light. Light things always kind

(47:37):
of get pushed the top. So I don't know if
a wooden boat is light compared to several tons rock.
It's the lightest thing it's possible. So you're thinking how
far back, I don't know, seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds. At
some point some porch love gets stuck on the island,

(47:58):
like this theory is running with. But let's say I'm
saying it's pre this area becoming established and then when
it all sloughs out, you know, breaks away from the
ice or whatever. I don't know, I'm spitballing here. So
it could be older than people are trying to establish
it as having come about. Well, not necessarily that old though,

(48:21):
because they also He also noted the presidence of a
forty four gallon drum is not something an No, you're right,
you're right, you're right. I'm I hadn't. I forgot about
that bit, yah, I mean, I don't know. I'm just
I'm just trying to as everybody is grasping at strong
as for the little bit that we've got. Right. So
the other thing that I you know, I think about
when I think about this, like drum that's metal that's

(48:46):
been pounded out, I think of somebody in the you know,
kind of mid sixties, early seventies, there's planes flying around,
maybe trying to use it as an S O S
signal kind or like our giant reflection. Yeah, wondered about that.
I can see that, sure, but it's not my favorite theory.

(49:06):
It's a theory, but it's not a favorite theory. Another
theory is the lifeboat just kind of lost at sea,
you know, torn off, a boat just randomly happened to
find this lagoon, although of course that doesn't explain the
oars and all that stuff on the shore, and also
the highly improbability. And this is the other thing that

(49:27):
I didn't really talk about with that first one. It's like,
we lost this island for a real long time. You know,
it's so remote that it seems really unlikely that somebody
would just luckily happen upon it in a life threatening situation,
or unlikely or an unmanned boat would just happen to

(49:48):
wash into this lagoon right up somewhere. A crap in
the ocean floats up onto places all the time. I mean,
it happens. It's it's rand happenstance, but it's still happen.
It does. It's just it washes up on places that
are like huge land masses by and large. I mean
you know, every once in a while you'll see uh,

(50:11):
you know sand bar that's got a bunch of stuff
washed up on it, But really that's because the tides
wash it. You know, they pass right through there. This
is not a place that is known or recognized as
a high traffic area by any means, and the tides
don't run through there. It's not like, yeah, it's not like,

(50:33):
you know, the Western Seaboard tides run through and deposit
a bunch of stuff. Because this is it's a lone incident.
So you know, the the odds of some like sad
souls on a lifeboat and life situation washing or an
unmanned lifeboat seemed fairly low. And again I come back
to the whole I can't tell because I've looked at

(50:56):
the Google Earth images of this place and I can't
see a look boon of any kind I saw, and
I could pretty small, and I couldn't tell if it
was if it's land locked or attached to the sea
in any way, if I was looking at the right lagoon. Yeah,
And the other problem is it's it. I don't remember when,

(51:19):
but it was only fairly recently that they got the
first full aerial photo of the entire island without clouds,
because it is always socked in at some portion of
it with clouds just because that's the way the weather
is in that area. Yeah. So the next theory, the

(51:40):
third theory is my favorite theory. It's that it's the
remains of an fairly undocumented landing party that did an
expedition to this island or land on this island. Um. So,
you know, the theory goes that a landing party used
their lifeboats to dock in, right, which you kind of

(52:00):
wood if you had lifeboats like this, there's a high
possibility that you could reattach them to your ship. Of
course that's fine, you know, well, and a current kind
of commercial ships don't have that capability. Once you abandoned ship,
you've abandoned ship. But there are used to be, and
I think as late as like the eighties and nineties

(52:21):
and maybe still today, there are ships that you could,
you know, like send a docking party out or landing
party out in your smaller ships. Yeah. Yeah, that's the tenders.
That's what whaling ships used to do all the time. Yeah, exactly,
so they would be tenders. Think you know, on recent
I guess actually no, this was back in the early sixties.
As I say, they would be using zodiac. But I

(52:42):
keep forgetting out it was back in early sixties. Yeah.
So the theory goes that a landing party of whaling
ships from wherever went by the island and thought, there's
an island, let's go check it out. Dropped two ships,
two boats, excuse me, landed. One of them got a
little bit ruined in the landing party. They went around,
you know, they explored, they realized there was nothing really there,

(53:05):
and then decided, well, this one, this, this boat is damaged,
so we'll just leave it here and we'll all pile
back into this other boat, go back to the ship
and be on our merry way. I like this theory
for a number of reasons. One, it explains how the
boat got there. It explains why it's there. It explains
why there's no sign of camp or anything like that.

(53:28):
I also think, and I didn't see this anywhere, but
in my mind, it explains why a tank may have
been pounded out, because it seems as though that could
have been a potential attempt to repair the ship in
some way to say oh or the boat excuse me,
to say oh, well, let's just see if we can
Jerry ready real quick. Oh no, that's not working, okay,
or it's not worth our time, or the weather's coming

(53:50):
in or whatever. Okay, we'll just leave it. We'll all
pile back into this one boat that's not damage make shifting,
just kind of like throw it on the it we
hit in the water, open, pop right out, yeah exactly.
And then you just don't think that I don't think
that would have solved their problems. I don't think it
would have solved their problem either. But you know, I
think that it's a possibility to just be you know,

(54:12):
like on shore kind of like troubleshooting the problem. Then
think that never, never mind, all right, we'll just pile
back into this boat. We'll leave it here, go on
their merry way. Nobody reports to Norway or Yeah or
whoever wherever that you know, says we landed on this
thing and we left a boat here. But before they leave,
they they and this is the fundamental clues to who

(54:34):
did it. They dragged the boat to that lagoon and
they put it in. And again that's a practical joke,
and this tells us who it was. It was the Russians.
I mean the Russians, they had that kind of sense here.
So and that's you know, again that comes back to
my biggest problem with this whole story is that whole
big question mark that's attached to I don't I don't

(54:56):
totally and know the situation of this lagoon. I mean truly,
all of the geographic maps that I've seen, all of
the Google Earth images that I've seen, the Google Earth
images that I've seen, I don't know what Google Earth
images you were looking at, but I didn't see a
single lagoon in any of them. I saw a bunch
of kind of you know, alcoves in the shore of

(55:19):
the island, but I didn't see any lakes or anything
like that. And you know, and I may have just
missed it or whatever. So I I don't have a
good satisfying answer of is this a landlocked lake, lake, lagoon, whatever,
or is this a just a like a inland. Now
It's like there was somebody actually made a map of

(55:42):
that little peninsula and it showed the location of the lagoon,
and then that's what I saw. But the spot, a
dark spot on the Google the Google Earth image in
that location. So I guess then we go back to
why is it there? And then you know there's the
four theory, which is of course that perhaps it never

(56:02):
existed photoshop it would have been a really good photoshop,
because there is photographic evidence. It turns out that Alan
Crawford is the only person to have ever mentioned this,
So eveno there were a bunch of the there, that's
the he's the only person. He wrote a book about it.
And then you know the scientific survey that went back

(56:24):
how two years later I didn't mention it. And again
you know, they were studying the lagoon and they said
it was shallow, but I don't know how extensive there's
you know, I don't know if they went out to
the middle and like stepped in it and said, oh, yeah,
it's super shallow, or if they just said, uh, it
looks pretty shallow. Probably fine in it, just like to

(56:47):
know the deeper it is. And yeah, I have no idea. Again,
there are a lot of big question marks attached to
this one, which is of course what makes it an
unsolved mystery, which is why we're talking about it. Well, yeah,
I I never was able to actually track in on
which theory I thought was best, And it's because of

(57:07):
the fact that there's one mention. Yeah, if there was
documentation in the logs or from other people besides this
one guy, and if that initial crew had spent more
than forty five freaking minutes on the island, I could
give it more credence. But I don't because it's just

(57:28):
it's so wishy washy. Yeah. So that's, you know, an
interesting one. And by the way, this was a listener suggestion.
It was suggested by Tarken. I probably have just butchered
your name. I greatly apologize. Yeah, would you give me

(57:48):
a pronunciation guide because I can't figure out how to
say your name? But it was a listener suggestion, and
it was a great listener suggestion I had actually never
heard of. Again, you know, I keep saying, although at
this point I think maybe more times than not, I'm saying, oh,
I say that I know a lot of unsolved mysteries,
but I've never heard of this one. I think at

(58:08):
this point I need to like shelve that response because
at this point, and you know, actually that that I
feel a bit foolish now is I just realized that
the Sarah Joe was also a listener's suggestion, and for
the life of me. I didn't write down who suggested
that I don't Steve Steve Joe's turn at this. Yeah,

(58:37):
unless you guys want to talk more about making of
creepy scary boat mysteries. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah you can.
You can round us off on creepy scary boat mysteries.
So I'm going to talk about another boat. This one
did not end up on an island when I'm talking about,
of course, the Envy Joita Envy standing for I Believe
Merchant Vessel also known as Mary Celeste Pacific. This is

(59:01):
why you pick this. You love the Mary Celeste's favorite.
Any any any ship or boat found this like everybody's
gone and it's just just cool. Before you go any further,
this was suggested by Ben our listener. This was on
my radar already because if you go out to the
web and you find one of those those web pages
that's the ten creepiest, weirdest ghost ships ever, this one's

(59:23):
usually on it with joy to perfect. So this is
this entire short episode is a listeners suggestion. I like
this listener suggestion. Didn't even I didn't even realize that
these were all listeners suggestions. Boats boats alright, so let's
let's get let's get down to our mystery here. So
this takes place. This starts in October nine. So about

(59:46):
five am October three, the Joy Da Celeste left Samoa
bound north bound for the Toklau Islands, which are We're
about two seventy miles still are actually I don't think
they've moved apart, but the hundred seventy miles away. There
were twenty five people on board. That included sixteen crew
and nine passengers, which I think is a little strange

(01:00:06):
when you think about it. That's the first that's the
first part of our mysteries. Why so many crew this
boat was about seventy long. That's a mystery. Well, it's
it's all about the money. The owner was trying to
get extra cash by paying his crew, but by having
by having extra passengers. I'm not mystified by the passengers.

(01:00:28):
I'm just wondering why he needed sixteen crew. So it
was captain. The captain's name was quote unquote Dusty Miller,
and his first mate. Um, I won't bother with the
name because people are gonna forget him anyway. So Dusty Miller,
his first mate Mr Simpson, and a whole bunch of
other guys and nine passengers. One of the passengers was
a doctor who was heading up there to perform an amputation.

(01:00:51):
So he had this a little black bag with him. Anyway,
so they again, they steamed out of the They steamed
out of the harbor and Samoa and we're the people
were needless say, never seen again. Are we going to
talk about the fact that they left a day light? Oh? Yeah,
they did leave a little bit late, not quite a daylight.
They were gonna leave late the night before, and then
they wanted to laying because the clutch went bad on

(01:01:12):
their sports side engine, so they were running on one engine. Yeah,
they wanted to try and find some parts. It couldn't
find some parts, and so they decided to leave at
the leave at the tide at five am on just
one engine. Yeah. Always a bad idea. And by the way,
and I think it's always a bad idea, is just
getting on one of these ghost ships to begin with.
Somebody says, hey, you want to go for a ride
at my ghost ship? No, no, okay, So they left

(01:01:37):
on one engine. Her cargo was consistent of that. Yeah,
this boat was not just a tour boat or anything
like that. It was it was it was a cargo boat.
Her cargo was medical supplies, some timber eighty empty forty
five gallon oil drums, and food. And I assumed they
were taking food up there for resale to the Tacou
Islands because apparently the Taco Islands are even smaller and

(01:01:59):
more ice lated than Samoa. It was supposed to take
between forty one and forty eight hours. In other words
of we're all off. We've ever done my singing career
is tank People don't download our episodes for the singing. Yeah.

(01:02:21):
So anyway, so the Joda was scheduled to arrive on
October five. Of course they didn't show up. So on
October six, they sent a message reporting the ship was
overdue the port they were supposed to land, part the
port that they were supposed to land, and reported them overdue. Uh.
Nobody reported hearing any sort of distress signal from the
from the crew, and there's a reason for this. Turns

(01:02:41):
out the radio tent tent had been disconnected. They didn't
know about it. UH. Search and rescue mission was launched
and from six to twelve October planes from the New
Zealand Air Force cer Scenaria roughly one square miles and
found no sign of the boat or the people. Five
weeks later, the No've ever ten merchant ship Tuvalu sighted

(01:03:02):
to join you to more than six hundred miles west
of her scheduled route that would be somewhat north of Fiji,
I think northeast of Fiji. Uh it was partially submerged
listening to port and there was no trace of any
of the passengers passengers of crew of course UH four
times of cargo was missing. And they also noted the
radio was tuned to Killer Hurts, which is the International

(01:03:25):
Marine Radio Telephone Distress channel, So obviously somebody was trying
to get help. Yeah. It turns out that this is
discovered later on during the inquiries, That is that there
was a break in the cable leading to the the
external antenna and apparently the break had been painted over
at some point and so it looked like it was intact.
But actually though there wasn't there weren't really vppy things.

(01:03:49):
This was not the most well maintained ship. I mean,
um for you know, like obviously it's a little risky
taken off to see with only one engine working. Although
I when when you think about it, I guess it's
d was had at the starboard engine quit. Then you
could always dismantle the clutch and fix the port engine
clutch and get it work. But there were some other
problems too, like, for example, they had builch pumps like

(01:04:11):
all boats do, and these ones didn't have screens on
the ends of their intakes, and so the bulge pumps
became clogged. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This was
discovered later when they actually got the boat back to
port and started examining it. They discovered the cooling intake,
the cooling water intake for the sea for the starboard
engine was a galvanized pipe. It rusted through and it
started leaking. And so this was there was a fairly

(01:04:34):
old ship at this point right now. Yeah, it was like,
well it wasn't that inch I think it was built, yeah,
I mean, and it had served in the war certain
World War two, you know, it had seen some time
number of yeah, and that you would expect that perhaps
if it were going to continue to operate, that like

(01:04:56):
these things would have been replaced, they would have it
would have been rebuilt or whatever. But that for whatever
reason that those things had been overlocked. Yeah, and it
turns out, you know, as we all know now, galban
ice pipe used to be the all the rage, and
now we know that it kind of rushed through dominized pipe.
And what's sad is when this boat was originally built,

(01:05:17):
it had brass pipe. But at some point in it's refitting.
I think the U. S. Navy refitted it when they
took it over for World War Two. They stripped the
old piping and replace it with galvanize because Galvian ice
was better. And so then maybe if they hadn't done that,
this might not have happened right, quite possible, or if

(01:05:39):
they'd put you know, coffer or brass, yeah, copper brass
back in. There were shortage, there were shortages during the war.
That that wasn't the only problem, not at all the
only problem. When they got to join it back to
back to harbor and looked her over carefully, discovered the
whole was sound, there was there were no holes in that.
But they imediately discovered that leaky pipe which had rested through.

(01:06:03):
As we said, kelvanic corrosion isn't that um when you've
got different types of metal within a loop, and that
you know, one type of metal, like the offcasts from
like a copper loop for instance. Right, if you've got
copper and GalF and I steel, copper corrodes the galvanize steel.
The little particles from each of them corrode the other

(01:06:25):
and kind of becomes it's a weird chemical reaction. Yeah. Yeah,
it's my understanding. I could be wrong, yeah, yeah, But anyway,
so back to our story, So the crew would not
have known about this leak until the water rose about
the floorboards of the engine room. So by that time
it was really too late. The whole thing is underwater,

(01:06:45):
and getting to it to plug it would have been
pretty much impossible the leak, right, yeah, getting to the
leak to plug it. H And as I as noted previously,
the bills pumps were not did not have strainers on
their intakes, so they got clogged and stopped working, so
they kept taking on water. But my understanding of the
construction of the whole of the ship, maybe I'm jumping ahead,

(01:07:07):
that it was even more unsinkable than yeah it was
the ship that yeah, it was. Well, it was two
and six seater planking, it was, which is what it
was built up. And then the hole. At one point
they decided to refrigerate the hold, so they aligned it
with cork to ancelate it. So yeah, and also on

(01:07:28):
top of that, as I mentioned previously, they were carrying
eighty empty barrels and full of air, full of air exactly,
so the boat was unsinkable. Now this is this is
saying that those those were sealed and so they would
hold the air, not just open. Yeah. Yeah, And and
the I would assume they would have been sealed because
they're transporting for a purpose, I would useless for the

(01:07:49):
purpose without there, without their their plugs, that would be
And also just to keep the fumes down and the
hold of the boat, you'd want to have them plug. Yeah,
So it only makes sense that these things were sealed up.
But even without that, the boat was still more or
less unsinkable, right, So, and it was taking on water,
but it was unsinkable. Yeah, But nonetheless it's still a
stressful situation. Well, anyway, let me talk a little bit

(01:08:11):
about the damage here though, that they they found there
was damage to the superstructure. The boat had had a
flying bridge which apparently had been torn away. What's a
flying bridge? Sorry, it's kind of a it's a cabin
that's opened at the back. Okay, yeah, that's on top
of the regular on top of the regular bridge. You know.
It's it's like you see a lot of those in
there for fishing boats and stuff. You get a lot

(01:08:32):
of height and so you can you can spot the
fish ees from further away like that. But apparently it's
not it's not always enclosed. Yeah, sometimes they are. Sometimes
they aren't, but it's it's a pot. Yeah. Often it's
just like a platform with the windscreen and extra steering
station and then and then that the awning. Maybe it's
just like, yeah, it's open like an awning or something
like that. So that had been torn away a lot.

(01:08:55):
Most of the windows have been broken. Somebody had ranked
the canvas awning on the top of the deck house
behind the ridge, which makes sense. It's hot, and then
you want to get some one more shade. I assume
uh an auxiliary pump had been rigged up in the
engine room. I'm sorry. The canvas awning Was it intact
when they found the shipper. It appears it was intact.

(01:09:15):
It wasn't like there wasn't shredded or anything. That now, well, yeah,
and that's why, there's some images of it and you
can see that it's still in place, and you would
see the damage to the flying bridge and it's significant,
but it's not as if it was torn away. Yeah,
it's it's curious to me, Yeah, it's I just thought
that it was worth noting that part of it had

(01:09:37):
been torn away but other parts were undamaged, and that
that seemed that appeared to be from waves. Yeah. Essentially,
it's a little odd to me that the the temporary
owning that they rigged that they had rigged up was
more or less intact, you know, so much of the
damage had been done. That's kind of interesting. Any Way,
back to the story here. So they had rigged up

(01:09:58):
an auxiliary pump in the engine room between the two engines. Uh,
but it was not connected, which would indicate to me
that the starboard engine probably quit right about when they
were ready to connected, because obviously you're taking the engine
to run the pump. Yeah, I'm assuming that this probably
wasn't a power takeoff kind of situation from the engine.
They probably was an electric pump, right, and so as

(01:10:20):
long as they had electricity, which they got when the
motor was running, then they could run that thing. But
when the motor stopped running, well no juice and no
auxiliary pump. So yeah, they were kind of hosed as
I As I mentioned, the boat was left listing and
it was semi submerged. It was you said, you've seen
the pictures. It was very heavily The barnacle growth on

(01:10:40):
the on the outside of the hull above the usual
waterline show that it had been It had been in
that position for a considerable amount of times weeks. Yeah,
at least don't grow like crazy fast. Um, I don't know,
I have no idea how fast they grow. Well, I
mean it took it took a number of weeks, was
about five weeks, and so there was enough growth in

(01:11:03):
that couple of weeks period for being recognizable. Yeah, so
that that gives you some frame reference of their speedy growth.
What else they had a dinghy with like a tender
And also what are they what they call carly life
rafts also called carly floats, and these are like these
are like non inflatable life rafts. The military used them
like in World War Two. They're kind of hard plastic,

(01:11:25):
they're not higher plastic. What they are is is there
that there's a central core that's formed in a noble,
and the central core is made up of either a
copper tubing or sometimes steel tubing, and it's like twelve
in diameter, and it's formed in a big oble, just
like a regular inflatable life raft would look right, And
then that's covered with cork on the outside for additional buoyancy.

(01:11:47):
And then that's all covered with canvas which is in
sealed with and stuff like that, and then it's got
like a like a mesh floor. Yeah, there you go,
Devin showing us a picture right now, and I'm the
Google grea. Okay, So if anybody has ever watched I
swear you've watched Jaws, right, and there's they kind of

(01:12:08):
do a discussion of when all the guys were floating
in those boats and the sharks were coming along. Yeah,
and they they kind of did a bit of a
filming of the scene. Am I confusing that with something
else where they showed those boats and they showed how
they had the that kind of net flooring to them. Yeah,

(01:12:29):
some of them had like lattice like wood slat floors
and some of them had a mess sort of flooring. Okay,
that's that's that's what we're talking about. But there so
they had three of those, all those were missing, which
was suggest that they took to the life rafts at
some point in a bandoned ship. But of course that
doesn't really make a lot of sense because as we
all know, the boat was unsinkable. Those and and the

(01:12:50):
carly life rafts. I'm sorry, excuse me if I'm wrong here,
but those are the kind of life rafts that are
like stored, they inflate. They had the canister, it's hatched
to them and they inflate. Now these are these are
not inflatable, They're always inflated. And the dinghy as well,
always inflated. Danny was a wooden dinghy like like the

(01:13:10):
one that so they weren't that that would have only
been seaworthy if there was an emergency, like if you
inflated them yourself. So they could have just been washed
off if there had been. I'm assuming they were pretty
pretty carefully lashed down, but they could have been. They
could have been broken loose and washed off. I would
say that somebody somebody took them, either an abandoned ship

(01:13:31):
or somebody else came along maybe after the fact, found
that the boat floating, and thought, well and life Fest
grab a few things. They're not enough life Fest for everybody.
They had them, but not enough. I may have been
googling while we just covered oh you were uh yeah,
see what other mysterious things. The starboard engine was covered
by a mattress. Well. Yeah. One of the theories about

(01:13:52):
that is that the as the water level was creeping up,
the flywheel and the and the belt on the starboard
engine was flinging up water unto the electrical panel, and
they might have wanted to cover it, so they stopped
wedding down the electric panel. So that's one possibility match
like they didn't have you're not you're not, Yeah, and
you're not. That's probably the closest thing that they had.

(01:14:14):
But you know, a max especially like it's full of
water already. Yeah, you're thinking of like a seely posture pedic.
And I'm not talking this is like a c matress,
Like that's the one that's a couple of couple. I
know what you're talking about. H that's one of those
one of those guys. I just is still weird to
me that would be what they would use. But as
I'm sorry, continue yeah, uh, as I said that the

(01:14:37):
radio was was disabled, and so they it's estimated the
range of the radio is about two miles, and so
they were broadcasting in a stress signal. Undoubtedly that nobody
that nobody heard. Yeah, quite sad. The electric clocks on
board stopped at ten twenty five switches for the cabin
lighting and the navigation lights were on, which indicates that
power finally was lost at night. And there's I I'm

(01:15:00):
not sure if I believe this what I when they've
heard in the standard of couches that the everything was
wired directly into the ship's generator, the lights and the
clocks and everything. But I can't. I find that hard
to believe you'd wired You'd wired them to the batteries.
For example, do you want your clock shutting off every
time you turn the engine off, Yeah, it should go

(01:15:21):
to the battery and and same, I mean the same
thing with the lights. You should have the capability of
running your nav lights even if your engines out. So
so a lot of people said, oh, this is in
the case that whatever cataclysm happened to them happened at night.
Not necessarily, it just means the battery finally ran down.
At night, So that's all it means, although the lights
switched on does indicate something happening at night, right you

(01:15:44):
you don't turn the lights on if it's broad daylight. Yeah,
I mean, yeah, we have the lights on at night.
So they obviously they finally lost all their juice sometime
at night. Uh, let's see what else the log book,
the sextant, their chronometer, and also Dusty Miller of the
captain kept a few guns on board. All that stuff
was gone. And they also found the doctor. Remember I

(01:16:04):
said there was a doctor on board. Yeah, they found
his bag on the deck and had a stethoscope and
a scalpel and some bloodstained bandages that I'm not sure
what happened to the rest of the stuff. Maybe it
got washed over board. If you gotta go perform an amputation,
do you think you need more than a scalpel unless
you're unless you're unless you're to have that. Maybe, Yeah,

(01:16:27):
you think you had more in the doctor's bag and
a stethoscope and a scalpel, though I thought part of
the cargo were medical supplies, which just keeps smaller medical
supplies in your bag. That he had some great stuff
in the supplies. Yeah, yeah, it's entirely possible. But still,
I mean, you don't really like a bone throwe doesn't
really actually fit? Yeah, probably not. Yeah, you still think

(01:16:51):
you've seen those black doctor's bags. You've been a lot
more in the stethoscope of a scalpel in there. So
I necessarily don't really keep bloodstained bandaged. Not necessarily yeah. Yeah,
maybe he was into recycling. I don't know, but yeah,
And last of all, there was fuel in her tanks. Uh,
And they calculated from the amount that had been used

(01:17:13):
that she had gone about two or three miles before
the engine shut down. That was, that was probably roughly
fifty miles short of their destination of Tokalau. Yeah, I know,
I know. So the league had probably started about nine
pm or so on the second night of the trip. Yeah,
so I guess the thing like, okay, and I have

(01:17:33):
been really pushing against doing this all night, this whole Like, well,
I lived on a ship for six months, so I
know everything resident collection, I am. But one of the things,
you know, and I don't know in situations like this
how long the sixteen crew members had been with this
ship or how often they did this run or anything

(01:17:55):
like that. You know, we did a run fairly frequently,
and one of the things within the first week they
drill into your brain is like, assuming we're going at
our normal speed, this is about where we are at
any given time, and in your cabin you have a
little map of that. So if you wake up and
the ship isn't moving and like for whatever reason, the

(01:18:19):
it's a it's a huge ship, right, it's not like
this is going to happen to me, like definitely not
part of the captain's circle. You know, I don't work
on the bridge anything like that. But if like the
first mate woke up and was like, wow, that's super weird,
we're not moving anymore and walked onto the bridge and
mysteriously everybody was dead or something, you know, super suspension

(01:18:42):
of disbelief story, that person could say, all right, it's
about this time. We are probably about this distance away
from the closest land mass. I can know that. So,
you know, for me for them to say, well, they
were about fifty miles away from their destined nation, assuming
that they had done this run a couple of times,

(01:19:04):
the thing that gets me is that, like they were
super like fifty miles away from your destination is like
close enough to abandon ship and paddle your way over there, certainly. Yeah,
And that's uh, you know, definitely is. And that's the
thing that like again, you know, like I don't know
how strong the currents were in that neighborhood, sure of course,
but and and that's the other thing, is that just
that it would be like hopefully the crew would know that, right, So,

(01:19:28):
like in the situation that a captain had had something
horrible happened to him, or first mate, or a bunch
of the crew had had something horrible has happened to them,
if even one of the crew members had survived whatever
horrible thing happened, that they would know, Okay, we're only
fifty fifty miles out, you've got a compass and some paddles,
let's go. There's no reason, like, there's no reason they

(01:19:51):
couldn't have taken some of that cloths for that makeshift
on ing over the that they could have, right, absolutely,
So you know that's my thing with the like they
were really close. Yeah, they were close there close. So
there was an inquiry, an official maritime inquiry to the
whole thing, and their conclusion was that the fact that
the passengers and crew were gone was quote inexplicable unquote.

(01:20:15):
The life rafts and the dinghy were missing. But it
didn't make any sense, and it was obvious to the
people that did this inquiry that it made no sense
to abandoned ship given that it was unsinkable. And I
know for me, I mean, before I abandoned ship and
got into a lifeboat, it would have to be a
lot lower in the water than the joy it was.
I go back to my well, we were just talking about, right,

(01:20:38):
and then like it's drilled into your head that like
the only time that you leave a ship is when
you are one sure that that ship is thinking. It
got to be like the water, which has then got
to be based upon the knowledge of the people who
were involved, which I think is where Jove's going to go.
I hope, because I know that that's part of the theories.

(01:20:59):
That's one of the theories. Yeah, one of the theories
is that I'll just go through the series theories now,
and this is one of the one popular theory is
that the captain down theory, which means that he was
disabled or dead. This theory goes that he was aware
that it couldn't sink, so he would have told the
passengers that there was no danger and everybody would stayed
on board. So the theory is that he must have

(01:21:20):
been incapacitated and people panicked and took to the life
raster because he was incapacitated. Uh. And as they're very
in this series there so there was a rumor that
there was tension between the captain and his first mate,
and so in this series they had a fight and
one or both fell overboard and they rushed the cruise
in the crew of the passengers took to the lifeboats.

(01:21:40):
I think you're probably going here, but like, there's no
way that those were the only two people on the
ship who knew that about the well exactly of course,
you know, you know, at least the first mate and
probably at least several of the members of the crew
were aware that of all the cork on board, the
cedar planking, the eight barrels, I mean, And so even
if the captain was down, uh, and you know, they
still wouldn't know the boat's not going to sink. And secondly,

(01:22:03):
as I said, no sensible person would abandon ship until
it's absolutely for sure about to go under. That would
be that would be my criteria. Another popular theory at
the time was that the Japanese did it. There are
two various on this. One. One is that hate this theory.
This is so bad. Yeah, that's lame. It's it's pretty lame.
They were passing into the joy that was paid, passed

(01:22:23):
through a Japanese fishing fleet. They saw something they weren't
supposed to see and apparrently so that everybody was murdered.
And I don't know what they were not supposed to see.
Maybe they were using the illegal lure. I don't know,
but this is like and they quoted this is from
the Fiji Times and Herald. They said that this was
from a then quote unquote impeccable source. But uh, they
produced no further evidence, so that well there was there was,

(01:22:47):
and there was further ado about this when something about
some Japanese knives were found on the boat. Yeah, yeah,
they found below decks in the boat, they found some knives.
They were stamp made in Japan. Of course, if they
said made in Japan and English, that means they were
made for exports to English speaking countries. Japanese people are

(01:23:07):
going to be carrying them. Another area is that they
were like there was Japanese soldiers who were on some
island or another who wasn't weren't aware that the war
it ended, so they were so they went out in
a boat and just bushwacked people and randomly killed them.
And yep, yeah, continuing ef Yeah, but of course the
problem with this is there it seems like there would
have been a lot of people in the area who

(01:23:27):
disappearing that didn't happen. Another there, let's move right along, Ivan,
good old Ivan. The Ruskies. Yeah, that's right. They were
abducted by the crew of the Soviet sub That's outlandish.
Do you want to go further into that theory, because
we've we've debated being abducted by a crew of a
submarine in multiple stories. We have done that, and I

(01:23:49):
I we've we've never found any of our favorite theories.
Even that's fun, it's one of our funnest But I
think we might have literally chewed the fat off the
bone on that. Well. Yeah, but then why submarine cruise
with Why to go around abducting crowds of people is
beyond me because crowded boat, Yeah exactly, I don't think So. Okay,

(01:24:12):
next theory, pirates they that took all the valuables, or
possibly they came on board and put everybody in the
life rafts and says sayonara, and then they took off
with the boat, which they didn't know what the time was,
taking on water and then broke away. Yeah, but yeah,
I bet you know. And the reason that people are

(01:24:32):
taking this is because four tons of cargo was missing.
And they'll say what four tons? If it was if
it was a medical supplies, a timber or what was,
or if it was the containers that were empty. I
don't know why anybody take those, but but I can
see if the boat is listing and the hatch pops open,
they didn't pop out and float away. Yeah, just see

(01:24:53):
floating away. It depends on else how well secured they were.
And then you know, SpongeBob SquarePants is going I got
a container. Yeah, but those things didn't. I mean, any
of those things aren't gonna wait four tons, so they're
not gonna wait much of anything. I'm just saying that
these things in general may have come out. So they
might have actually, but you know, it just it just
depends not small there because the boat was listening over

(01:25:15):
far enough that water was actually coming into the top
hatch that you used to access the whole of the boat,
which as far as I know, it is the only
way to access the whole. That's through that's through the decks. See.
I didn't look any any kind of drawings of the
actual boat. I didn't see those. Yeah, and so the
so and large items weren't about to float out through
those hatches, but something small could have. I mean, barrels

(01:25:36):
could have, but not that many. Probably again, because so
many things were missing, like the guns and you know,
the navigational equipment and four tons of cargo, and people
immediately went to pirates. And and actually this is not
as this doesn't doesn't suck as bad a lot as
a lot of the other theories. It's possible piracy does exist. Yeah,
and so the reason I think that they didn't just like,

(01:25:58):
there's no reason to just kill everybody on the boat.
If all you want to do is pill take their stuff.
Number one. If you wanted to do the more rational
things a pirate and take the entire boat, which is
what I would do, then you put them all in
the life roust. Yeah, you put them all in the
life raft and and then you you take off with
the boat. Later on we discovered the boat is taking
on water. You, of course, being a pirate, you don't

(01:26:20):
know that this boat can't sink. So you radio your
buddies in the other boat that brought you there originally,
you meet, you get off, you take what you can,
and if you take off believing the boat is going
to sink, which it didn't do, the steak and would.
A stick in the heart of this series is that
the radio was tuned to the stress channel, So if
they were using it to communicate with their buddies in

(01:26:41):
the other boat, it would have been tuned to a
different channel. Yeah, so they couldn't have taken the radios.
Yeah maybe, I don't know if hand radios are that
common back in those days. Yeah, yeah, so, and so
that's why I think, I mean, I could be wrong.
They could have had other methods of signaling their buddies too.
But what else we have here in terms of these, uh,

(01:27:03):
these fun theories. Another fun theory Insurance FRAU Captain Dusty
Miller had serious debts because he had several failed fishing
expeditions and that left him in debt. But he didn't
he didn't know on the boat, did he didn't know
the boat he was leasing the boat. Yeah, so that's dumb,
but that explains why he was taking on passengers, because
he was trying to get as much money as he
could out of every run. Yeah, and I believe that

(01:27:27):
the inquiry that you talked about had found that he
had lost or let laps license to have passengers on
the boat. Yeah. They actually found quite a bit of
fault with him for the condition of his lot of
version of like a firefly kind of yeah, yeah, okay,

(01:27:49):
but but yeah, so he didn't on the boat. He
knew the boat couldn't sink, for God's sakes, So if
he'd wanted to like turn into claim for insurance, he
would have lit it on fire. He wouldn't have done
it with twenty four other people on the boat, did, Okay.
I swear that I've seen somewhere talk of the fact
that the sea cocks were open, were open, and that's

(01:28:12):
say that I've seen theories that the that they were
going to scuttle it in the sea cocks were open
for insurance reasons. But I don't remember in there officially
inquiry anything about that. So the sea cocks were never open.
They discovered that which would be stupid because the thing
still wouldn't sink well exactly, so it makes it, like
I said, he would have torched it trying to sink it.

(01:28:32):
That would have been the obvious thing to do, alright, alright,
so don't want that one onto the next one. Mutiname.
So in this theory, the boat encountered heavy weather, the
crew wanted to turn around. The captain refused because he
you know, again, he was in desperate for cash. He
didn't want to lose any money, so he wanted to
keep on going. And also if they were actually truly
within fifty fifty miles of their destination, then there's no

(01:28:55):
there's no same reason to turn around rather than just
continuing to go. Yeah, that doesn't make sense, but that's
one that So the crew, when when he wouldn't turn around,
the mutiny, and there was there was blows were traded,
the captain was either killed or knocked unconscious right about
the end of starboard, engine stopped running, and everybody took
off for the life boat because remembered, only the captain
knew that the boat was unsinkable, right, yeah, and taking

(01:29:17):
the captain and of course the navigational equipment which you need.
We're gonna be floating a life boat. So the abandoned
ship in heavy seas I I eat storms to take
to a bunch of flimsy life rafts, which doesn't make
a lot of sense. Yeah, so, and it doesn't make
sense that the crew would be wanting to turn around
when they were that close to their destination. Alright, So

(01:29:38):
we put that one and put that theory to rest.
About the only one that's held any water so far
has been the pirate one, and the pirate I'm afraid,
I really I hate the pirate theory, but it really
is the only one that makes sense that we can
talk a little bit more. Another theory is this is mine.
That they didn't abandoned ship, at least not right away.
So because they had food on board, they're part of

(01:30:00):
their cargo was food for for the the boat had behind.
Besides the three thousand gallon diesel fuel tank or tanks,
had also had twenty five gallons gallons of water. Of course,
we don't know that that tank was completely full. It
might have been full and left, but it should have
had a substantial amount of water. Yeah, it should have

(01:30:21):
had a fair amount of that. So they the official inquiry,
and I I'm so sorry I was not able to
get a copy of this because it would have been
nice to get that information. But they mentioned the amount
of fuel left in the in the tanks, but they
don't say how much water was left in the water
tank water, or nor do they say how much black
water well exactly exactly, So if the if the water

(01:30:44):
tank was empty, that would be a big clue. What
that would mean is that they stayed with the boat
until they ran out of water. And if the black
water tank was all full of well, you know what,
then it was all all full then uh. And I
don't know what boats in those days did. I assume
they had black water tanks and then didn't just flush
it directly. And the other problem is is that if

(01:31:05):
if the batteries dead, I've been on how did you
say a house boat and I pushed the knob and
I hear the electric pump turn on and it spits
out water. But if that's not going, how do I
get the water out of the big holding tank? Well,
that's that's a question, you know. I mean, I would
assume that they had some sort of pump like manual

(01:31:29):
pump back up for that, but of course you're know,
given the state of the boat, maybe not, maybe that
wasn't working. And I guess, since this is your theory,
do you have an explanation for the list? The list? Uh? Yeah,
Actually I think that it is possible, quite possible that
the crew actually induced the list on their own because
the starboard engine, remember, is the one they needed to

(01:31:49):
get running again, and so it's a portside list. So
how would you induce the list? Well, you remove say
four times of cargo from the starboard side of the
ship and throw it overboard, and you're both starting to
get something out of trying to pull the starboard engine
out of the water or whatever. Yeah, apparently makes sense
to me. Actually, it's a lot of sense. It's yeah, logical. Yeah.

(01:32:13):
So anyway, apparently they didn't succeed, because they had, they
would have immediately hooked up that auxiliary pump that they
had rigged up ready to go. It still doesn't explain
why they left, because even if you run out of
food and run out of water, you're still better off
on the big boat than being on a life raft.
Your profile is higher, you're more likely to be spotted,
You're you've got shelter from the elements, which you don't
really have on a raft. So the only reason I

(01:32:35):
can think of that they would they would leave if
they if they spotted an island and they weren't too
far away from they might have decided to make a
break forth they're all out of food and water, or
if they're really low on that stuff. If you go
to an island, at least there's going to be like
birds and fish that you can kill and eat and
stuff like that. You know, they didn't abandon the boat
because they thought the boat was going to sink. They

(01:32:56):
might have abandoned the boat because they were they were
starving and out of water, and if figured you know,
and it was what you correct me if I'm wrong.
It was five weeks after they went missing, was found
twenty five people. How much how much does the average
person drink? About a gallon a day? A gallon a day.
You don't need a gallon a day to survive though, okay,

(01:33:17):
but about a gallon a day the average person drinks.
So that's twenty five a day by five weeks comes
out how many days five let's say so le's let's
just same. They're drinking a full gallon, So that's that's
twenty five by five weeks, which is thirty five that
nobody knows what that number is. Well, let's say if

(01:33:38):
it was gallon tank right, undred right, assuming it was full,
that means that they had ten days of drinking water,
assuming they drink gallon a day, Yeah, would have a
hundred days. Hundred gallons by twenty five people is a
hundred gallons hundred gallons per persons per person, which means

(01:34:00):
they could have theoretically gone a hundred days if the
tank was full and the drinking a gallon and yeah,
and and of course you know the tank was probably
not full, probably wasn't full. At half full, it's fifty days.
At a quarter full, it's twenty five days. So we're

(01:34:21):
now running into that gray area of let's say it
was half or a quarter full when they left board.
That would explain why they were out of water and
would have wanted to leave because they had nothing left.
But then again, if you're on a boat boats, and
we talked about this before, there's tons of plastics, so
you would think that you could use evaporation to make drinkable,

(01:34:43):
potable water, But who knows what the circumstance was we're
also assuming that, you know, the nine passengers didn't get
sea sick, and there wasn't any kind of going not anything,
you know, And that's a fairly large assumption as well. Yeah,
and so it would have been other uses for the water.
Obviously you're gonna need to use a little bit of

(01:35:03):
water to wash up occasionally and things like that if
you do get sea sickondy bar, if you're gonna want
to wash your face, probably rench your mouth out, so
you need to be hydrated more. Yeah. I have no
idea if after the search, after the discovery of this,
if they went along and check that checked on Wikipedia.
Then in the South Pacific there are roughly twenty islands

(01:35:25):
in there, you know, a lot of them just specs
like the islands that we've been talking about there. So
I don't know if anybody thought to go back and
check any small islands that were sortable on the course
of bones. Yeah, exactly, exactly, but I think they probably
made a break for an island. Yeah. Well, I don't know.
And I think that's the problem with all of these

(01:35:47):
stories is that they they's just very little information apart
from the start and to finish to really know what's
going on well. As always, ladies and gentlemen, all of
our shows and all of the links to the stories
that we've been talking about tonight, as with all episodes
are gonna be on our website. The website is Thinking

(01:36:11):
Sideways podcast dot com. Uh, you're probably most a lot
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(01:36:32):
you know one's come out, because we try to put
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(01:36:52):
discuss and the interesting things that we find. You have
a theory for us that we've forgot, or you've got
thought or comments. We've got a lot of great feedback lately.
If you've got something you want to say to it,
you can always send us an email. That email address
is Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. And by

(01:37:13):
the way, if you are one of the passengers on
the joy They or one of the crew, we'd like
to hear from you. We'd love to hear from you,
or the Sarah Joe or the random boat that we
don't know the name of Buve Island. Yeah, if you're
a resident Bouve Island, which is inhospitable to anything but
see elephants, please let us know. Well that having been said,

(01:37:33):
ladies and gentlemen, Uh, this short has gone on a
little longer than a short, so we're gonna go ahead,
and yet we've got long shorts, so we're gonna go ahead,
and we're gonna sign this one off. Thanks again for
taking the time to listen, and we will talk to
you next week. Everybody, hie, guys,