According the the article, the guy lost half of his body weight & kept the bodies of his brother & nephew in the raft with him?
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Amazing to last so long in those latitudes in a raft. You can last four months in the tropics in a raft but I haven’t heard of anyone lasting that long that far north
One question would be, how long before rescue did the brother and nephew perish? An hour or a week?
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After reading about a young Richard Parker on the yacht Mignonette, I don’t think I want to know. The above article says his heavy body weight is probably what saved him but 100kg, 220lbs isn’t that big imo.
I used to watch a show called Naked and Afraid on TV. Should be called Watch Me Starve For 21 Days. Anyway, about the only thing I learned from that show is that a person in the tropics will lose about 1 to 3 pounds of body weight a day starving for 21 days, while walking in circles, gathering firewood, and quarreling with their fellow contestant.
In high latitudes a lot of body fat goes to just keeping warm. So, with no exercise, maybe the same amount of weight loss.
Assuming he caught no fish, using the mean-number of 2 pounds of weight loss a day would mean he should have been down to 122 pounds at rescue. He was less than that (110 pounds?) but the equation still holds true.
I don’t think he would have lasted much longer. Not enough body fat to ward off hypothermia.
That math sounds right to me. It being a personal yacht, I don’t know if they had immersion suits or not to fight off the hypothermia. Also if they started off with high calorie lifeboat rations? I loved that Naked & Afraid show btw. Many of the contestants reminded me of some of the nutzo that I worked with over the years.
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20 days on a raft in the Pacific Ocean
The two were rescued by a Japanese ship after spending 20 days on a small life raft. The incident created major media coverage around the world.
IIRC the two survivors were painting on the foredeck and was blown overboard when the explosion occured. As luck would have it a paint raft was blow off with them. (Not a life raft) They survived on flying fish and rain water.
A full length documentary about the miraculouse survival (In Spanish):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASzp0w6MSv4
BTW; I believe the rule about haveing life rafts up foreward on ships of this type/size came from this incident.
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