This is the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey living on a rubber raft in the Pacific Ocean for 118 days after their 31" yacht sunk from being hit by a breached whale. They were each avid journalers and kept careful details of their experience on the open sea. It's a shocking story just in the fact that they both survived, especially Maurice. Not only were they both starving, having survived on eating raw fish and turtles and drinking questionable "fresh" water collected whenever it happened to rain, but Maurice got really sick with some sort of upper respiratory illness. Even the always-positive, upbeat Maralyn thought he was in the process of dying at one point. Miraculously, he survived the illness.
These are two very unique individuals. Maurice hated his childhood and left home as soon as he could. He never looked back. I'm curious about his childhood experience, but he apparently didn't want to share the details so maybe no one will ever know. I couldn't figure out if he experienced trauma at the hands of his parents, or he was on the autism spectrum and simply didn't bond with them. Maybe both. Maurice was definitely a loner, in every sense of the word. Then there is Maralyn, eight years his junior. She was a free spirit who absolutely did not want to conform to societal expectations. I'm not quite sure what she saw in Maurice, but it could have been his uniqueness that attracted her. They both were completely fine with quitting their jobs to spend their lives (childless) sailing around the world. They were both painstakingly detail-oriented and planned out every single little detail, in writing & diagrams, before they set sail from England in June 1972, headed to New Zealand. The whale hit them on March 4, 1973. They transferred all the supplies they could into their small rubber raft and a small dinghy before their yacht sank.
Maralyn was ever the optimist. She insisted that they play games (she made cards & game pieces out of whatever material she could find, like paper); they dissected every sentence in the two books they happened to save from their yacht, talking about these books endlessly; they both wrote details of their every day life on the raft; they weathered horrible storms; they dealt with raft punctures that they were not able to completely fix so they had to constantly bail water out of their raft so that it didn't sink. Maralyn 100% kept Maurice alive. He would spend his time talking about the ways they could die - should die, while Maralyn looked toward their future and eventual rescue. They tried to flag down seven ships over the course of the 118 days, but their flares were duds and they were just a speck in the ocean to passing ships. They were both near death when a South Korean ship happened to see them.
It's a remarkable story, not only for the survival aspect, but for the tenaciousness of these two unique individuals. As soon as they could, they built another yacht and set sail again after they had recovered physically from their ordeal.
Wendy's Rating: ****
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