Sailors recount close calls at sea
Pacific storms, equipment failures, sharks, Navy rescue
HONOLULU — Trapped on a storm-battered boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for months, Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiava were running out of food and beginning to believe they were out of luck when they saw it: a U.S. Navy ship chugging toward them.
“When I saw the gray ship on the horizon, I was just shaking,” Appel said. “I was ready to cry, I was so happy. I knew we were going to live.”
On Wednesday the pair, followed by their dogs, Zeus and Valentine, boarded the USS Ashland, all four looking remarkably fit for having been lost at sea for nearly six months.
They had been drifting across the Pacific since the end of May and had sent out unanswered distress calls for 98 consecutive days before crew members aboard a Taiwanese fishing boat saw them Tuesday and notified the Navy.
They had left Honolulu on May 3 aboard Appel’s 50-foot vessel the Sea Nymph for what was to be an 18-day journey to Tahiti, followed by months of leisurely cruising the South Pacific before returning home. Disaster struck almost immediately when a storm battered their boat with 50 to 70 mph winds for three days as they left Hawaii. They continued on, thinking the vessel wasn’t that badly damaged.
By the end of the month another storm had flooded the boat’s engine, however, and they discovered its sails and mast had been damaged enough earlier that they could no longer generate enough wind power to keep the boat on course.
They were 900 miles off Japan, and thousands of miles in the wrong direction, when a Taiwanese fishing vessel found them and started to tow them. As the vessel towed the Sea Nymph, the 100-ton steel ship was damaging the much smaller sailboat as it pulled it through the open ocean. “We incurred incredible damage,” Appel said of the 24 hours under tow that were the scariest of the trip. It didn’t help that the women spoke only English, a language not spoken on the fishing vessel.
“We had a really tough time communicating with them that they were going to sink us within the next 24 hours,” she said. Eventually she was able to swim to the fishing vessel and use its radio to make a mayday call.
The Navy amphibious dock landing ship showed up Wednesday. When it appeared to pass them by, they panicked momentarily. “OK, we’re going to make it,” Appel told herself after sailors radioed from the bridge assurances that they did indeed see them.
The Sea Nymph, deemed no longer seaworthy, was allowed to drift away after their rescue, although Appel says she hopes she might retrieve and repair it.
She and Fuiava acknowledged that until the Navy arrived they wondered whether they would survive. Appel credited their survival in part to the veteran sailors in Hawaii who had warned them to prepare well. “They said pack every square inch of your boat with food, and if you think you need a month, pack six months, because you have no idea what could possibly happen out there,” Appel said.
They thought they had enough to last a year but with the six-month mark approaching they discovered they had gone through 90 percent of it. The dogs’ food had run out and the women were sharing theirs with them. “The dogs turned out to really like human food,” Appel said. “A lot,” Fuiava added.
One of their water purifiers had also broken but they managed to fix it.
One night, tiger sharks attacked their boat, and the next morning, a shark returned and rammed it again, Appel said. “We were just incredibly lucky that our hull was strong enough to withstand the onslaught,” she said in a video interview provided by the Navy.
Although Appel has been sailing the Hawaiian islands for 10 years and spent two years preparing for this voyage, she acknowledged she and Fuiava, a novice sailor, may not have prepared as well as they could have.
They said they tried to hail a number of ships and fired off 10 signal flares. One of their cellphones had been washed overboard early in the voyage, but they were out of cell range anyway. They carried two GPS units; one failed and they had to rely on the hand-held model for the entire voyage, Appel said in a phone interview Friday from the USS Ashland.
They also had a new VHF radio, a ham radio, a weather satellite and a radio telephone. She said none worked, and they apparently had a communications failure with their new antenna. Appel said they had six ways to communicate with multiple backups, and none worked.
That, she said, “exceeds Murphy’s Law.”