As your body needs things,” Steven Callahan says, ”it makes them taste good.”
Callahan should know. A third of the way through his 76 days adrift on a rubber raft in the Atlantic, he acquired a taste for fish eyes. ”My teeth crush out a large squirt of fluid, a chewy dewdrop lens, and a papery thin, green-skinned cornea,” he writes in his new book ”Adrift” (Houghton Mifflin, $15.95).
Since coming ashore almost four years ago, Callahan`s idea of haute cuisine has reverted to more normal fare. ”I don`t go out to restaurants and order fish eyes,” he says, laughing. ”But when I have something to eat or drink, I`m still aware of the value of it. I`m definitely more aware of how others must be feeling when I read stories about people starving.
”My girlfriend and I argue because she thinks you can control everything with your mind. I know that`s not true. You feel and think differently because of your physical situation. Your mind is very linked to your body.”
To survive a 2 1/2-month nautical nightmare, Callahan, now 33, had to control both body and soul. He did it blending a sailor`s resourcefulness with a soldier`s discipline. Time and again the New Englander, who will speak Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Shedd Aquarium, restored his broken equipment and spirit.
He fished with a speargun until the firing mechanism failed, then used the spear. When that broke, he lashed a knife blade to what was left and kept on fishing. He caught birds with his hands and water with a variety of devices, including a chronically malfunctioning solar still. He patched a four-inch slice in the lower tube of his raft by stuffing it with sponge and sleeping bag lining and tying it off with rope. To check his position, he lashed pencils together to form a crude sextant. On top of all that, he kept a detailed daily log of his activities and thoughts that served as the outline for his book.
”A log is something you always do on any vessel,” says Callahan, who learned to sail as a Boy Scout more than two decades ago. ”I was brought up doing it. The log serves a practical purpose. You can set up speed and distance tables, navigation notes, information about food and drink. What was more important, it helped me to develop a survival routine, to put order in my life.”
That sense of control kept Callahan going long after his 21-foot sailboat Napoleon Solo sank on Feb. 4, 1982, en route from the Canary Islands to Antigua in a nighttime collision with what he now suspects was a whale. Whatever it was, it was big enough to knock a hole in Solo and leave Callahan scrambling to retrieve a survival kit, a knife, a T-shirt and not much else as he jumped into a canopied life raft about 5 1/2-feet in diameter.
What followed was a test of wills that matched Callahan against Mother Nature with her blistering sun, hungry sharks and violent storms. He had neither enough food nor enough water to last as long as he did, before fishermen discovered him floating near Guadeloupe about 1,800 miles from where his sailboat sank.
Trading on skills he learned on Boy Scout camping trips, mountain climbing expeditions and prior sailing trips, Callahan succeeded in establishing sources of food and water. At first taunted and frustrated by the school of dorado fish that tracked him and slammed into his body as it sagged against the bottom of his raft, he finally realized that this oceanic entourage was a moveable meat market. Dorados are 3 to 4 feet long and weigh 20 to 30 pounds, a real bounty. So with increasing skill, Callahan began skewering the big fish and the smaller triggerfish that swam with them, filleting them, drying them from a line hung inside the canopy and feasting on them with the zeal of a man bellying up to the bratwurst at Berghoff`s.
”I don`t waste anything,” he writes. ”I eat the heart and liver, suck the fluid from the eyes, and break the backbone to get the gelatinous nuggets from between the vertebrae.”
Water was a bit more problematic. Having rationed himself a half-pint of fresh water a day from his survival kit, Callahan set out to supplement that with a pair of solar stills designed to collect condensation. Unfortunately, the stills were easily fouled by seawater and later undermined by chips of bright orange paint that peeled from the canopy.
Besides that, Callahan did himself no favors by wolfing down ”a pint of hard-won stock” when he spotted the first of seven ships that would pass him by as he fired off flares and screamed in vain. ”You were cocky; you were wasteful,” he chided himself in his log on that day, the 14th of his ordeal. ”You confused dream with reality.”
Separating the real from the fanciful became an increasing concern. At night, through fitful bouts of sleep, Callahan dreamed of delicacies and awoke to raw fish. He saw his life in multiple layers of reality. A sense of impending doom overwhelmed the natural wonders he observed. Eventually, he came to see it as ”a view of heaven from a seat in hell.”
”How I would like to take command of my situation,” Callahan writes,
”to entertain myself with enlightened thought, to heroically forget pain and fear, to keep control. Perhaps that kind of heroism exists only in novels. If there is any enlightenment that I have been awakened to, it is that men`s minds are dominated by their little aches and pains.”
As sores on his wet, naked body festered and ripped open on the raft`s rubber floor, Callahan had plenty to think about. Staying dry proved impossible, in part because the canopy door would not seal correctly. Ultimately, that frustrated Callahan as much as anything. Another sailor who had survived a similar ordeal years earlier had complained about the faulty cover, he says. It should have been corrected, just as the peeling orange paint should have been.
”It was really frustrating to have carefully gathered fresh water only to have it fouled by paint chips,” Callahan says.
Surprisingly, the passing ships were a relatively minor disappointment. Even on a clear day visibility in the open sea left plenty to be desired. ”A 250-foot red freighter didn`t appear to my eyes until it was almost upon me,” Callahan writes.
More disappointing was the Coast Guard`s search and rescue operation that came after Callahan`s parents reported him overdue. In sum, Callahan`s family found the Coast Guard uncooperative in sharing information and taking advice. For example, Callahan`s brother, himself an experienced sailor, plotted two potential drift courses based on where relatives suspected the Napoleon Solo sank. One of these turned out to be reasonably close to the route Callahan`s raft actually followed. But the Coast Guard did nothing with the information.
”People go on offshore sailing trips assuming that the Coast Guard will take care of them,” Callahan says. ”That`s not always true. If the Coast Guard is not going to do much with offshore search and rescue, it could be a lot more cooperative with amateurs who want to do it.”
In Callahan`s case, they didn`t come close. But after the first couple of weeks on his raft, Callahan decided he couldn`t depend on anyone but himself to survive. He did yoga to rejuvenate his atrophying muscles.
An old hand at sailing alone, the solitude didn`t bother him. A ship mate would have been ”a mixed blessing,” he says. Certainly another body would have been invaluable when a dorado dragged Callahan`s spearhead across the bottom raft tube, slicing it open and deflating it. An additional set of hands would have helped in trying to plug the hole below the surface and another pair of arms was desperately needed to work the hand-held pump that kept the tube inflated once the gaping hole had been patched to a hissing, slow leak.
But, Callahan says, ”another person would have been a big load on the equipment. And there was not enough fresh water as it was. I don`t know what would have happened.”
It is easy to imagine. The life raft, which was advertised as a six-man craft, barely held Callahan and his supplies. He had to sleep in a modified fetal position. Merely standing erect and poking his head out of the canopy was a major accomplishment, a bit like walking on a waterbed. In the end, this survival game seemed one destined for an individual to win or lose.
Callahan teetered on the edge of defeat dozens of times. Setbacks became omens: Once he speared a dorado, killing it cleanly with a single stroke, then watched helplessly as it slipped fom his spear and sank into the depths. For days thereafter his mood was pessimistic and fatalistic.
Toward the end, survival became a daily battle among his rational, emotional and physical selves: ”I must coerce my emotions to kill in order to feed my body. I must coerce my arms and legs to perform in order to give myself a feeling of hope.”
Eventually, he succeeded, reinforced by nature`s signals–the flying fish that flew into the raft and became a meal on the wing, the sea bird that lit atop the canopy where Callahan could grab it, and last but not least, the trash floating in the water that showed the proximity of civilization.
By the time the Caribbean fishermen discovered Callahan floating off the coast of a tiny island called Marie Galante, the haggard sailor had lost 44 pounds and suffered from an acute potassium deficiency, but he had made his peace with the sea. There was, he decided, a kind of karma at work. The fish that followed him attracted birds; they, in turn, attracted the fishermen. And so, after 76 days adrift, Callahan forestalled his own rescue by exhorting his saviors, ”I can wait. You fish. Plenty of fish here, you must fish.”
The cosmic significance of the whole episode has faded now, replaced by a pragmatic application of the lessons he learned. Though his mishap left him almost destitute and as yet unable to replace Napoleon Solo, which he designed and built himself, he never thought for a moment to give up sailing. But he has added to his survival kit a more durable, effective solar still, silicone sealer for repairing raft leaks and needles and thread. Soon the kit will include a hand-held VHF radio that will allow him to talk to ships within his line of sight.
Furthermore, Callahan, who designs boats as well as sails them, is trying to perfect a kite sail that may one day be flown from life rafts.
”I`m also thinking about doing a survival manual, something small, on waterproof paper, very concise,” he says.
All of this he`ll carry on his annual long-distance sailing trips.
”I routinely take one long passage a year,” Callahan says. ”Last summer another guy and I delivered a boat from England to the U.S. This summer I`ll do at least one two-man trans-Atlantic race.”
Since being adrift he hasn`t tried to cross the ocean alone, but in 1983 he sailed by himself from Maine, where he lives, to Bermuda. ”It did intimidate me a little bit,” he admits. ”It was the process of getting back on the horse so to speak.”
The horse bucked slightly: The rudder on his boat fell off.
”I handled it okay,” Callahan says. ”It was a pain in the neck, not a crisis.”
