They are tossing about in the ocean 500 miles from the nearest land. They have no food, their 6-foot inflatable boat is leaking and frequent storms blow up giant waves that carry them on roller-coaster rides.
Are they worried?
Not William Heil and Jose Sanders.
With help from stray seabirds and a fisherman`s hankering for a cigarette, they survived 23 days on the ocean after their sailboat was slammed by a whale off the coast of Brazil on Feb. 2.
”We never gave up hope. We were very determined to get picked up or make a landfall. . . . We did talk about dying, about how we would go. Maybe a shark would eat us or we`d die from exposure,” Heil said Friday in Monroe, Mich., where he is visiting his family.
Heil, 69, has been sailing the world for nearly 20 years. Sanders, 57, joined him in Europe a few months before what was to be a voyage from islands near Portugal to South America.
Trouble began 10 days after they left the Cape Verde Islands. It was 11 a.m. on a Sunday when the whale knocked a large hole in one hull of Mahia, Heil`s 38-foot wooden trimaran, a boat with three hulls.
Water was already a foot deep in the bilge when Heil went below. He radioed unanswered mayday calls, and he and Sanders gathered up emergency gear.
They stuck with the boat until the next day, when a storm and waves up to 25 feet started to break Mahia apart.
Two days later, storm waves capsized their dinghy and swept away their food and equipment, except a sail cover, a can opener and one container of water.
”We thought, `This is not the time to give up,` ” Heil said.
The boat`s improvised sail survived the storm, so they were able to head in the general direction of Brazil, constantly bailing.
They had been without food 12 days when a bird about the size of a robin blundered into the sail.
”I snuck up underneath and grabbed it. We skinned it and ate it, and oh my, it was delicious,” Heil said.
Over the next few days, they caught five or six more birds. A few finger- size flying fish also landed on the boat and were added to the larder, but they had no way of catching larger fish.
Heil and Sanders said four ships passed without noticing them.
At last, a small fishing boat picked them up about 60 miles offshore. The lone fisherman spotted them while looking for a match to light a cigarette. He took them to San Joao de Pirabas, near the mouth of the Amazon.
