The story of Steve Callahan, who miraculously lasted 76 days on an inflatable raft in the open sea (5 photos)

Steven Callahan, an American sailor, set out on a solo voyage in 1981 on a small yacht, the Napoleon Solo, which he designed and built himself. However, after just over a week of sailing, his boat collided with either a whale or a shark and began to sink.





When 29-year-old Steven Callahan left Maine in January 1981 and set out on a solo voyage to the Canary Islands and back to America, he was about to fulfill a childhood dream and thought he had prepared for all contingencies.

On January 29, 1982, Callahan left the Canaries for the return trip to America. The first week of the return trip, Callahan says, was "in a steady trade wind, and when the storm came, I wasn't too worried. I knew the boat, and I'd been in much worse situations." Then, on the night of February 4, 1982, something - "probably a whale or a large shark," Callahan recalls - "hit the boat with a deafening roar and tore a hole in the hull." Callahan was forced to evacuate to a life raft and spent the next 76 days at sea, an ordeal he detailed in his book, Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea.

When the Napoleon Solo sank, Steve barely had time to gather his essentials, get on deck, cut the ropes and launch an inflatable raft.

"I woke up in my bunk with the water churning above me. I could tell by the way it was rising that the boat was sinking fast," Steve recalled in an interview with The Guardian. "The boat was almost completely submerged, but I kept holding my breath and going under again and again. I remember the water below seemed so calm compared to the raging sea outside. It was like entering a watery tomb."

He kept a journal, caught fish with a speargun and got his drinking water with a solar still, a contraption that took him several days to get working and produced just over a pint a day.



“On about day 14, I saw a ship, lit a flare, and thought they’d spotted me, but it just went by,” Steve said. As they approached more tropical conditions, the temperature rose, and Steve suffered from hunger and constant thirst.

By day 50, he’d spent 10 days fighting to keep the raft afloat with a pump after part of it broke. “I was at rock bottom,” he explained. “I broke down and gave up. But then I got scared because I was going to die in a few hours; I found a way to fix the raft, and that felt like the biggest victory of my life.”





On day 76, he was finally spotted and rescued by fishermen off Marie-Galante Island. By then, Steve had lost a third of his body weight, and it was six weeks before he could walk again. “I couldn’t believe there was actually someone out there,” Steve admitted. “He was like, ‘What are you doing here, man?’ and I was like, ‘You know I’m not here to get a tan.’”



"My senses were like an electrical circuit, they were all heightened, so every color was really, really bright, and every smell was really, really intense," he says. "It was just heartbreaking, it was so beautiful to me. There's nothing noble about surviving, it's just what I did. I had so much unfinished business, and I think that's what kept me alive."

Steve Callahan's book "Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea" has become a bestseller.