Feb. 2/2025: It is, as Steve Callahan himself once remarked to me, a story that will not die. That being the story of his 76-day solo survival drift across the North Atlantic in a liferaft, back in 1982, after his 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo was sunk in a collision (presumably with a whale) some distance...
June 14/2024: I’m guessing not too many folks remember Bill Butler these days, but he had his 15 minutes of fame back in 1989, when he and his then-wife Simonne survived for 66 days drifting across the eastern Pacific Ocean in a liferaft. I met Bill a few years after that, in the summer of...
IT WASN'T SO LONG AGO that liferaft survival-drift stories were fairly common. I personally know two people who spent more the 60 days in rafts (Steve Callahan and Bill Butler) and have read numerous accounts of similar experiences. Since the advent of reliable EPIRBs, however, it is now unusual for sailors abandoning yachts to spend...
