How to Survive 118 Days Adrift in a Life Raft at Sea

I have just finished the book A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst. The story is largely about Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s failed voyage from the UK to New Zealand that became a brief media sensation in the early 1970s. As a young couple, Maurice and Maralyn decide they are bored with their tedious lives in the UK and want to sail to New Zealand. I had similar fantasies when I was in my late teens, even going as far as looking at boats with my friends for such an adventure—as if we could have afforded it. The difference between the Baileys’ and my fantasized plans was the drive and meticulous planning they put behind their dream, while mine was fleeting when confronted with the Herculean set of tasks I had neither the will nor real-world desire to perform in order to achieve this romantic fantasy.
The Baileys spent a number of years planning: earning the money needed, having their boat built, learning the art and skills entailed in sailing, navigation, and surviving a voyage without a radio that would take them halfway ‘round the world. The first leg of their journey, while not unremarkable, was without major incidents they couldn’t manage—until the evening Maralyn heard a huge clunk that shook the boat like an earthquake. Maurice slept while Maralyn had the watch. Alarmed, she wakes Maurice, and they quickly discover a large hole in the hull of their boat through which water is gushing. They believe they may be somewhere in the overall vicinity of the Galápagos but still many hundreds of miles away. They try stuffing clothing into the hole—anything that might stem the flow of water. As the boat lists to one side, they see they have been struck by a wounded whale, bleeding profusely and fiercely agitated. They quickly see the boat cannot be salvaged and begin moving jugs of water and tins of food to a life raft and dinghy, where they will spend the next 118 days tossed not only by the severe weather but between hope and despair.
They are tested in unimaginable ways, evoking improvisational talents to catch fish with safety pins, keep their minds busy, and consciously and unconsciously complement and express—in their actions—gratitude for one another’s strengths, weaknesses, skills, and personalities in a manner that literally saves them from death and despair.
What makes this book so compelling is revealed in its title, A Marriage at Sea. Very near death, Maurice and Maralyn are rescued from their leaking life raft by a Korean fishing vessel after 118 days. Maurice is suffering from a fungal condition that covers his entire body. He has huge, bone-deep infected sores on his back and buttocks. Maralyn is barely able to walk. Their rescue and remarkable survival make them celebrities of sorts. They become busy with speaking tours, TV shows, and book deals. They are the toast of the town and treated as heroes. The couple writes the story of their adventure and captures worldwide attention, offering them their “15 minutes” of fame.
Their narrative is fact-based, essentially a recitation of the sequence of events and circumstances that occurred over the course of the 118 days adrift. While author Sophie Elmhirst retells their story, she does so with a subtle and nuanced emphasis on the couple’s relationship as one of the critical elements of their survival. She shares his inclination toward depression and fatalistic thinking, and her intuitive capacity for helping him keep his head—literally and figuratively—above water by focusing on the future they will share together.
I don’t know why, but I expected after they were rescued, with the world’s attention focused on them, they would separate and go their own way, if for no other reason than to shed the memory of those 118 days. I thought of them like a couple losing a child, or the dream of having a child, and how such loss and disappointment often divide rather than unite couples. In some fashion they only serve to remind one another of their failed dream. But this is not what happens. It is clear each of them has been profoundly sobered and humbled by their experience, but there is a genuine and generous willingness for each of them to be both the good and the bad guy, to buffer the assaults of too much attention from their newly acquired fame when one of them can bear it no longer. They look after one another according to their seemingly boundless capacity and ability.
The author spends relatively little (but just enough) time on those feelings that let the reader know Maurice and Maralyn feel all the attention they’re getting is missing the point. Indeed, the attention becomes depleting, and the questions feel trite having missed the mark of their journey’s purpose. The spectacle of discrete and horrific events has captured the public’s imagination: the bloodied whale punching a hole through the hull of their boat, the capture, butchering, and eating of raw turtles, birds, fish, being washed overboard by a huge wave.
They were asked by reporters if they discovered God in all this. Maurice, we are told, is offended by the question, in part because he realizes that they have lost control of their story’s narrative. It seems to me, while they are themselves unclear as to what the narrative actually is, they are convinced it is not God, or any and all of these discrete events the public seems to hunger for. The real story seems to be about how their relationship keeps them alive. There is nothing sentimental or saccharine in the manner in which this is presented, and it is certainly never overtly referred to. Indeed, this couple knows one another far too well to romanticize their survival. Maurice humbly explains that he was inclined to give up, while Maralyn kept focused on their future. The symbiosis and complementarity that characterizes their relationship it’s seems is what kept each of them alive.
On one very important level, the story of Maurice and Maralyn is an adventure story that serves as a foil for illustrating the elements of a successful relationship. Their voyage is a metaphor for marriage. Elmhirst makes this most explicit near the end of the book when the Baileys have built a new boat (yes, a new boat!) and invite along a few friends to sail with them from the UK to Patagonia. There is a celebration with a collection of friends, mirroring a wedding that sees the sailors off as they set out on this new voyage.
But it is different this time. Beneath the ritualized send-off, Elmhirst writes, “is the sense of an ending… newlyweds driving away in a car; the boat cutting through the water until it disappears from view. Something irrevocable is taking place in the spirit of hope.
“In that sense it is a beginning too. A new chapter as people like to say, giving credence to the falsehood that our lives unfold like stories. There’s such trust in that moment. Trust in what is to come; trust in how well it will all go….
“Misfortune can seem abstract in the midst of celebration. In the beginning we imagine the bad weather might pass us by. It’s only natural, part of the long business of self-preservation because how impossible it would be to go through life in full awareness of all that will befall us.
“Somewhere deep within, unspoken, we must know, we DO know, that we’ll all have our time adrift. For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive.”
Curiously, the Patagonian trip is uneventful, well-organized, and not an especially happy time for any of the participants, who could not wait to get away from one another. What exists between Maurice and Maralyn is more than a learned set of interpersonal skills for managing. It is something much bigger, more profound, and mysterious. It is a gift, as it were, one becomes vaguely aware of from time to time, one for which we are never sufficiently grateful.
What better reason to write than to create a story with a sequence of events that generate excitement and communicate the underlying and fundamental truths that weave these events into a coherent and meaningful whole. Without awareness of—and the capacity to communicate—this underlying and fundamental truth, there is no story, there is no meaning, there is no humanity; there are simply two individuals adrift at sea for 118 days who barely survive.