I Was Shipwrecked After Killer Whale Attack & Ate Turtles To Survive | Minutes With | @LADbible

we didn't know what the next step would be we knew we hadn't got an SOS off we knew that we were 200 miles west of the Galapagos Islands we had no water and no food as we thought then [Music] I was born in the middle of England Staffordshire and we were farmers so we we ran the hill farm for the first 16 years of my life and my dad was a former sea captain and my mum was a nurse from that she'd worked in Hong Kong and the Middle East we lived in a market town and our whole lives revolved around farming but we used to listen to my dad's stories of when he was at Sea and um you know Sailors can always spin a good yard so we used to sit enthralled with his stories it was in the 1968 that uh there was around the world yacht race sailing around the world in those days was an adventure all in itself because there was no electronic navigation there were no electronic um safety AIDS it was you were on your own basically my brother Neil said Daddy's a sailor why don't we sail around the world like a throwaway comment but that that really sparked an idea in dougal's head my dad's head he was just uh you know living hand to mouth and he considered his children to be very um uh unworldly unworldly because um we were in this sort of rural setting and he thought why not somehow from that little seed a plan grew that we would sail around the world and it seems a little bit crazy now looking back but it seemed very normal to us as we were growing up first of all we had to find a boat so we spent a lot of time looking for about two years to find the right sort of boat and I think it was my mum who found uh what was advertised as a world gurgler I think it was probably July or August of 1970. we we met up in Falmouth and that was going to be our new life can you just explain who was on the boat so there was my mum and dad then there was my sister and myself we were sort of five years older than the Twins and then the twins so we had a birth each it was a sixth birthday yacht with a saloon and a galley and uh um a Folk Soul so um 45 foot long that sort of length it was January by the time the wind shifted to the right quarter that enabled us to set sail around the world wherever that was you know we were so naive when I think back to it we had no idea where we were going and um we took a Lisbon wherever that is you know and Lisbon was going to be our first foreign port if you've got no experience of yards sailing on a yacht sounds very very exotic when it's in the harbor tied up alongside looks very nice people come down say what a nice yacht they've got no idea what it's like on a yacht at Sea there are things to bang your head on there are things to fall over there are cleats to stub your toes on there are words new words a new vocabulary that you've never heard of before you know we sail across the Atlantic it took us 33 days to get across the Atlantic it's the same time it took Christopher Columbus or almost 300 years before us and you know this was more like it this was what we dreamed of calm seas tropical weather Discovery a voyage of Discovery in one of those Many Adventures that I referred to we would rescue the fishermen uh who was adrift in his fishing boat and in a sort of really strange setup we towed him under sail we towed his fishing boat with us under sail to Nassau in the Bahamas as a reward one of the sort of uh rotarians of the uh of the local Society offered as a gift from his dive shop of any present that we would like to have and my sister fell in love with the with his son and suddenly announced that she would no longer be coming with us on the trip she was going to call it a day there and she was going to live with Jeff and that was a shock to us all and we we sailed off to the San Blas Islands which are just to the east of Panama in Panama we picked up a student you know we could pick up people who were looking to partake in the same Adventure and help pay for the voyage so Robin Williams joined us after some sort of extended cruising there we sailed through the canal and we were then in the Pacific Ocean so the next leg of our trip had started really once we got through the canal there was no going back we were on our way to Australia New Zealand we had a very rough sort of departure from Galapagos because the wind was quite strong four six and the waves were quite large and we were in a reach which is the on the beam the wind was on the beam and it um made the boat roll quite heavily but we were used to it you know by then I mean when I think back to how we left Falmouth we were 100 seasoned Sailors we could sail the boat in in Pitch Black uh with uh we knew the rules of the road we knew you know we knew how to sail well we were 200 miles west of Cape Espinoza and the Galapagos Islands it was quartered quarter past ten I think but I think dual recorded it's 10 o'clock and um he was working his sight out and uh cytus an observation of the sun to get a fix of the boat's position and he did he put a coffee on the coffee particulars are on the stove and um a little did he know that he was never going to drink that coffee because the events of the next few few seconds we're going to change all our lives forever I was up on the in the cockpit with my brother Sandy he was at the whale and uh Robin had gone to bed because he'd done the night watch and um suddenly there was an ear splintering crash and the boat jolted three times and there were three crashes one after the other bang bang bang like that and the boat jolted heavily it was lifted out of the water and she settled back into the water and it felt like we'd gone around at high speed and I poke my head down the hatch to say to my dad what what is that what was that and I noticed he was up to his ankles in water and I asked him what he was doing like didn't he know that was dangerous I thought he'd opened a Seacock or something like that and he said where's this water coming from and then there was a big noise behind me over on the left-hand side and a three killer whales appeared following us like if you can get it in your mind a big daddy one a little baby one in between and their mummy one on their Far Side and the the big one the Big Daddy one had his head split open and blood was pouring out into the sea we'd come through the doldrums about two months before and we'd had a big whale baleen whale tried to make love to the boat it rubbed itself up alongside and we thought if that whale could mistake us for another whale for the purpose of mating maybe the killer whales had attacked us for thinking we were also also thinking that we were a whale for food purposes I poked my head down Back Down the Hatch Dougal and he was up to his waist in water and I thought if he doesn't shut that Seacock soon you know you have ridiculous thoughts we're going to sink I said dad what and he said abandon ship and I said abandon I was petulant 18 year old you know Abandon Ship what you're talking about you know so to where do and I said we're not in Miami Marina now he said over there and I sort of first got the first Inkling that things had gone horribly wrong and this wasn't supposed to be happening I started to take the sales down and and Google appeared briefly on the on on the deck and said what are you doing get the life raft over the side and I thought my God I'm not going to wake up from this this is really happening I've got to get moving now I got the I I got the dinghy over the side I tied it to the rail put the oars in the dinghy and uh I got the life raft over the side which is quite heavy and I pulled the cord in and I remember the raft a loud bang as the raft started to inflate and I thought my God you know thank thank the Lord that's happened at least we can get into the into the raft and then I was washed off the deck so in that time scale probably a couple of minutes I managed to swim I was very frightened that the whales were going to get us at that moment because they were still around and um uh that they they I kept feeling for my legs to see if I still had them I swam around to the raft entrance and climbed in and everybody was sitting there yellow very yellow looking from the canopy overhead and we were all in shock about what had just happened and that they they thought I'd been lost and they were very my mum and dad especially were very sort of pleased to see me and they helped pull me on board and uh we then had to sort of sit and take stock of what had happened and the Twins were crying and my mum said to them don't be frightened and the twins said we're not crying because we're frightened mum we're crying because lucette's gone So Lisa had been our home for two years she'd been the source of Many Adventures and now she was gone and we we had a very uncertain future in front of us we didn't know what the next step would be we knew we hadn't got an SOS off we knew that we were 200 miles west of the Galapagos Islands we had no water and no food as we thought then and the enormity of what had just happened was starting to hit us and my mum said that we should say the Lord's Prayer and my I'll never forget my dad's it was a hard man my dad Navy trained we used to say and he said well I don't believe in God so I am not going to say the Lord's Prayer and I said to him Google can't you just say the Lord's Prayer anyway you know I said we might need God very soon we might be meeting him much sooner than we think and he he said well you know if there is a God don't you think he'd know that don't listen so there's no point pretending but we did say the Lord's Prayer and uh we thought that we might need some Divine assistance if we were to survive the next few days ah the raft was quickly blown clear of the uh the Rex act and then we were on our own truly on our own I always remember looking out at the sea and this frigate bird flew down and a a flying fish jumped out of the Sea and the frigate bed just snapped it up and flew off with it you know as if mocking us you know and I said to my dad I said they've got millions of years on us and Dougal said something that was very which was to help us in the future and perhaps signify how we might survive he said yes Douglas but We've Got Brains and with brains we can make tools and with tools we can survive and so there were six of you on the raft and how big was the raft well the raft was a 10-man raft but it's for 10 sitting people so it's not designed to be lived on and so we we filled that space and um we then had the dinghy which was a three-man dinghy in the had three thwarts and we noticed there was a survival pack in the raft it had I think it was say 20 tins of water I think it was 18 actually and it had some glucose tablets and some biscuits the there was some Flotsam going by and I managed to grab this generous ale and my mum's sewing basket which turned out to be an absolute Treasure Trove bits of copper wire bits of string bits of ribbon bits of cloth and a needle and thread and uh tools basically tools and we didn't quite know how to use them yet but we knew that they were valuable we knew where we were roughly and Dougal had come up with this plan that I should Row the dinghy we should empty the dinghy and I should row it to the Galapagos Islands and raise the alarm I mean we did we were Sailors by then we knew the current was two and a half knots away from that's 50 miles a day taking us away from the Galapagos the wind was another 50 miles a day blowing away the trade winds blowing us away from Galapagos that's 100 miles a day that's four knots I'd have to row that boat at four knots just to stand still there was no way I could row faster than that 24 hours how many days would I have to stay awake and I remember at 18 and a half with a very strong willed Father I remember saying to him Dad I'm not going to do that that is a Fool's errand and I will die and as a result you will die and that was the sort of first time I'd ever sort of said something sensible to my dad you know that he'd listen to and I remember him saying I'm sorry Douglas for asking you I should never have asked but it was the desperation that was making me ask and uh we need another plan we need to make another plan but there was one option and when we'd come when I go back to that big baleen whale again that was in the doldrums and in the doldrums it rains heavily and we knew we could survive without food perhaps for quite some time but we couldn't survive without water so we made a plan to sail to the center of the Pacific Ocean try and stay in the Dolphins where we could get a supply of water and then sail East towards the Americas and that somehow we might get picked up along that route so we made a sale and we used the oars from the raft as a boom for the for the makeshift sale and Google Google's idea we would sail the uh sell the dinghy backwards Towing the raft so that this wind would catch the trade winds would catch the sail and tow the raft and that would maybe save us a couple of days on the way to the doldrums so every day would count we knew that how are you feeling dick did you have hope that you would survive or did you no no no desperate I mean we thought we were going to die anytime anytime now the moment of truth is going to arrive at our doorstep and this it'll be a wave it'll be a whale don't forget we've just been hit by those whales and we'd we thought maybe maybe they would come back to us or other whales would find us but on the sixth day we spied the first ship from the shipping Lane so we thought we might see the name of that ship was the star cook and she sailed right pastors and that was a very very tough moment to take because we realized that suddenly that it wasn't a question of surviving till we got rescued that somehow we had to survive until we got ourselves out of this mess and we fired five flares three and flares and two parachute flares at that ship and uh I said Dad we had one one flare left I said Dad fire it straight at the bridge of the ship and he said I can't do that Douglas you may have explosions on Deck something like that but Dougal did have a revelation at that point and he said we're not going to get rescued and we can't rely on that he said we have got to sail from here to America a 75 days so and we just thought how can we survive 75 days in this how are you keeping your spirits up and how is the dynamic between all of you well we everybody has a purpose you know in a survival story and whilst my dad was our leader my mum was our carer and I was the muscles behind dougal's sort of uh leadership and bright ideas that he came up with Robin who was our passenger Robin Williams he was a well-educated young man who hadn't got hardly any experience at Sea only what he'd had with us but he could talk and boy could he talk and boy was it good to listen to his voice I remember saying to him Ramen tell me about the time when you were stuck in the bus station in Florida that time and he he said what again you know I say Yes again you know we just wanted to hear each other's voices you know and we invented a cafe that we would um we would open when we got home because that gave us an excuse to talk about food and we talked about food an awful lot because we hadn't got any and the most exotic foods that you could think of and you had to describe how you would make them how you'd prepare them how you would cook them how you would serve them every detail was of great importance and that's how we kept our spirits up and my dad kept a map of where he thought we might be we had no navigation equipment but we knew that the sun rose in the east and set in the West we knew that the waves the underlying swell was still coming from the southeast so we knew that as long as that was on the uh behind us that we were headed still headed north and so we had an idea of where we were and we would tick off the mileage every day another 10 miles today another 20 miles today which was chipping away at that overall distance that we had to sail and uh the Google came up with a password which was um survival we're going to say that every day we're not going to say rescue we are going to say survival and survival is what we're going to do I always remember saying to my dad he was he was quite astonished at how brutal I'd become I said I've read somewhere that you can drink Turtle blood you should catch one of these and drink its blood and you know I mean how are we going to get the blood out of the turtle well we had no Solutions you know but I thought I'd catch it and I hit it on the head with a paddle and I remember his eyes filling up with blood as he swam off and made good his Escape and I thought to myself well that's a bit silly you're gonna die anyway you know I mean why are you trying to escape and I remember sort of discussing with my father how actually we had to catch these animals hunt them this was not this was not like a show now the next Turtle came along and I thought well I'm not going to let it swim away I'm going to capture it and lift it out of the water everybody's jumped up on the side you know the side of the raft and like what are you doing Douglas you know that it was it was like taking a box of matches into a gunpowder at a store you know Doug will grab the turtle and threw it out through the forehead entrance and it was gone so plan number two didn't work you know a third Turtle came along and uh I wrapped it up in the in the lifeline there was a Lifeline attached to the raft 100 feet of maybe 100 meters or something and I wrapped him up in that so he couldn't get away and then we towed him around to the dinghy hold him on board Dougal did that and uh cut his throat and drank his blood we cut his shallow and he was full she was full of red meat like steak and eggs full of eggs like grapes like Bunches of grapes and we realized there's a food source there that we could probably live off and all we needed was more Turtles but for now we drank the blood of this turtle and we knew that then that we perhaps for the first time stood a chance of surviving so on this on the 10th day roughly as we'd planned it the skies changed the clouds changed and we noticed there was a high high cloud in the upper atmosphere and Mariners know that a change in the wind means a change in the weather changing the sky it's changing the weather and we had very little water left one or two cans and I remember saying to my dad I said will it will it rain tonight do you think and he said I don't know son I don't know and I said well do you think it'll rain you know I was trying to get the last some kind of positive statement out of it and he said Douglas I'm not a prophet I don't know whether it's going to rain or not but if it does rain we must be ready to catch it and I thought about that and and the next day the sun came out where was the rain beautiful weather and as our water supplies began to dwindle dangerously low we perhaps realized we'd made a huge mistake and that we weren't actually waiting for the rain but we were waiting to die first and this this assumption that it always rained in the tolerance which is exactly that just an assumption three days went by and then it rained you know that was a turning point in our lives suddenly we had this water and we filled it all up filled era water cancer we filled our um other things that we could catch water in and we we knew perhaps our plan was going to work you know that with enough water we could survive and we we sang with joy at the because we'd managed to collect water and uh and we'd Court of a few Turtles as well by then and uh uh you know the next stage of our survival was about to start surviving was hard work drying food cutting it catching turtles and when we were sitting in the raft we were sitting up to our chest and water into that cold water and that itself was was was debilitating as to you know [Music] uh nearly to our deaths anyway you know we were so cold and we had immersion foot and we had we had sea water boils we were covered in sea water boils and we we were um life was very painful you couldn't sleep if you did sleep your head would drop into the sea and into the water and then you'd wake up again and uh you know there was one dry place on the raft and we would take it in turns to to sleep in that spot you get an hour and I always remember my mum God bless her giving up her turn so that we could sleep in the dry something we thought nothing else then but as I advance in years I think of that great sacrifice she she made for us on the 17th day the raft had had it and at the bottom the floor dropped out of it and we knew that we couldn't stay in the raft any longer and that we would have to all get in the dinghy that would be six of us in a three-man dinghy Along came a turtle while we were doing that well we were disembarking from the raft to the dinghy and we caught this it was a pretty big turtle as well 35 pound turtle and we put him in the in in the dinghy as well and the six of us and we were still afloat you know this this all happened over about an hour and we watched the the raft float away and we thought well it got us this far without that raft we would never have got off to lucette in the first place and now this truly is on our own we're in a boat that we could sink we have to keep it afloat there were six of us sitting in a three-man space we had at least another 700 miles to go if we were still on plan which we didn't know for sure whether that was the case then one night probably the 20th day or thereabouts I saw the north star in the sky and I woke my dad up and said Google look I said this that's the North Star now Mariners know you can only see the North Star from five or six degrees north of the equator and we had sunk two degrees south of the Equator that meant that we had sailed seven degrees to the North or 420 miles proof positive that we were in the northern hemisphere and that we were on track suddenly the bits were coming together to to realize that we might just survive this thing on the 38th day we'd been adrift six and a half weeks now and um it's arraigned heavily that night and they we were we were frightened for our lives then and we we often bailed you know bailing water out of the out of the dinghy all night and um one particular now all three of us bailing all night trying to keep the dingy afloat and we felt pretty good in spirit you know we would their Seas were calming and we were talking about how many miles we might make on the under oars and how far off we were from Land we were talking about dougal's kitchen that was the cafe that we didn't invented to talk about food and it's about four o'clock in the afternoon and doogle saw a ship we we had forgotten almost that ships could pick us up as well rescue was not ruled out completely I know we'd sort of convinced ourselves that we were on a survival we were going to survive and sail to America but now suddenly this opportunity might present itself where we could be rescued we quickly cleared the cleared the decks took the sale down and uh Google held up first one Handler and they didn't see that and then and the ship was getting closer and closer this time she would come within maybe a mile which is very close at sea and um we had one last hand flare left and and Google we all studied the the dinghy as he held up the the flare and the Flair there was no wind although there was a swell there was no wind and the the flux of the uh Flair was dropping onto his hand burning his hand but he still sort of held it up and then he threw it away and that was the bit the Japanese Helmsman saw on the fishing boat which was now as I say about about a mile away and he altered course and we watched the alteration of course not daring to believe that he was altering course for us we had no clothes on our clothes had long gone but my mother had saved us some little rags that we were to put on for being rescued only my mum could think of that at a time like this you know she said I don't want you showing your you know your bare bodies so you put these on you know and the Toca Maru as she was called approached came alongside she was about 100 meters away maybe a bit closer than that actually 100 feet say they threw a rope out to us a dirty oily smelly rope and I grabbed hold of that rope and uh held it in my hand and looked at it and realized that this rope was our Lifeline to another life a life that we'd left behind so long ago it seemed it seemed like we'd always been on that raft you know and I I gripped it and I didn't want them to go uh you know I thought I'm not going to let go of this rope because if I do they might just not bother picking this up you know like I know it's a weird idea but I grabbed grabbed hold of that and we couldn't make it fast because there was nothing on the dinghy to make it fast too and gradually we closed with the tokamaru and we were climbing onto the deck and touching the deck of the tokumaru the wooden deck and it was like a dream unfolding you know Dougal said to the Japanese they said can you save the dinghy do you know it wasn't for the dinghy we didn't want the dingy we wanted the food that was in it which saved that food which saved that water that was valuable to us and the the captain of the fishing boat said we've got food we've got food on this ship and Google we still didn't trust them we wanted to save our food and so we saved the dinghy and we pulled the dinghy over onto the onto the the deck of the tokumaru you won't believe how small that dinghy is it's a little cockle shell but it's been our home for 38 days towards your parents for taking you no never and you know I thank my dad every day of my life now for what he did took it on this amazing adventure that um just didn't turn out right but it wasn't Douglas fault and um although my mum and dad never forgave themselves for it we forgave them straight away I wrote a poem on the on the on the raft and I I finished the last line of it on my mum did for me on on the ship on the way home and the and I remember her bursting into tears and saying that she we should never have done this and I said to her then I said mum nobody died we've all got home I said you know it wasn't the ending that we wanted but what what we did was great and having survived that that was also great you know it was a great feat that they'd achieved my mum and dad together my mum cared for us and the twins had a little supper every night she made sure that they had some extra food because they were so young life is never so joyous as when you're alive and you know you could lose it at any moment you know this just living can be very Jewish when you know that you might not be alive in that on the next wave and we'd lost that you know now we were going to face a new life without the lucette and without anything actually we were not insured we were we'd lost everything when the lucette went down but uh that was the amazing story we were 25 miles out in Latitude 100 miles out in longitude from our position with no navigational instruments whatsoever so what happened out there in the Pacific was fairly unique it's a family The Experience out there changed our lives forever because you can't have those thoughts and it not change you and so even now um and as I say it was 50 years ago last year a lot of the memories are still with me about how we'd survived and [Music] you know you make your own luck I know but uh who were all so lucky [Music] and I remember unlocking my phone and WhatsApp was on and I kind of closed what's up and clicked on the camera and the second I clicked the film I saw what I guess the whole world saw foreign

Channel: LADbible TV

Views: 1,424,750

Keywords: the lad bible, lad bible, lad, bible, videos, viral videos, viral, documentaries, exclusives, interviews, douglas robertson, douglas robertson survive the savage sea, survival story, sea, pacific ocean, shipwrecks, shipwrecked, survival story documentary, documentaries real stories, documentaries 2023, lost at sea, around the world, travel, castaways, stranded in the ocean, taste of the savage sea, shipwrecked by killer whales, killer whales, galapagos islands, turltes, turtle eggs

Id: InoZ7xJJ1Bs

Length: 36min 20sec (2180 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023