Survivorman | Season 1 | Episode 9 | Lost At Sea | Les Stroud

I've got four cameras with me a whole bunch of batteries tapes I need camera gear I need associated with that stuff and other than that I've got the ocean [Music] [Music] this time on Survivor man I'm heading to Central America and the country of Belize a tropical paradise of the highest order but for this challenge I won't be anywhere near land I'm heading out into the open ocean like a castaway I'm going to be set adrift in a life raft left to the mercy of the wind and the currents for seven days I'll be lost at sea without food or fresh water only the searing tropical Sun above me and the depths of the ocean below me my support crew and I are going to head way out into the open water where they'll set me adrift but before we left I tested out what I thought would be the raft we would be using life rafts are packed by the manufacturer and have an expiration date printed on the case we found this one on a local yacht and even though it was six months past it's due date for repacking it was considered by the yachts owner to be ready for use within only two minutes of a promising start the plugs on the raft completely failed and it deflated what if this had been a real emergency anyone attempting to use this raft would have been dead in the water my support crew has found a replacement raft but there's no time to test it out I have flown biked driven paddled and helicoptered into survival locations but somehow sailing to where I must spend the next seven days surviving alone has a much more powerful feel to it more final board lock oh my marine survival expert and frank Galliano my boat captain tried to figure out the best place to drop me so they could follow my drift from afar they think that I can drift in the wind and current to a group of small islands and if all goes right I may be able to beach myself on one towards the end of the week just getting ready to toss this raft over we're going to first disable the hydrostatic release this gadget hero operates like a depth charge fuse if this yacht sank was no one ready to release it at about 10 feet underwater this would blow release this hook back the raft comes up but the way we're launching it we're gonna chuck it overboard so we'll do it manually sometimes if the vessel is sinking fast the raft can inflate and get caught up in the rigging and be taken to the bottom of the ocean with the boat these rafts to be very heavy and I don't know how anyone is expected to lift one by themselves while their boat is sinking and a storm is blowing it's been quite a problem for many people throughout history but the sailors rule of thumb for life rafts is that you should only use it when you actually have to step up to climb in the rap opens upside down a common occurrence hopefully the few supplies it comes with haven't fallen out of being soaked by the salt water in an emergency a boat can take just seconds to sink I can't imagine how hard it must be to get into a raft like this in a heaving stormy sea at night on a quick check it looks like the supplies haven't floated away but they're all saturated with salt water hopefully the baler is still here now the crew leaves me to drift alone they'll try to keep track of me throughout the week my fears dehydration sunstroke and sharks the reality is gonna sink in any minute now that's got to take a moment just to figure out what it is I'm gonna do well actually I know what is the first thing I got to do get all this water out of here get myself as dry as possible as quickly as possible it's a great raft but it's already leaking badly through the floor which means I'll be bailing constantly [Music] well I'm completely alone now the potential for something to go wrong it was very high there's great risk in doing this I've got a shadow boat with me now they can't chitchat with me on the radio but they've got to monitor my safety all week long for now the seas are relatively calm but there's so much openness around so much water it's easy to become overwhelmed by the immense ocean well it's not hard to figure out what you do in a situation like this I mean you either want to try and attract attention by signaling somehow or you want to hit land obviously I'm not gonna be trying to attract attention when I'm gonna hope for is that there are keys little islands basically that I might land on with this and I can try to make that happen by playing with the sea anchor like a parachute on a long line sent out and it helps to keep the rafts stable and keep it from flipping over because it pulls down and can slow your progress as well so I might want to pull it up if I want to try and speed up and hit an island [Music] all right let's take a look at the construction of this raft these rafts have got two separate tubes to keep the floatation happening as well as a an arch to give me my roof they color it on the inside all blue because they believe that's a more calming color and they also feel that it does help to stop seasickness got a zipper at the back of it to help air go through and also a rain catch it's not attached right now but this is the water bladder so the tube attaches to the rain catch just about every shipwreck survived or anybody had to spend time at seeing a life raft complain about constant air leaks or constant water the only way I could make this work and film it - it's a tie on a little rubber dinghy to go with me it'll be a place where I can put most of my camera here wind has died right down and the Sun is going down soon it'll be dusk which has the horrible nickname of the sharking our sharks get much more active at dusk finit dawn when they're feeding I think what I'm gonna have to do for the night is climb into the little blue dinghy spend the night in there dry survivors often have both a life raft and a dinghy as an emergency backup there's so much water in my raft that I'm going to sleep in the open dinghy to try to stay dry that's mostly home and I guess this is the bedroom I don't think I could be up in here in the heat of the day I'd just be scorched by that Sun but right now the Sun lost its strength and it's going down it's nice to get in here and get dry I feel like I'm a lot lower to the water it feels a lot more vulnerable I feel a lot more vulnerable pretty hard I think no matter who you are cannot be in a situation like this and just be thinking about sharks constantly I don't care how tough you are man this is not a an easygoing situation [Music] you know I've slept in deserts jungles swamps the Arctic tops of mountains but out here I'm in the ocean like this is by far the eeriest its ever felt it's not much between me in the ocean a little bit of rubber it's day two of my seven days lost at sea there's only a few square feet of rubber raft protecting me from the perils and the depths of the ocean then do a spin around show you what I can see that's it [Applause] before it gets too windy and too wavy out here before that Sun gets too high and intense it's already getting pretty warm maybe what I'll do is I'll show you what I have for supplies now in this situation I wanted to go with the supplies that came with the raft and find out what we got something really interesting happened when the raft opened up upside down well water got into everything I mean and see it's surprising how how I don't know I'm water proof the stuff was this is the actual bag which is not a waterproof bag the top was just open okay now this is something that I have myself this didn't come with the kit emergency navigation chart I may be able to use it for figuring out where I am okay these are three hands flares and once again water got into them and I could feel them reacting with the water they were getting hot internally hot water crew flashlights it doesn't work okay first aid kit I have added multi-tool I brought pair of goggles will tell you why with a pair of goggles might be able to dive for some fish or some conch shells or something like that we've got blue dingy and raft all right I'm gonna pull up the sea anchor the drogue because it would be nice if I could slip behind some of the small islands that I'm passing and if I pull up the drogue it'll lessen the drag in the water and help me to move a little faster possibly into a better position than I am right now because I'm pretty exposed out here it can go either way drifting at a couple of knots I could easily travel as far as 50 miles a day on the other hand without wind or strong current I could Bob around like a cork in one place Brian under the relentless tropical Sun set adrift in a very very big ocean it's hard to talk I have to I have to keep looking at the horizon so I don't start to feel too seasick it's been hours and my safety boat is nowhere to be seen all right you want to see the cool hard reality of this Susan calling talisman Susan calling talisman Susan is the name of the raft by the way no answer is our high card VHF Susan calling talisman Susan calling talisman no answer which means that at this very moment anything could go wrong to me here right here and now and they wouldn't be able to hear my cries for help this is the boat down here this is somewhere out in here we're not quite sure where I do not read you anymore talisman I do not read you anymore over [Music] [Music] Talisman this is Susan I read you loud and clear over finally after hours of no visual in mystic haze a safety boat does a pass by to check and see if I'm still alive waves are calming down I guess tonight is coming in the raft has bad leaks both in the floor and the air chambers causing me to bail and Riaan flake in every 20 minutes I'll need to climb into the blue dinghy that is my camera platform climbing into the dinghy so you can get up and get dry and the dinghy it really is gonna be a long long night my life jacket is on in case I roll out of the dinghy in my sleep then without warning a sudden rain squall yes okay well I finally I just climbed in here I'm soaking wet now of course finally as I get myself organized get the camera turned on it stops raining but good news is rained enough that I got some fresh water caught in the rain catch probably gonna be salty of it mostly of it most of it is fresh what actually no hardly any salt water in at all does it taste very good no coming off the plastic oh that's nice nice to get the fresh water though and again [Music] survivor man has gone six miles from the place he was dumped into the sea but he probably covered 20 miles throughout the night going in circles unfortunately so that's got to be the maddening part of it for a while you see a lighter you see a piece of land and then it starts to disappear I was along and you know it's really hard to tell but let me look at the islands I have a feeling that I drifted one way in the night and maybe even lifted back out again because the breeze has changed there's one sort of Big Island I can see and the breeze has changed its now blowing me away from that that Island I undertand Islands down here they call them keys or islands really doesn't matter I've got little fish that have decided to make the bottom side of my round that could be good Wow good in that I might be able to make a meal of them bad in that they are a floating meal for larger fish and eventually sharks so at this point as my captain so eloquently put it I am now part of the food chain [Music] dolphin just swam through within just feet of me no doubt checking me out that was cool I'm glad to see him so close to me I mean he passed by within feet a dolphin is a good sign they have been known to even protect swimmers from massive great white sharks you know a lone survivor is at a grave grave disadvantage there's no one to help there's no one to tease me out of fear there's no one that I could even be brave courageous for no one to talk to except maybe this fly it is just dead still you know I don't even know it could get like this any cushion but it's dead still nothing's moving there's no wind from where sun's beating down and I'm not moving anywhere this is skin steaming dangerous I may be in the middle of a vast ocean but this heat and the thick haze have conspired to make me feel very claustrophobic while I battle heatstroke my whole world consists these two pieces of inflated rubber very hazy you can still get burned badly through this kind of cloud cover well in this heat finally a slight breeze has just picked up what I want to do is maybe chart my speed of my drift now I can actually figure out my drift speed with a rope of determined length and something small to float past it I got a little bit of tissue paper this is my very crude version of the 17th century naval instrument called a log line all right like the halfway mark I stopped counting at 3232 halfway so all the way would have been 64 so that's that's a quick bit of mathematical chart checking and I can determine my speed hmm well that's hard to tell so I'm probably roughly traveling somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3 knots not very fast a very slow lumbering much faster when they first dropped me in the water and slowed ever since [Music] [Music] all right after being quite a few hours without radio contact we have a big thunderstorm coming in and they just come back into radio contact with me and they're suggesting that this could be a big one and that they could actually lose me in the storm okay well I've got a very very eerie problem happening here the water has be calmed again and I'm just sitting in a very still bit of water I'm back into the dinghy now try and sleep out the night but I'm seeing all kinds of wicked heat lightning and I know that it's possible that at some point in this night the storm could come upon me and really buck it down sitting here in calm water no wind waiting for a big storm to come down on you watching it come down the way crossed your fingers I don't keep the hit by it tonight comes the ring it's really coming down out there I'm just blowing like crazy if it wasn't busted I wouldn't be getting poured on but I am getting poured on it's a pretty intense my stroke flasher I think if Drew is going to come out to tether me to their boat the Winsett baked up and it's storming the rain is bucketing down and there's a good chance they could lose me tonight if they don't come and tell me this is pretty scary better come and get me down forever the tropical storm is wild and getting stronger and it seems intent on blowing me all the way to Honduras the safety boat has to move in quickly once it spots my emergency strobe light then it too has to escape the massive waves and wind by ducking into a small Lagoon before it is wrecked on a reef somewhere let's help the whole blast that swallow just came through and it could have driven us apart and made him almost impossible to find him I'm now tethered to the safety boat for the safety of the crew as well it pulls into the leave an island to wait out the storm in the morning I briefly jump aboard the boat so they can reposition my raft out into the open water it's a welcomed respite but then it's back into the raft the next day dawns fairly clear and Gord and Frank decide that it's finally safe to set me adrift again one of the biggest challenges of survival at sea is psychological monotony and desperation of week after week drift waves can break the will to live survivors tell heartbreaking stories of ships passing close by only to disappear over the horizon the promise of land even deserted must be a godsend for the true survivor all weak islands have passed by tantalizingly close but impossible for me to get to this island is within reach I'm drifting it away I'll hit this little island if I don't hit it I'm way out and beyond the reef it looks like it's gonna be tight with it [Applause] we're doing one thing and went to one another I'll show you where I am like this directly underneath the raft is a field of skin ripping bone jarring and sometimes poisonous coral coral is gonna be sharp this is more dangerous than it may look coral reefs can rip a heart Yass or simply shred the skin from my legs I thought about jumping in to pull the route to shore but I get lucky and I hit a sandy cove instead after days of bobbing around on the ocean solid ground feels amazing the irony is that being cast away on a small island is in some ways worse off than being adrift at sea at least then I was going somewhere in the raft now I'm trapped on a tiny island and my safety crew has left for the mainland leaving me utterly alone once again it's a pretty small island I don't know maybe 90 yards long by 75 yards wide Wow people have been here and cleared out this area here for shelter I'm gonna shelter here too in this case the evidence of people can only mean poachers they come from other countries and use these desolate ocean islands to poach Lobster their garbage along with trash from shipwrecks is all over the island this raft that confidently held my life for days is now relegated to keeping scorpions and crabs off of me at night now I do have one serious problem a possibility of heatstroke I'm feeling extremely hot I'm still sweating that's a good sign but I got to be really careful if I get to the point where I'm not sweating that's very dangerous I gotta go cool down [Music] it's been a long time without food and the rain that filled both the raft and the blue dinghy is chanted with seawater I went in to cool off there just now I'm standing there I look down about a three and a half foot shark swam right by me [Music] I tell you I'm glad to be out of that raft thank you would not believe so tomorrow it's all about food and water there's no water on this island to speak of in terms of spring so I'm gonna have to find other methods and try for some live foods [Music] [Applause] very bright moon tonight it's making it so that I can walk around on the island without too much problem in the dark well it is certainly the strangest feeling to be inside this life raft and not be jostled back and forth constantly time to get some sleep goodnight there are some big cockroaches around here [Music] was one horrible sleep I still have what they call stillness illness once you're on the solid ground feels like everything's still moving even this morning it still feels like the raft is is bobbing around here's what's left my rain catchment bag you know what I could do especially with a bag like this and the long tube that comes with it a water enema basically you can't do it with seawater because it'll kill you but brackish slightly brackish water or slightly tainted water there was one family kept themselves alive by giving themselves daily enemas with tainted water that they couldn't otherwise drink or it would make them sick fortunately there are palm trees on this island [Music] [Music] Oh all over this island there are parts and supplies from boats refuse from ships as well as the leftovers from the poachers cold hard reality of just about everywhere on the planet can always find garbage of some sort huh this is one half of the canister that the life raft came in the idea is it all the seawater and all the greenery will start to evaporate seawater we've operate and the green greenery will sweat and moisture out of it will evaporate hit the plastic on the roof and then hopefully little droplets will drip down down down down down to the lowest point which is right up above my little catch stop drinking only the liquid of green coconuts can lead to diarrhea I need some solid food and the best place for that is the ocean oh yeah he's in there all right this is a conch shell and inside is a delectable treat there's no way that I can pull him out of there and the shell is extremely hard but it does have just one one weak spot well it won't be conch chowder but after five days without food it should hit the spot there we go I'm basically gonna cut away everything that isn't white I know Lupe's here tell that strength of the conch here's what I want fresh white meat right out of the carpet just eat raw I found one I'm sure I can find more [Music] now stash Oh warm but it's freshwater Buddhist thought it's only an ounce but it's better than nothing so the solar still does work it's good [Music] [Music] [Music] so now I think I slept better in the bottom of this raft wasn't rock hard at least it didn't rain last night cool sea snails they're locally known as will exceed a bunch of coconut houses from the island also got bamboo this may be my easiest fire-starting challenge yet this is one of my hand flowers okay that works yeah okay flares died cockroaches are all going running I've got the Willick send seawater gonna pick them up [Music] Oh let's get rid of all the entrails mmm a little overdone robbery but good the next few days can be spent gathering sea snails coconuts and conch shells I've found an old bottle there is one thing I could do with it it may seem like a cliche but survivors adrift even in recent years have used bottles to send messages notes have been scratched on styrofoam or anything else that will float I can only imagine the desperate feeling of knowing that your only chance for rescue may lie in a small bottle floating out to sea adrift at sea was an experience I approached with trepidation for my time out here I was just a speck on the ocean in a storm even a rescue boat you'd be powerless against the forces of nature before the end of day six the world's realities take over Belize is now in a state of political turmoil so the crew comes back to free me from my island prison oh and the note in the bottle it has my phone number on it I'm still waiting for someone to call

Channel: Survivorman - Les Stroud

Views: 631,547

Rating: 4.8928094 out of 5

Keywords: Survivorman, Survivorman Les Stroud, Survivorman TV Series, Survivorman TV Show, Les Stroud, Survivorman TV, Outdoor Survival, Survivorman - Season 1 - Episode 9 - Lost At Sea, Todd Standing, Logan Stroud, Sam Omik, Uzimann, Joseph McConnell, Bob Wilson

Id: cpHvhYOMayM

Length: 44min 30sec (2670 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020