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Do not eat jellyfish. Or fish that are armed with spikes. Or that have parrot-like beaks. Or that puff up like balloons.
Pressing the eyes of fish will pa...
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But an idle mind tends to sink, so the mind should be kept occupied with whatever light distraction may suggest itself.
Green water is shallower than blue water.
Ultimately, a foot is the only good judge of land.
So long as no excessive water is lost through perspiration, the body can survive up to fourteen days without water. If you feel thirsty, suck a button.
Turtles are an easy catch and make for excellent meals. Their blood is a good, nutritious, salt-free drink; their flesh is tasty and filling; their fat has many uses; and the castaway will find turtle eggs a real treat. Mind the beak and the claws.
I learned that the horizon, as seen from a height of five feet on a calm day, was two and a half miles away.
Only one important topic was not addressed: the establishing of alpha-omega relationships with major lifeboat pests.
Survival had to start with me.
Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one’s life away.
You see, waves and steady winds are usually perpendicular to each other. So, if a boat is pushed by a wind but held back by a sea anchor, it will turn until it offers the least resistance to the wind—that is, until it is in line with it and at right angles to the waves, which makes for a front-to-back pitching that is much more comfortable than a side-to-side rolling.
His upturned pads with their wet fur looked like little desert islands surrounded by seaweed.
The constant motion of the sea, though gentle, didn’t make my work any easier.
The vault of the world was magnificently tinted. The stars were eager to participate; hardly had the blanket of colour been pulled a little than they started to shine through the deep blue. The wind blew with a faint, warm breeze and the sea moved about kindly, the water peaking and troughing like people dancing in a circle who come together and raise their hands and move apart and come together again, over and over.
You are as likely to see sea life from a ship as you are to see wildlife in a forest from a car on a highway.
Perhaps you’re hoping that he’ll lap up the Pacific and in quenching his thirst allow you to walk to America?
All sentient life is sacred.
“Once you saved the world by taking the form of a fish. Now you have saved me by taking the form of a fish. Thank you, thank you!”
It occurred to me that with every passing day the lifeboat was resembling a zoo enclosure more and more:
I survived 227 days. That’s how long my trial lasted, over seven months.
My story started on a calendar day—July 2nd, 1977—and ended on a calendar day—February 14th, 1978—but
Time is an illusion that only makes us pant.
I survived because I forgot even the very ...
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Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals—I travelled down the road of life—and I did other things with my fingers than try to measure latitude.
I drank the blood to the last drop.
Okay sea vampire
You want an animal that is piqued, peeved, vexed, bothered, irked, annoyed—but not homicidal.
I assure you, in no time you’ll have your lifeboat rocking and rolling like Elvis Presley.
Lol
No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.
I would remind myself of creation and of my place in it. But God’s hat was always unravelling. God’s pants were falling apart. God’s cat was a constant danger. God’s ark was a jail. God’s wide acres were slowly killing me. God’s ear didn’t seem to be listening.
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out.
On the day when I estimated it was Mother’s birthday, I sang “Happy Birthday” to her out loud.
It seems impossible to imagine that there was a time when I looked upon a live sea turtle as a ten-course meal of great delicacy, a blessed respite from fish. Yet so it was.
By the end of my journey I was eating everything a turtle had to offer.
Turtle shells were very handy. I couldn’t have done without them. They served not only as shields, but as cutting boards for fish and as bowls for mixing food.
It was frightening, the extent to which a full belly made for a good mood.
To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle.
To be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles.
The sun distresses you like a crowd, a noisy, invasive crowd that makes you cup your ears, that makes you close your eyes, that makes you want to hide. The moon distresses you by silently reminding you of your solitude; you open your eyes wide to escape your loneliness.
Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating it when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious.
Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces.
and you feel you’re the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish.
Any zookeeper will tell you that a tiger, indeed any cat, will not attack in the face of a direct stare but will wait until the deer or antelope or wild ox has turned its eyes.
It came as an unmistakable indication to me of how low I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal, that this noisy, frantic, unchewing wolfing-down of mine was exactly the way Richard Parker ate.
For two, perhaps three seconds, a gigantic, blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky, insubstantial yet overwhelmingly powerful.
Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation? The answer—believe me—is No.
I put a message in the bottle: “Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnipeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you.”
These are the last pages of my diary: Today saw a shark bigger than any I’ve seen till now. A primeval monster twenty feet long. Striped. A tiger shark—very dangerous. Circled us. Feared it would attack. Have survived one tiger; thought I would die at the hands of another. Did not attack. Floated away. Cloudy weather, but nothing. No rain. Only morning greyness. Dolphins. Tried to gaff one. Found I could not stand. R. P. weak and ill-tempered. Am so weak, if he attacks I won’t be able to defend myself. Simply do not have the energy to blow whistle. Calm and burning hot day. Sun beating without
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Do you see these invisible spirals on the margins of the page? I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out.
I would rate the day I went blind as the day my extreme suffering began.
