We went to see All is Lost the other night and the engineer in me kept wanting to know “Why didn’t he have an EPIRB”? My companions haven’t spent too much time in the lonelier parts of the planet so they didn’t have to suspend their disbelief that someone who fits out a sailboat for a round-the-world cruise wouldn’t buy an EPIRB from Amazon
Having also seen Gravity recently (six of us total; six thumbs up) I’m impressed by how much filmmakers can do with just one or two actors. All is Lost seems more impressive because the hardware is simpler and one is reminded that the open ocean can be just as lonely an environment as space.
The movies reminded me to get the batteries changed in my EPIRBs! (I have a floating ACR EPIRB that I got for a trip down through the Caribbean in a Diamond Star DA-40 (story) and a smaller PLB for helicopter trips through some of the blank areas of the American West.) Maybe it is also time to have the life raft repacked by Survival Products.
My experience as a blue water sailor is primarily limited to vomiting over the side. What did the sailors who read this blog think of the movie?
[For a separate real-life story about how bad things can go when you don’t spend $200 on a Spot or EPIRB, check out this story about a Canadian who ended up killing and eating his German Shepherd after the dog saved him from a bear attack.]
Dunno about the tech, but I think the movie is based on a real story — there was a documentary some years ago on the BBC about a dude whose boat started to take water (for not clear reasons, even to the victim, possibly a collision with a whale). The guy had to survive at sea a long while before hitting the carribeans.
Federico: I don’t think that the movie is based on any one particular story. I did a quick search for sailboats that hit whales and found
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0625/Man-recounts-collision-with-whale-that-sunk-his-boat
in which the sailor was saved by his EPIRB.
Although extreme survival technology is interesting, my follow up questions are tangential; apologies in advance:
-Did you ever make it to Martinique
-How was the movie
Ryan: I made it to Anguilla/St. Martin and turned around!
How was the movie? Awesome!
I haven’t seen it yet but as a sailor you are resigned to seeing sailing movies that require an impossibly large suspension of disbelief. It’s over 20 years since http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105824/ came out and some us still haven’t stopped simultaneously cringing and laughing.
There is a good thread on the mistakes in All Is Lost here: http://forums.sailinganarchy.com/index.php?showtopic=152338
But I’ll still go see it anyway, beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to sailing movies 😛
Also, Vanity Fair had some sailors review it: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2013/10/all-is-lost-review-sailors
The Dove (1974) is a movie that inspired me to take up blue water sailing and eventually live aboard a sailboat for nearly 8 years.
The Dove was produced by Gregory Peck and filmed at a variety of locations around the world. It depicts the true story of Robin Lee Graham, who at the time was the youngest person to sail around the world solo — the trip was made in stages over the course of several years, mostly on a 24 ft. sailboat (named Dove) — but I think a Ranger 23 was used in the film — and Graham switched to a larger boat for the last portion of his circumnavigation. The film includes some excellent photography of sailing.
If memory serves, Stephan Callahan had his laminated plywood sailboat delaminated by a whale 20 or so years ago. He drifted from off the Azores (guessing) to the Barbados in his lift raft – something over three months. The book he wrote convinced a lot of sailors to upgrade their “ditching” bag.
A couple of astronauts I know had a good chuckle about “Gravity”, though they thought the photography was beautiful. Ms. Bullock’s character’s spacesuit should have been punctured from the beating it got. And when she got out of it, she was wearing cute shorts instead of the standard-issue diaper.