This reminds me about Stanislav Kurilov [1], who successfully escaped USSR by jumping off the cruise ship with a snorkeling mask and swimming for the following 2.5 days towards Philippines.
He wrote an interesting book called "Alone In The Ocean" [2] where he described his endeavor.
Not mentioned in that link though is that the doctors who examined him believed his resistance to cold came from him eating a traditional diet that included seal meat in his youth, and that his body fat had accumulated a not inconsiderable amount of seal blubber.
The most important aspect of this is he was wearing a 5mil wetsuit. All of the rest of the things they mentioned are much smaller factors in him staying warm. The wetsuit also makes him slightly more buoyant. I kayak in the winter and have a dry suit, and a 5mil wetsuit when the water gets a bit warmer. In the winter my survival time would be minutes unprotected. The most dangerous time of year is May and June as unprotected kayakers come out in response to the warm air temperature. But the water is still very cold.
In that water he would have succumb to hypothermia in hours. I spent 2 hours wading in water with no protection in the same temperature that he was in. My body temp was 95 degrees, lower than his after 72.
It's one thing to sit neutrally bouyant in a Scuba suit, or in a flotation device, with nothing but shivering to keep warm. Asleep, you can get hypothermia in water that is nearly at body temperature.
However, endurance athletes (like this 2.5-day-swimmer apparently decided he was) can keep warm by exertion. Competitive swimmers will keep warm, and actually sweat a great deal, in a very cold pool throughout an hour or two of practice in nothing but a speedo.
The problem only comes when one discovers, like the protagonist of Jack London's "To Build A Fire", that you lack the endurance.
Did anybody read the article?? One of the most important factors was staying in the fetal position- he even lost consciousness at times and was saved by a floatation device that kept his head above water.
heat production by effort is large, probably way more efficient than shivering so your chances are probably better if you can reach a destination by swimming.
Hypothermia starts at relatively high temperature (naked, below 25°c if I remember well)
There are records of people dying after hours of being exposed to 14°c without proper clothing (actually in the Philippine, if memory serves me well)
Our body (without technology like clothing or homes) are really just adapted to live around the equator at constant 27°c :-)
The Ph. are just off the equator. I’ve been in the water in northern Australia and the water was 30c and on the verge of being too warm. Definitely not refreshing, felt like a salty bath tub.
Due to water being a way better conductor of heat than air you lose heat up to 75% faster than in air. Even 30°C warm water can therefore quickly lead to hypothermia if unprotected. Ever seen scuba instructors in warm countries? While their customers would often submerge in nothing but a swimsuit the instructors would often wear 6mm full body wetsuits due to longer exposure. And yet a lot of them are shivering in the evenings.
I've been shivering in the water at 27 degrees Celcius in Australia (diving, no wetsuit, sitting on the bottom). Admittedly I have a very slender build, but clearly 27 degrees is below my equilibrium temperature when not in activity.
There are a few adaptions to colder conditions like Brown Fat and shivering which directly converts calories into heat and work fairly well.
Body Size and insulating fat at can also make a huge difference. People in warmer climates are simply less adapted to cold conditions and therefore at greater risk for a given temperature.
PS: Some people can actually walk around without clothing or becoming cold in 40f weather and be perfectly comfortable. It's sleeping that's the greatest risk as you reduce metabolic activity while having a large surface area in contact with the ground.
There is wide variety in human resistance to cold, including cold water. It isn't surprising that someone who had lived in Russia could spend a great deal of time in the tropical ocean. Some people who live in the tropics can do that!
Incidentally, this variation seems not to be genetic, or maybe it is epigenetic. When visiting India during the "winter" with a friend who was born there but had lived in USA for decades, his family was shocked at how both of us were comfortable in short sleeves while they shivered in heavy coats.
So, a guy with tons of experience goes for open water dive without a diving marker or diving alert device, decide to leave his dive-buddy and return to the beach by himself. Some other articles says he was a navy veteran. That would probably explain his overconfidence, as those are things that recreational and tec divers are explicitly trained not to do.
Lots of diving accidents reports starts with someone being overconfident (ignoring the recommended safety limits or his personal limits), ignoring safety-checks and/or losing his diving buddy. I guess this is one of those. I like reading those kinds of reports because it shows how things can go wrong, even for experienced divers. And how to be prepared for those problems. It also shows that most diving accidents happens usually because of human error instead of equipment failure.
The good thing: He's still alive. He returned to the diving spot a few years later (to take a picture for his "treading water" book) and he became a "Water Safety Ambassador" in NZ. And his history might serve as an example during diving safety classes.
I did a month worth of diving in Dahab on the Red Sea a while back. Talking to the instructors and dive masters there, their big challenge is keeping the Israelis from killing themselves.
Being just over the border in Egypt, they get a steady stream of young guys fresh out of the army who are accustomed to surviving lots of things and now want to go have some fun. So they nod along to the safety instruction on their "discover scuba" dive, then swim off over the lip to the 30M deep underwater caves filled with lion fish and opportunities for knife fighting.
It doesn't surprise me that the guy in the story thought he could swim to the beach from a few hundred yards away.
> Lots of diving accidents reports starts with someone being overconfident (ignoring the recommended safety limits or his personal limits), ignoring safety-checks and/or losing his diving buddy.
I am not a diver but I have come close to losing my life three times in the backcountry. Each time I remember my overwhelming thought was "I have been an idiot". And, as you noted, each time: I was alone (or with my dog but no other human), and was overconfident both in gear and experience.
Interestingly in two of the three cases my dog saved my life. Though I knew full well that Lassie is not a documentary, it always felt like I had someone with me.
Actually not so much fascinating but rather mundane. Both were in the snow.
The first time I went for a hike without checking the weather. I had a topo and compass but not a GPS (which I almost never carry anyway) and, as it was a day hike, no stove or any overnight supplies beyond a bottle of water. In the summer that's not really a problem (you can almost always survive overnight in summer without a problem even with no preparation, food or equipment, especially if it's not raining) but stupid and dangerous in the winter at altitude. I was wearing relatively lightweight "travel" gear because I expected to be sweating, not sitting still. In any case it began to snow heavily and I could not see any landmarks, much less my map. I tried dead reckoning to the trailhead but eventually came across my own snowshoe tracks as it began to become dark. Very scary. I was also frightened of stumbling into a lake or off a cliff, both which were relatively nearby. At some point the dog became fed up with my antics and just walked away, which he normally never does. Lacking any better plan I followed him and he walked pretty directly to the trailhead which turned out not to be that far away.
The second was much more serious: again, I got a late start because of work and got into the wilderness around dark, not having checked the weather. I skied a bit but it's dangerous to travel at night, especially in the snow. I do have a special lightweight and compact rig I developed for sleeping below zero, but it requires some time and attention to set up. So I put up a tent (least I had brought one!) for me and the dog because I wanted out of the weather and was too tired to try to make a robust shelter, especially in the dark. Unfortunately the spot I chose was exposed and the winds were quite strong, pulling branches down and threatening to pull the tent (I had only anchored it to the snow). In the dark I had to get up, find a tree well, and dig a hole. I put my skis and my pack over the hole, dug a chair, and then spent a sleepless night with my dog. I opened his jacket and my jacket, sat on the dog pad and my sleeping pad, and wrapped my sleeping blanket around us with the dog blanket over the top. I put the dog's jacket under him. He sat up/stood up all night and kept me warm (most of the time I was hugging him). I was afraid to fall asleep and potentially freeze to death because the covering required continuous adjustment. When we dug out in the morning up my tent was gone (I eventually found it) and there were branches that had fallen where it had been, though who knows if they really would have been dangerous? At least it hadn't snowed much, though it was pretty cold.
(One of my students managed to dig a shelter using only his skis when he was caught downhill after skiing out of bounds, but he did the digging before the sun went down, and was rescued in the morning. His ski gear was adequate for overnight in those conditions).
The common thread here is that I was dumb, dumb, dumb and deserved to suffer. I prepare better when writing code than I did on these two trips: I was overconfident that my skills and experience would get me through.
BTW my dog weighed almost 150 lbs (not much less than I do) with legs as long as mine. He had (he's since passed away) well over a thousand trail miles and was trained to stick with me regardless of distractions, which is why it was so shocking when he walked away. He only did that one other time, when a group of us were cutting a trail -- I assume he was bored and went back to camp in the hope of finding forgotten food. Oh yeah, he would also do it sometimes in the office if he thought someone might be eating a sandwich :-).
An Australian on a surf trip a few years ago fell off a boat in the Mentawais and survived 27 hours with no flotation help.
75 hours in cold water is crazy, but the diver didn't have to keep himself afloat. I find it almost unbelievable that it's possible to swim and tread water -- even in warm salt water -- for 27 hours.
They immersed him in 5.3C water for 83 minutes, and only stopped the experiment because of discomfort in his feet. His temperature only dropped by about 1C.
Yes, that was remarkable. That paper says he was a large man with some body fat, but from what I recall (an Icelandic colleague once referred to this), the fat type in his body differed from that usually found in people. Children have "brown fat" which usually changes to "white fat" in adults, but this man had a far higher than normal composition of "brown fat" for an adult.
It does depend on your body composition. The largest energy drain on a person stagnant in water is their body working to keep them warm, and then breathing (lungs have to expand, muscles have to contract, water has to be displaced).
Lying flat, arms out reduces the work needed to stay afloat - but will drain your core temperature faster (although after 27 hours it doesn't really matter, you'll shiver your way to stay warm "enough" or hypothermia will set in).
I can't find the study I read after that movie came out a few years ago on this exact scenario. Will reply or edit my post if I can find it.
Some people simply cannot float. Me included. I've had 3 different instructors try to tell and show me that everyone can float. I can't. I have 5 swimming certificates, I'm fit, but I think I just don't have enough body fat? Even in the Red Sea (if it's called that in English) I can't float. Not for more than 5 seconds.
My experience with people who don't float easily is that they're not expanding their lungs enough. When you train in diving, you realize just how much different your buoyancy is when you have a full breath compared to an exhale. On my first few dives, I realized that I didn't trust the equipment enough and kept my lungs full while only taking shallow breaths. Learning to dive with mostly empty lungs made it so much easier and allowed me to get rid of all but one weight on my belt.
When I started training in freediving (apnea), I learned how to take much fuller breaths. I can almost guarantee that if you haven't done that kind of training, strengthened your diaphragm and learned 3-zone breathing, you aren't taking in nearly as much air as you could.
Our bodies are mostly water and the amount of mass that we have that's denser than water isn't that much denser. But water is a lot denser than air and the more you can add air volume, the more buoyant you become. Learning to float is a matter of learning to maximize your volume. Some density numbers from the internet...
Salt water: 1.03g/ml
Fresh water: 1g/ml
Muscle: 1.06g/ml
Bone: 1.1g/ml (approximate...couldn't find a good source for this)
Fat: 0.9g/ml
Air: 0.0023g/ml
The numbers seem to back up your instructors. As you can see, all these values are fairly close except for air, so adding more air to your volume can dramatically change your buoyancy. Wikipedia lists the average adult male lung capacity at 6L, so a 5L breath should be achievable for most. In salt water, that 5L breath will add more than 5kg of buoyancy, which is enough to float around 400 lbs of muscle or 176 lbs of bone. In fresh water, that same 5L breath will add a bit less, enough to cancel out 193 lbs of muscle or 121 lbs of bone. There's no way that I can know your body composition, but those numbers are very substantial. The more likely is that you're just not getting anywhere near 5L of air in your lungs.
If you're ever into you're trying it again, look up some stretches to open up the lungs. Then practice breathing shallowly with nearly-full lungs. If you're able to do that, you'll probably be able to float laying on your back, where your head is mostly submerged...remember, every part of your body above the surface counts against your buoyancy, for the same reason that air in the lungs matters so much.
Maybe your bones are too dense, though to be honest, I've never heard of anyone with your issue in floating/treading water. I've always assumed that everyone has enough buoyancy to float most of their body.
I float, but not much more of me is out of the water than I could cover with my hand. Even with more fat than I like to carry, I can stand on the bottom of a swimming pool. This greatly amuses my wife, who can lift her toes out of the water, while mine are pointing straight down.
My friend claimed he couldn't float . And it appeared he couldnt when he tried. But I put my full mask scuba mask on him and magically he could float. My theory is that he was craning his beck when his face got closeish to water, messing with his form
You might have low fat, a lot of "white" muscle (explosive sprint), and not a lot of "red" one (endurance). White is heavier than red. Also, bone density and lung volume might be factors.
Well if you stay calm its more like once a minute or two. When I learned the technique they forced us to stay in the water like this for half an hour, it does kind of suck after a while.
How much heat would you lose by submerging your head and neck, versus how much would you gain by keeping the fetal position? I'm not sure if that's a positive tradeoff.
Big waves travel over long distances in the open sea.
But it's not the big waves that would disturb when you are floating around, they would just make you float up and down a bit. More disturbing are the small waves that are caused by nearby winds. At the ocean you very often have some wind nearby (depends on the region, season etc).
> ... the holder of the scientifically documented record for the longest a human has intentionally gone without sleep ... stayed awake for 264.4 hours (11 days 25 minutes).
So I'm gonna guess "no", it doesn't mean "without sleep".
Non-stop in the sense that there aren't any staged pauses, but she undoubtedly stopped to sleep at some point. What really blew my mind is that she finished 10 hours ahead of the next competitor.
Rest sure, but sleep isn't usually employed much in endurance events. In RAAM (bike from west coast US to east coast) winners sleep maybe 10 to 20 hours over the whole race which lasts 10 days.
OK 75 is a lot, but for an almost as harrowing first person account, listen to the interview with Brett Archibald about surviving 28 hours after falling off a cruise ship:
There are lots of cruise ships in the Baltic Sea, and there's perhaps 2-3 cases per year where someone falls overboard and quite a few who go missing without a trace (ie. fall overboard at night with no-one noticing). Practically no-one is ever found, even though several ships participate in the search if the falling is detected.
It is possible to jump off a cruise ship and survive, though. Every now and then an idiot decides to jump off before reaching the harbor and swim to some island near the coast. And get a hefty fine afterwards. But at this point the ships aren't doing full speed or at the open sea.
5mm wetsuit (or more likely drysuit given that he's a diver) saved his life far more than anything else. That's some serious insulation, though barely enough over such a long period of time.
The article doesn't go into much detail in terms of the psychological aspects of the ordeal -- your life flashing before your eyes for days, can't imagine.
I think it is more likely that he was in a wetsuit... Dry suits aren't measured in thickness since the purpose is to just keep the water out, as opposed to providing insulation like a wetsuit. Most divers wear a wetsuit unless they are in particularly cold water.
I'm not being snarky, asking because I used to surf and wearing a wetsuit would seriously make me warm, to the point where surfing on 10C would require me to unzip the wetsuit every half an hour to make me comfortable.
After my body warmed up the water inside the suit I didn't feel at all the cold of the water except on my feet/head, like I mentioned, I actually felt overheating after a while.
With that said I never calculated or researched how well do these wetsuits insulate for a prolonged period in water, have any data on that?
It's the duration that gets you. For example, if you go out in a 3/2 (3mm torso, 2mm arms/legs) when the water temps call for a 4/3, sure, you can surf for 45 minutes or so, but after that you'll start getting quite chilly.
This guy spent 75 hours floating in the water, not paddling around expending tons of energy competing with the pack for the next set wave :)
Divers' suits are not dry. There's water between the skin and the suit. Actually that warmed water layer is what isolates the body against the cold outside.
It's getting ridiculously difficult to write something in HN without receiving some absurd answers like that.
The comment I responded to said that divers use drysuits so this guy should be wearing one. No matter how you put it, the article says that the guy used a wetsuit.
Please, stop for a moment and let this little fact sink: the guy wore a wetsuit and the article clearly states this much.
Yes, I could have said that NOT ALL Divers' suits are dry. But the fact is that MOST of them aren't and in the single specific case THAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT, the suit wasn't dry.
So why the hell do I need to clarify these obvious things? I have no idea.
Oh, and the fact that people use downvoting to "win" these petty fights.
You were trying to explain the difference between dry and wet suits to people who obviously already knew the difference, because they brought it up themselves. Now you're pointing out that the article specifically mentions wetsuits to people who obviously already knew that and chose to discount it. So yeah, if you make context-oblivious comments, you're going to get downvoted.
Nobody is downvoting to win a petty fight. It just looks like you haven't understood the thread of the conversation and are trying to argue about something when there is no argument.
Tangentially related: Lynne Cox, a rather remarkable open-water swimmer, both for some fairly unique swims she has completed, and her ability to tolerate swimming in ice-cold water. She has twice held the fastest time record for swimming across the English Channel.
An inspiring story and one of the worst near death experiences I could imagine. Waiting to starve to death, bleed to death or drown in salt water while at the mercy of the ocean sounds terrifying.
This reminds me of a sign I saw at the top of a rather dangerous ski slope: « la neige ne reconnait pas les bons skieurs » ≈ “snow doesn't recognize good skiers” ≈ it's not because you're supposed to be good that you'll get special luck.
There is an episode of I shouldn’t be alive (Season 6, Episode 3: Dive of Terror, streaming free on Prime Video) about this guy. Crazy story and he openly states he should have known better. Great episode and great show in general.
In 1995, a 20-year-old U.S. Marine fell overboard from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. He did what he'd been trained to do: he "kept his cool, inflated his uniform into a life preserver, and floated for two days and two nights until he was picked up by a Pakistani fishing boat." [0]
Socks also work to tie the leg ends closed. And shoelaces. Especially with thick, stiff, or slippery leg material, with socks you can get a stable knot while sacrificing less air volume. With rubberized gear, you can fold over the end first.
As others have pointed out, beware planning for one environment, and finding yourself in an very different but adjacent one. Warm air, cold water, no pants.
Recently finished In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton. Extremely interesting read about a navy ship that sank near the end of WWII. The crew were not rescued for over four days.
Must be the USS Indianapolis (I'm from Indy, so we hear about it a bit more often). Incredible series of utter failures by the Navy, and just two weeks of fighting left. Tragic story all around.
Similar survival story of a surfer who got dragged out to sea and had to survive in the irish waters. Admittedly this was 32 hours in comparison but the effects of what happened are remarkably similar. Nocturne had a great podcast episode on this. https://nocturnepodcast.org/ep-31-shortboard/
After? I read it as during. That may be just another way of saying he considered giving up hope (I can’t find the article online, but I think it is more likely he considered stopping to try and maintain fetal position than slicing his wrists, for example)
From what I read, keeping up hope is a huge factor in survival.
Most of the suicides are committed when a person starts believing suicide is the only way out. When a person has lost all reasons to live, and when he thinks there is nothing he can do, then he concludes suicide could be the only next natural act under his control.
Any tech to bring with you to desalinate water on solar power ?
Are there high insulation full body suits (double layer) ? Some people use array of thermoelectric generators on their skin to produce drops of electricity. Granted a large body coverage, helped by the temperature difference, the heatsink effect of water would make the generation a bit less inefficient.
Also what's worse keeping the HELP position with body submerged or doing a plank with half the body in air ? I wonder if wet skin + air lowers your temp faster.. albeit you have a bit of sunlight.
Speaking of surviving in cold water, Gordon Giesbrecht (prof at Univ of Manitoba) has some scary videos of plunging through holes in the ice and hanging out for extended periods. He isn't advocating it but it shows you can survive for more than the 2-3 minutes I was taught, and used to teach my students.
Not quite the same, but if you were interested in this story you might be interested in reading "Last Man Off" by Matt Lewis. It's the story of how he survived a fishing boat sinking in the Antarctic. Basically came down to luck and having donned the appropriate survival suit, but very much touch and go and many of his fellow crew members didn't make it.
For full disclosure he's a friend of mine, but the book is a gripping read.
> The practical guidance in situations like this is that you should avoid drinking for the first day; this will trigger hormone changes that make your body start conserving water. After that, aim to scrounge up half a liter per day
He had a buoyancy compensation device, pretty much a life jacket with adjustable buoyancy, so he'd wind up in the HELP position like this. Fetal but head held above water by the PFD.
He would have inflated his BCD when he got to the surface, and that would have kept him afloat, probably dropped his weights as well. That way his kit is actually keeping him afloat.
He wrote an interesting book called "Alone In The Ocean" [2] where he described his endeavor.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HYLLOZ2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...