Word: raft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Squeezed into a raft designed to accommodate six, the eight survivors subsisted for four days and nights on meager rations of sea biscuits and gulps of water twice a day. "The days were barely tolerable," said Flanagan. "The nights were hell." The survivors used up their only three emergency flares and sighted six ships without being able to attract attention. Finally, on the fifth harrowing night, with Deckhand Leslie McNish using a flashlight to blink the international distress signal SOS, the shipwrecked survivors flagged down a Norwegian tanker 335 miles north of Puerto Rico and lived to tell...
Amidst eggs, onions, and other assorted garbage, the participants in Saturday's Harvard-Radcliffe Adams House Raft Race made their "run for the roses." While most of the boats pirated, sank, or suffered, a few rafts actually ran the course. Leverett House snagged the victory as it crossed the finish line second, winning according to the traditional rules...
...through his classes, then got fired as an electronics technician because, as his wife Jane explains, "they said he was too slow and inattentive." Trey Smith, another Landmark enlistee, had similar symptoms and his own deep frustrations. A superb pulling guard at his Dallas high school, Smith saw a raft of football scholarships sink because of his hopeless transcript. Smith had known about his disability since he was eight; Thompson learned from a psychologist that he was dyslectic when he flunked out of Franklin. "No wonder I'm not making it," he thought at the time...
Three stories dovetail in this small book. One of them involves the ordeal of Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor on a Colombian destroyer. He was swept overboard and into the Caribbean, along with seven other crew members, on Feb. 28, 1955, and endured ten days in a life raft before swimming ashore to what would become a hero's welcome. Once the cheering had died down, Velasco offered to sell his account to El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota. A young reporter named Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent some 120 hours interviewing the survivor and shaping his recollections into a first...
...reaches a raft and decides, Crusoe-like, "to make an inventory of my belongings." These include a wristwatch, some keys, three business cards from a store in Mobile and no food or water. He guesses that he is some 50 miles from his home port and will be rescued in two or three hours, but still worries, "It seemed an extraordinarily long time to be alone at sea." Ten days later, having swallowed seawater and a few pickings of raw fish, he lands with a cargo of extraordinary impressions...