In 1972, a group of six, including children, got lost at sea after killer whales attacked their yacht. Adrift in the Pacific Ocean for 38 days with just a compass, they drank turtle blood to survive and learned to harvest rainwater amid pouring thunderstorms, all the while struggling to keep their damaged dinghy afloat.
It may seem like an almost unbelievable tale of daring, distress, and determination, but five decades after the fateful voyage, Douglas Robertson—one of the crew members who was just a teenager at the time—shared with The Epoch Times his vivid memories of surviving the shipwreck and the lessons learned. He says the unimaginable battle for life not only shaped his character but also led him to discover God amid all the chaos.
“It felt like you were being saved for a reason,” Mr. Robertson, now 69, said. “[The experience] makes such an emotional connection—a mother trying to save her children, a father trying to save his family. It reaches into similar situations that we all have, but not as desperate as that. But we all have those situations to deal with. And we have to dig deep and find extraordinary power to keep going.”
Over 50 years ago, Mr. Robertson was rescued from the sea along with his parents, Lyn and Dougal, his 11-year-old twin brothers, Sandy and Neil, and 22-year-old family friend, Robin Williams. He says the ordeal has made him fearless.
“People around me say, ‘Douglas, you are such a strong character. You are so dependable.’ ... I think it’s affected me like that. It’s made me realize that life hangs by a very, very thin thread,” he said, adding that one very bad night adrift in a powerful storm, his mother said she felt God was looking over them.
“She said that she could see God, that she could see a light, that somebody was watching over us. Whether you believe it or not, doesn’t matter,” he said. “My dad was an atheist. And I was an atheist because my dad was—I wanted to be like my dad. But come the tests, I was not really an atheist at all.”
The Shipwreck
Mr. Robertson was just 16 years old when his parents, Lyn and Dougal, dairy farmers from England, decided to buy a boat and sail around the world. They spent 18 months journeying across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean before heading towards New Zealand via the Galapagos Islands when the disaster struck.On the fateful day of June 15, 1972, Mr. Robertson’s younger brother Sandy was keeping watch in the cockpit of the family’s schooner, Lucette. Around 10 a.m., three huge blows hit the side of the boat. Just moments earlier, Mr. Robertson had spotted a dark shape in the water.
“I could tell it wasn’t a seabird because it was too solid,” Mr. Robertson said. “And then, a few seconds later, bang, bang, bang—massive, massive blows to Lucette. She lifted out of the water and shook and shuddered. The noise was terrific.”
Looking down below deck, the then-teen saw his father standing up to his ankles in water. Next, he heard a big gushing noise, turned, and saw three orca whales: two adults and one calf; the large male with its head split open bleeding into the water.
“I knew he [the male orca] must have hit the yacht and with such force that it wasn’t an accident—it must have been an attack. I put my head down the hatch again to my dad to tell him there were whales, and by now he was up to his waist in water,” he said.
Immediately, Mr. Robertson knew it was serious, but when his father called out to abandon ship, he was incredulous: “I said to him, ‘Where to?’ We’re not in Miami Marina; the only place is out in the ocean. I thought he was crazy to say abandon ship, because I thought he could stop the yacht from sinking.”
When his father repeated the call to abandon ship, Mr. Robertson thought he must be dreaming. “I thought, ‘This is a nightmare—this can’t be happening,’” he said, adding that he began lowering the sails in a daze, thinking that if he were to lower the sails and pack them away, when he woke up everything would be over, and everything would be okay.
Instead, his dad appeared on deck. “‘Get the life raft over the side,’ my dad said, and I did it. We were sinking. I thought I was going to be eaten alive by killer whales … that they were bound to be waiting in the water for us,” Mr. Robertson said.
The teen just had time to launch the dinghy over the side, put the oars inside it, and maneuver the life raft over before a wave washed him off the yacht. It took just two minutes for the boat to sink. Mercifully, the raft was already inflated, and his dad, a seasoned mariner, had the presence of mind to rope the two crafts together, preventing the lighter raft from escaping in the strong wind.
While he was in the water, Mr. Robertson’s panic about the whales grew. He’d heard that you don’t feel the bite, so he kept checking to see if he still had his legs. After he managed to pull himself around and get into the raft, he saw he was the last one in. “Everybody was cold, shivering, and wondering what the hell happened. It was the end of our adventure,” he said.
“The twins were crying. My mum said, ‘Don’t be frightened; there’s nothing to be frightened of. The whales have gone.’ And the twins said, ‘We’re not crying because we’re frightened; we’re crying because we’ve lost Lucette.’ They’d lost their home—and I felt the same way.”
The moment the yacht had begun to sink, his father had grabbed a kitchen knife. This flash of forethought was to save the lives of himself and his family, who used the knife to kill and cut up raw meat. When the crew was finally rescued six weeks later, the knife was worn down to just a sliver.
A Poor Family Sailing Around the World
The adventure had started when Mr. Robertson’s father, an experienced sea captain, and mother, a former nurse, decided to sell their Staffordshire dairy farm and take off to sail the globe with their children.The couple had met and married in Hong Kong before returning to the UK, where they took up farming. It was a bucolic but tough existence, and after 15 years of struggle, when Mr. Robertson’s younger brother Neil suggested the family pack up and sail around the world, their father eagerly agreed it was possible.
Although they sold their 50-acre (20-hectare) farm for double what they originally paid for it, the Robertsons weren’t an affluent family. After purchasing a sturdy, 43-foot (13-meter) wooden boat in Malta, which they named Lucette, and setting sail in January 1971, they were effectively swapping one hard way of life for another.
“We were not a wealthy family sailing around the world; we were a poor family sailing around the world,” Mr. Roberston said. “We never really had enough money. We worked places we got to, especially in America, taking jobs delivering yachts and things like that.”
Mr. Robertson remembers his mother being full of trepidation. But his father had committed himself to the idea and had already done several newspaper interviews so “there was no turning back.” The initial period was like a baptism of fire, Mr. Robertson says. As well as the constant risk of the children falling off the side of the boat, there was a lot of basic learning to do.
His mother found getting used to nautical terms difficult and would use farm words to name parts of the boat instead. But Douglas and his brothers and sister learned fast. Their father navigated without GPS or radar, using only a compass. By the time the family had sailed first to Portugal and the Canary Islands, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and up to Miami and America, they too had become skilled sailors.
It was Mr. Robertson’s dream to be in the Merchant Navy; something he later went on to achieve. First, though, the Robertsons would spend six months in the United States, working and saving enough to fund their voyage through the Panama Canal and the Galapagos Islands, en route to New Zealand. “We had a great time. The Vietnam War had just finished. My mom worked in one of the big hospitals as a nurse, and we did gardening and painting which, after farming, was easy,” he said.
The Survival Plan
When the terrifying sinking happened, the crew was located 200 miles west of the Galapagos Islands. With no way of sending a radio distress signal, there was only one viable option: attempting to sail to a land mass—which would mean going without water for an unfeasible number of days. They needed a fool-proof plan, and soon.Mr. Robertson said: “I said to my dad, ‘If water is what we need, sail to the doldrums. It’s where the two trade winds meet, and it rains all the time.’ I said, ‘We can live for 30 days without food if we have to. We can live for three days without water. Water is the key, so let’s sail to water, get more water, and then decide what to do.’”
He added that there was also the potential of catching a counter-current back to the American coast from this position, which would also carry plenty of fish for food, and it was possible a ship could rescue them. From that moment, their spirits picked up. They had a plan in place, and the vital motivation and focus to carry on.
There were flying fish jumping out of the sea all around their makeshift boat, and Mr. Robertson remembers a big black frigate bird swooping down and plucking one from out of the air, as though mocking them. “I said, ‘Dad, they’ve got millions of years on us.’ But my father said something very profound. He said, ‘Look Douglas. We have brains. And with brains, we can make tools. And with tools, we can survive,’” he said.
Using sunrise and sunset to guide them, the desperate group made their slow, painful advancement. The torn and leaking raft had to be continually re-inflated, which Mr. Robertson did by blowing air with his mouth, and water had to be bailed out. All were constantly hungry and thirsty. They had some precious cans of water and allowed themselves one sip of water each, three times a day, and one piece of bread. The only other provisions were a bag of onions, a bag of oranges, and some lemons, saved from the Lucette.
On the sixth day, they spotted a ship in the distance. The excited group fired parachute flares, but the crew didn’t see them, and the ship sailed right past. “It completely demoralized us,” Mr. Robertson said. “It left a mark on us, but we had to get over it. We used to recite this password every day, which was ‘survival.’ No matter how grudgingly we felt about it, we said it. And we continued to sail north.”
On the 17th day, the food supply ran out. Water was still leaking from the raft, and it was worsening day by day. The crew had hoped to be in the doldrums in 10 days, but they still weren’t there. On that same day, the bottom fell out of the raft, forcing all six into the tiny, three-man dinghy. Watching the raft float away, they knew it had saved their lives.
A couple of nights later, Mr. Robertson awoke in the dinghy and saw the North Star in the sky above. Waking his father, the two had confirmation that the doldrums could not be far away. But they were down to their last few tins of water. For a further three days, it didn’t rain, until the evening of the third day when it started raining heavily.
He said: “We knew that our plan was working. We were now able to fill everything with water and to drink. We just opened our mouths and let the rain fall in; it was like a deliverance.”
It was on that leg up to the doldrums that Mr. Robertson drew on something he’d picked up in a fiction book he’d read and suggested drinking turtle blood. “It tastes very strong. It sticks in the back of your throat, and, as it congeals so quickly, you’ve only got 10 seconds to drink it,” he said.
Learning how to catch, kill, and bleed the turtles out, then butcher them for meat, which they dried in the sun, was a crucial survival tactic. They also caught flying fish using a clever handmade device. They even preserved fat from the turtles to make oil, which their mother used to administer enemas, to provide hydration and cleanse their bodies of waste that would become poisonous if left.
The Rescue
They were six days away from the coast of Costa Rica when they saw a ship sailing past, approximately a mile away. Hastily sending up a distress rocket, they waited and prayed they’d been noticed. As they watched intently, the boat slowly, but visibly, began altering course. When the Japanese vessel came close, all its crew lined the deck and watched in astonishment as the dinghy, filled with four pitiful, barely clothed adults and two children dressed in rags, came into view.It was the afternoon of the 38th day.
“We were like cavemen from ancient mankind; we’d learned how to catch food, how to catch water, how to survive. On the day we got picked up, we had 10 days’ supply of food,” he said.
After the rescuers threw down a rope, Mr. Robertson grabbed hold of it with his hand. “I was holding something that was not of this world, it belonged to another world; it was the link to our rescue,” he said.
Their rescuers pulled the exhausted voyagers onto the deck and were about to abandon the dinghy when the dad suddenly appealed for it to be brought on board. “They said, ‘Why do you want that dinghy?’” Mr. Robertson said. “My dad said, ‘Because our food is there.’ They said, ‘We have food … you don’t need to worry about that food.’ But we had become so conscious about our survival that we couldn’t let our food and water go.”
To appease their father, the crew pulled the dinghy aboard and served them cups of coffee. “I was looking at that coffee thinking, this coffee belongs to the civilized world. We just marveled at that coffee,” Mr. Robertson said.
The six were then on their way to Panama, to be met by the world’s press. Ten days after arriving in Panama, they traveled home to England on a steamer to be joyfully reunited with Mr. Robertson’s older sister, Anne.
In November of the same year, Mr. Robertson went back to sea, training to be a seafaring officer and serving for 10 years. During that time, he married and had five children—naming his youngest daughter after the family’s yacht, Lucette. The family settled in London, where Mr. Robertson still lives.
Mr. Robertson’s father later wrote a New York Times bestselling book about their shipwreck story, buying a farm with the proceeds, and a yacht in the Mediterranean on which he lived for the rest of his life, until his death in 1992.
Mr. Robertson retrained in accountancy so he could see his kids grow up. Today, the last four survivors together—the Robertson brothers and Mr. Williams—have a big extended family with 44 children and grandchildren.
He says he will “always remember” their journey. It is the ultimate tale of survival. The artifacts—dinghy, the message Mr. Robertson’s dad wrote on the front seat of the dinghy, turtle oil, and more—are kept at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall.
Overall, looking back on his life so far, what has Douglas learned?
“I’ve had an adventurous life in all areas,” he said. “I think that everybody should at least try and go on one adventure in their lives. Because it helps you become a more rounded person, a more complete person.”
