Steve Callahan survived 76 days stranded alone at sea.
In the spring of 1981, Steve Callahan embarked on a life-long dream, setting sail across the Atlantic in a 21-foot boat he’d built from scratch.
He reached the United Kingdom, then Portugal, eventually making it to the Canary Islands. But as the Napoleon Solo began to sail toward the Caribbean, the soothing rhythm of the sea abruptly gave way to a cacophony of chaos.
“There was just this crash, a huge bang and water cascading in,” Callahan said.
The Napoleon Solo had been struck by an object, and now Callahan was in the ultimate scramble for survival.
“The bow quickly submerged, like it was going to sink,” he said. “There was an air lock, a bubble of air toward the back, that kept that end up. I was able to get out and get the life raft inflated. I dove back down inside and got some critical equipment before I got broken away. It was total chaos.”
What began as a voyage inspired by Robert Manry’s in 1965 would far more resemble Chuck Noland’s in Cast Away.
Callahan was stranded for 76 days on a small raft — battling extreme hunger, dehydration and the scalding sun. He was ultimately rescued by a trio of fishermen near Guadeloupe.
His story captured the world’s attention, and four years later, he published the best-selling book “Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea.”
Best of 7 spoke to Callahan about making quick decisions when we’re frightened, maintaining optimism in the face of extreme hardship, and the inherent contradictions of the human spirit.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Best of 7: Steve, how did you get your mind to slow down and avoid panic immediately after the crash?
There are parts of you that are totally freaking out. Some parts may just want to lay down and accept it. There’s another part that’s shocked and another part that’s falling back on my experience and training. I actually did have training since I was 12 in being independent and jerry rigging stuff and making do with little.
There’s a psychological splitting that can take place. Even though you're scared or there's parts of you freaking out and whatnot, you don't pay attention to those voices. You've got an eventual goal in mind, which is to live, and you just pay attention to what's right in front of you that you can do.
In my case, once the boat goes down, I'm looking at 1,800 miles of ocean before I would drift anywhere to get picked up — there’s that reality — but you don't really focus on that as much as the next achievable step. In the initial crash, in that really short time of escaping the immediate threat, you're really just focused on exactly what you’ve got to do next.
How did you balance making quick decisions but also taking time to assess?
In an initial crisis, denial is always the No. 1 enemy of the survivor. The quicker you can come to grips with what the reality is, the quicker you can make an essential decision.
In acute crises, people tend to have to make decisions quickly, but not everybody does. In fact, about 70 percent or so of people will look for leadership to figure out what's going on, while they might go back to their desk and tidy up. They might hold a conference to decide a course of action. A smaller percentage of people are just so freaked out, they're either running around like chickens with their heads cut off or they're just almost catatonic.
But about 15 percent of people are able to do this kind of psychological splitting and make timely decisions, weighing risks and determining what you’ve got to do. Quick actions are essential. Those decisions may be wrong in the end, but you have to act quickly in certain scenarios.
If I'm sitting there in the middle, the raft’s been floating around for a few days and in relative calm, it's a good time to do a chore or solve a problem. What's going to be the best way to do this? What kind of knots do you need in order to be sure that you're not going to waste anything? If I have to do a chore, I can afford to sit around and think about what are all the materials I have? It's prioritizing and doing something else that's more useful or essential.
You barely had any food. How did you prioritize after you realized you were completely stranded?
The priorities in ocean survival are obviously physical harm or drowning, which can kill you in seconds to minutes. Then, hypothermia, which was an issue for me in the first half of the voyage. And hyperthermia, when things get too hot. Then there's water, and then finally food. Food is actually down the chain, so to speak, for priorities. Obviously, you get hungry, and eventually you will starve, but you can live for weeks without food.
The highest priority was really keeping the raft in shape. I fortunately wasn't seriously injured — had some cuts and stuff like that — but they weren't too bad. Then, getting water and finally food.
In the days and weeks that ensued, what was the key to maintaining optimism when there really wasn’t much hope?
The highs and lows are epically high and epically low — and they can be kind of smushed right together. In my case, when I held the bottom of the raft, it was a really desperate, horrible time, really, really low, and then I finally figure out an answer to the problem.
It’s like Tom Hanks in Cast Away when he makes fire and he's dancing around. “Look at me! Look what I have created!” You’re king of the world. There are all kinds of moments, very touching moments, spiritual moments, all of it. It’s a very mixed bag of what you go through overall.
You have this quote in your book: “You can only do the best you can.” What does that mean?
It’s something I just repeated to myself. I try to be a pretty rational person — I was a philosophy major in college — so I can attack things from a lot of different angles. You do screw up, but one of my rules of thumb is, “You can figure out how you should’ve done it at just about the time you finish it.”
I knew there’d be a lot of that involved. If I used a piece of material, I might not really need it right now — I might really need it later on. You can never be certain of an outcome, but But at some point, you make a decision and go, “Yeah, but this is really useful right now, and I don't know what's going to happen a week from now. I'm going to do it.”
You have to accept that you have to make decisions, and you do the best you can with those. There’s no sense in going back and second-guessing yourself after the fact. You try to go through it, and you try to accept worst-case scenarios. If you can accept the worst-case scenario, then maybe it’s worth doing.
Several critical thoughts there. What did those 76 days do for your life's outlook?
The accidents of life somehow coincide and intervene with who you actually are. I’ve designed, built and repaired boats for basically 50 years. But for me, I was also interested in storytelling and writing, and when I got ashore, I got asked by a sailing magazine if I wanted to write about this journey. That led to writing hundreds of articles and two books over the years — writing Adrift and talking to survivors around the world and survival specialists, meeting all kinds of people from all walks of life I would never have met.
But the inner things, they're more subtle in a way. From the obvious to the subtle, crises shape your life. When I came back, I had a friend, Kathy, and we were living together initially as a pragmatic thing, and now we've been together for 43 years. We've built stuff together. There’s no way I could even envision what my reality would be had this not happened to me.
What do you want people to take from your book and your story overall?
In the book, I abstract myself into a physical and emotional and a rational self, and they have competing needs and desires a lot of the time. You come in between those and, in the end, you make a decision about something. We operate like that all the time. Think about any big issue in your life. If we really examine it, we usually have a lot of different feelings. We can have hope, we can have despite desperation, even find some gallows humor in a horrible time. And you battle your inner-self.
If you're with a crew, you deal with everybody's personalities, needs, desires, capabilities and shortcomings. But when you're by yourself, you face inner conflicts, even things like how much to fish. The physical part says, “I'm hungry. We have to fish.” The emotional part says, “No, no, I love these fish. They're spiritual creatures.” Then there's a practical part of me that comes in and says, “You’ve got to ration the use of your equipment and your energy. We can fish, but we already have a stock there. We don't need to do that right now.”
For me, one of the central themes of Adrift include that we're not single-dimensional. We're multi-dimensional, and dilemmas face us in every decision. Crises are hugely difficult, but also offer us opportunities. I learned things about myself and the world that I could not have in any other way. I witnessed rare wonders, as well as suffering. And like many survivors, I learned my weaknesses and that I was a lot more resilient than I thought I could be.
You can feel desperate and hopeful at the same time.
What I learned…
I was curious about Callahan’s internal dialogue while stranded, as several other coaches and decision-makers I’ve interviewed in recent weeks have turned to key catch phrases in moments of intense pressure.
A bit to my surprise, he said there weren’t mantras or slogans entrenched in his head but rather songs that would continuously run.
“A couple of Beatles songs,” Callahan said. “One was ‘Help!’ which seemed absolutely perfect. The other one was ‘I'm so tired, I haven't slept in a wink. I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink. I’m so tired, I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink?’”
I found it to be one of the more amusing parts of our conversation, and to me, a valuable reminder that no matter what we’re up against, finding the mild humor in the hardship is rarely a bad thing.
Additionally, I thought Callahan’s point about crises being defining events and critical catalysts for some sort of improvement was well-taken. These challenges can be extremely painful, confusing and bring us to the lowest of lows, but on the other side is often some type of opportunity that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.