re: Cruise ship crew member goes overboard and is found 22 hrs later...

I saw that episode too. Still kinda freaks me out.

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Back before the web, there was a long line boat fishing south of Pensacola. The crew was in the cabin and he was cleaning up the deck after they had put there lines back out. He stuck a 5 gallon bucket over the side to get some water to clean the deck and it pulled him right over. Seems like it was 13 hours before he was found. That’s gotta be a lonely feeling out in the Gulf and watching your boat sail away.

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It was 1982 or 83, two guys had gone out from Galveston fishing, they were on a boat with a cabin, it was night, and one of the guys went below to sleep, the other guy was doing something topside and fell overboard. The boat motored on and the guy sleeping didn't know his buddy had fallen in for a hour or more. The guy that fell in watched the boat disappear, then stripped off his clothes and swam the 15 miles back in to Galveston, took him all night and part of the next day.

I think you are talking about the Trashman.

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Deborah Kiley was no stranger to the seas. She had spent most of her life working as a crew member on yachts around the world. So she thought that signing up on the Trashman in October of 1982 was just another job. It would turn out to be anything but.


The captain of the ship was John Lippoth, who brought his girlfriend Meg Mooney along for the ride. The two other crew members on the trip were Mark Adams and Brad Cavanagh. The plan was to take the yacht from Annapolis, Maryland down to Florida to meet up with its owner.


The first half of the trip was pretty smooth sailing, although Kiley started noticing things that started to make her uneasy. Lippoth kept making excuses to go below deck, and Kiley soon realized their captain was afraid of the ocean. Lippoth and Adams also spent the entire voyage completely drunk. Of the five people on that yacht, only Kiley and Cavanagh were experienced, capable sailors.


After the boat passed North Carolina, the trip took a turn for the worse. A massive storm appeared out of nowhere, and Trashman headed right into the heart of it. Kiley recalls wind speeds over 70 knots, and 40-foot waves so powerful they ripped holes in the boat. Two days after they set sail, the yacht, torn apart by the sea, began to sink.


The crew managed to make it to a lifeboat, but not before Mooney was seriously injured by the ship's rigging, suffering severe lacerations on her arms and legs. Her bleeding attracted sharks, who followed the lifeboat for the remainder of the journey. The crew found themselves adrift no supplies or water, miles from land.


Two days after the Trashman sunk, Lippoth and Adams, already dehydrated from alcohol and dying of thirst, began drinking seawater. They started hallucinating and rambling incoherently. On the third day Lippoth, in a state of delirium, jumped into the water and attempted to swim to shore. He was immediately attacked and killed by the sharks. Soon, Adams jumped overboard as well, muttering something about going to get some cigarettes. The sharks attacked him also, so violently that the boat was spun around and the water turned red.


That night, Mooney succumbed to her injuries, dying of blood poisoning. Kiley and Cavanagh, the only two left, had to toss her body overboard where she too was eaten by sharks. Shortly after, Kiley and Cavanagh, close to death themselves, were spotted by a Russian cargo ship off the coast of Cape Hatteras. They were rescued, four days after they abandoned ship and five days after setting sail.

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I mean that's crazy.. but it's not "stuck in a sunken boat 100 ft below sea for 3 days while sharks and things thrash about around you in the pitch dark probably eating the rest of your crew" crazy

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WTF? Is this insane shite? Did he get rescued or what?

The backstory

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In May, a tugboat with a crew of 12 was moving through choppy waters off the coast of Nigeria. The boat was towing an oil tanker when a sudden ocean swell or rogue wave slammed into the vessel, snapping the tow rope and capsizing the vessel at about 4:30 a.m. Harrison Okene, the ship's cook, was in the bathroom when the boat turned over and began to sink

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Okene eventually scrambled into the engineers' office, where he found a small pocket of air. By this time, the boat had come to rest upside down on the seafloor at a depth of about 100 feet (30 meters). Almost naked, with no food or fresh water, in a cold, wet room with a dwindling supply of oxygen, Okene's odds of survival seemed to be near-zero.

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Not to derail the thread, but Im waiting on new about that Thai soccer team in a cave for a week now

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They found them alive.

I saw the Norwegian docked in Cozumel on Friday. it could have been me.

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Maybe he had basic water survival training and knew how to use his pants or other clothing item as a flotation device.

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That's pretty cool and never thought of that. Simple and easy. Good to know these things just in case