Thinking Sideways: Lost Boats Found

which means no fans. Yeah, I literally cannot read the text in front of me on the paper because I'm kind of sweating on it. It's kind of a gross thing. Your eyes are sweating? Is that like the man version

of crying? Uh? Well, everybody, Uh, I know, we've done this before, and we decided, based on some some listeners suggestions, that we were going to do another show of shorts because we've got a number of stories that don't quite flush out to a full one, so we decided we just bring them all together and make one big show

up also because we're all wearing shorts. All right. Well, let's let's get into the first of our stories today, which I guess somehow I got voted to go first, So we're gonna talk about We're going to talk about the crew of the Sarah Joe. Okay. The Sarah Joe is a is a story that starts in Hannah, Hawaii, which is I believe is on the is on It's in Maui County. But I couldn't figure out if that was actually on the island of Maui or not. Did

you not? Just like Google Map? I did Google Map, but Google Map wouldn't say this island's name is Maui. It was really being a jerky. Yeah, I don't know how to use maps. I know it's on the windward side of Mali, the westward side. Yeah, he's using body talk exactly. So the story starts on February eleven. We've

got five local men. Their their construction workers. They've been working on a friend's house who is one of the five, and they decide, you know, we just need to take a break and we're gonna take a fishing trip for the day. These five men, their names are Peter Hanschett, Benjamin Colama and I'm gonna do my best with this. Ralph mala Kaya Kiny Scott. I think it's Malaya Kiny. It might be my Malaya keiny, I'm not sure. And the lastly, the last gentlemen on here would be Patrick Woesner. Uh.

They all set sail for this trip. They borrowed a seventeen foot Boston whaler which had the name of Sarah Joe, thus the name of the story. The crew of the Sarah Joe and they said, hey, it's first thing in the morning, we're to take off. And they leave, first thing in the morning. Weather's nice, weather's fine, they leave.

Nobody really worries about it, except that afternoon the season, the weather gets a little nasty, the seas start to get rough, and by that evening it's a terrible storm has hit the island, to the point that a brother of one of the men who was on the boat said that it was the roughest that he had ever seen the sea in that area get. So it turns out going fishing wasn't such a hot idea. No, it wasn't the best idea. Why didn't they just check like

yahoo other or something? Exactly, yeah, exactly, they're according to this guy, that the swells were forty feet and breaking at the crest, and the winds were more than fort that's huge season. It's actually when you're in seventeen ft boat, I kind of wonder why they didn't just head right in when things started to kind of turn and the wind picked up, Well, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I think we've talked about this fairly recently, that it turns out that one of the safer places to be

in bad weather is at sea. Obviously like not in a tiny boat, though not in a tiny boat. But if your choice is you know, you've kind of missed your window, right, maybe you're like too far out. If your choices stay at sea and try and write it out, or try and make a super dangerous docking to get off this boat, you're probably just going to decide, well, we'll just see if we can't ride out these waves, instead of having no idea that this is not the worst of it, but it's going to get worse. Yeah,

exactly exactly the point everybody starts getting concerned. So we've got Peter Hanschett. He's one of the guys that was on the boat. His father John got concerned and decided, even though this weather was terrible, to go out and look for him, and he was joined by a gentleman by a marine biologist in the area named John not In I believe it's how you pronounced his name. And Captain Jim Cushman, who was with the Coast Guard, the U. S.

Coast Guard, and these two actually came in. They came in by I believe it was the third day that the boat had been missing, So it wasn't that they all went out right away, but over time these people joined the search. No trace was ever found of the Sarah Joe in those searches. By the way they did, they did also search by plane, etcetera. They did, they sent out planes. I think they looked for about a

week or two. The accounts very in the reporting that I found, but they were I mean, it's huge area, and the season are pretty quick moving in that area, so it except where you're gonna look, kind of expands really fast. Well. And also, I mean, you know, it's like you're lost at sea, right, It's not like if you get lost in the wilderness, people can you know, like find traces of you because you've like bumped into

a tree or like you're leaving tracks behind you. Yeah, piles of poop are like fire and camp debris like this is the c It moves so quickly. Like you know, Steve was just saying, you know, it's not like you're gonna just miraculously find like some pieces of the boat just just floating wherever. I mean, you know, it's so yeah. I mean, you know again the CEA, it's harder trace. I always think, oh, yeah, because there's no fire or whatever. Exactly,

there's there's no obvious signs left on the surface. I think it's where we're headed with. Yeah, I mean they can sink without a trace. Yeah, and so nobody found any sign of them. Now we step forward ten years later, it's and if you remember John Notton, he was one of the guys the marine biologists. He was on a while life expedition on a toll which is called and you're gonna have to help me out here if I

butcher this Tony or Tonguyk something like that. Well, this a toll, which is part of the Marshall Islands, is two hundred miles two thousand miles west of Hawaii, which, to kind of give people a scale for in the global scheme of things, if you look at Hawaii and then you go west, it's halfway between Hawaii and New Guinea and the Philippines, which is it's yeah, and it's an itty bitty a toll. It's really small, and I'll get into some of the basic basically that's yeah. Yeah, um, well,

not discovered a boat on the island. It was a small boat, and he was kind of confused, and he checked it out and then he saw the registration number and he recognized that it was registered in Hawaii. And several from several feet from the boat he found and again this is where the accounts very a little bit. He found either a a grave marked with heaped stones with a cross made out of driftwood, or a shallow grave. In either case he found in that either sticking out

it's sticking out somewhere from it a jaw bone, human job. Yes, And the coastguard got involved because there was a body part of a body anyway, and they be traced to Hawaii. Right, not that the coastguard, just like there's body parts on an island, some island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, I think the boat had a registration number or something, and he right, and you know, it's it's kind of like every state has a certain way of making your

license plate numbers. Well, he recognized the registration number being a Hawaii number. I'm guessing it means it starts with HI. But so I know he didn't dig up the grave, but he did he grabbed the job own and take it back with him. I couldn't find if he picked it up and brought it back with him or if

somebody else came out and collected it and figured it out. Yeah. Well, you know, obviously the coast Guard, like we said, got involved and they figured out that through the dental records that the job bone belonged to Scott Mormon, which was one of the five of the men that were missing on the Sarah Joe, and the registration was that it was the Sarah Joe. So here's the Here's I mean, this is one of many weird bits. So the job bone and the boat being they're not weird enough. But

here's another weird bit. It's entirely possible, based on the currents of the ocean, that over the course of three months, a boat could drift from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands. The problem is, however, is that there was a government survey all the islands previously to this discovery, and that that was done in about and when of what the Marshall Islands. Yeah, and the Marshall Islands, Oh gosh, who

owned Who is it that is registered under? I want to say it's the French, but that is absolutely wrong. But they went there and they did a survey because they check out wildlife and all that kind of stuff, which would be four years after the Sarah Joe disappeared. There's no boat there. They didn't record that there was a boat there. So after that time frame the boat mysteriously came aboard and mysteriously this body was buried on the on the atoll. Just just doesn't make any sense

because it's a weird amount of time. It's conceivable though, because I mean, it may be that the body and the boat were sort of washed shore, but they got covered by sands and then later on weather and waves and wind uncovered them again. That's ye, that some of somebody came along and buried the body and put across

up there. Yeah, so it's possible. It's also possible that these guys who were actually being paid to survey the islands were actually sort of took them, did some shortcuts it didn't go to every single one of the one of them that they were supposed to be. And that's a good point because this particular toll is the north most toll of the Marshall Islands, so it's the farthest north of the group. So it may have been that during the survey they were running a little behind some stuff.

Nobody's going to know that we didn't go there. Well let's just call it good. Yeah. I don't know that that's really the case, but this has led a lot of people to try and figure out, well, what happened to the crew and how did the boat get here? And the theories that I've found there's there's not a lot, but there's a couple. And the first one is, well, it's kind of Scooby doo hinky. That's that's my best

way to describe this. And I found this on a blog and this is the only place that ever said I found this, But we'll just go ahead and run with it. Is The theory is that a the crew survived the storm, but for whatever reason, their boat was incapacitated, so they're just floating at sea and they're found by another vessel. That happens to be pirates are, so we're

going with pirates here. A confrontation ensues and at some point Mormon is killed and his body is left on the boat, and then the other crew members are taken off of the boat and they just they just leave the boat. I'm guessing the idea was to scuttle it and let it sink, to hide the evidence and let the body is sink well. And the other thing is, if I'm a pirate, why would I scuttle a perfectly good boat that I could scrape all of the registration off and then resell. Because the value is not in

the people, it's in the boats. Yeah, they had nothing useful ondem except for some beers they could actually keep it for a for a tender for their boat. Did that to re name it? Because can you see Sarah Joe pirates? You know seriously? Yeah, yeah, it didn't seem like a very pirate theme name. Well, that's that's the first theory that we've got. The second theory is that everybody went somewhere. So run with me here with this, because this is this is part one. This theory is

kind of kind of splits off. So this is part one of the every body else went somewhere. Some Mormon stayed with the boat, and everybody else left mysteriously. There's a lot of theories trying to explain why the boat

and Mormon, like I said, ended up on the island. Okay, Well, if we think about the storm that was reported, this massive, massive storm in this itsy bitsy boat for all intensive purposes, a tiny boat in a giant storm, it's quite possible that through the swells, people were getting washed off the boat. So it could be that Mormon Odysseus style ties himself

to the boat. Well, he ties himself to the boat thinking everybody else has been washed overboard, and I don't want to go overboard because these kind of this Boston whaler, it doesn't have what's the term joe when you've got an enclosed cabin. It's got a close cabin, that's the exact word. It's an open boat. So he may have tied himself on thinking, well, if a big wave hits, at least it won't knock me overboard. These boats. I don't know if we've talked about this yet, but the

Boston whalers, they're reported to be virtually unsinkable. The gimmick has always been for the company that makes the Boston Whalers, they will take a saw to their boat. I think was in the sixties. The guy who started the company took a big saw, cut the boat in half and then motored the back half and towed the front half behind him. Because they're built with a styro from hall with fiberglass around him, so they will float regardless. So he might have known this and said, well, the boat's

not gonna go down. I'm just gonna hang on for dear life. Yeah, yeah, okay, so let's just that he did that. I guess. Yeah, they'll float regardless. Anything will float regardless, unless like literally it's just filled with water, you know, which a forty foot swell would do. You would swamp a boat because you know this is having looked at pictures now, it is literally just like the hull of a boat. It's not there's just no it's just it's a windshield or a windscreen and a steering

wheel and open boat. Yeah, that's all these seventeen footers are. So I can imagine if they were in forty ft swells that it could have taken on a whole buttload of water. And just and washed a couple of guys over, and in desperation, what do I do. I'm going to strap myself in because it's better to go down with the ship. Well, you know, the ship's probably not going to go down if you know about the boats. They might go to the water level, but it won't go

all the way under right, it's so buoyant. Okay, So we've got that. The theory then runs that he dies, whether that is Mormon dies from an injury that he sustained when the boat's being flipped around, or he's tossed around or what it might be, or he survives the storm but then dies of dehydration or starvation. He's he's tied to the boat. He's now he's now permanently with a boat that he can't get off of, which was a great idea when there was a storm, yep, but

maybe not so great after the fact. Regardless, he stays with the ship. The body stays with the ship, and it floats and runs aground on this atoll. At that point, somebody else before not in finds the boat and they find the body, and out of respect, they bury the body. And there's actually a little bit of evidence that adds

some credibility to that theory. All the reports say that when they found the body or found the jaw bone and they started digging the grave, they also found three quarter inch by three quarter inch strips of paper with foil on top of paper, so it was a stack of paper, foil, paper, foil, so on. So it's a stack of these. This is evidently something that is done in a Chinese burial ritual, and that's to represent money

and fortune in the next life. So people have theorized that it might have been some guys who are from China fishing in the area illegally. They find the boat, they find the body, they bury it, they leave this bit of a token as a custom to ferry him into the next life with good fortune. But they don't tell anybody because they're they're illegally. And the last thing I want to do is report that I found this body when, oh, by the way, I shouldn't have been

here in the first place. Is that the case. I don't know, but that's what folks have theorized. And I tried to find information about this supposed burial ritual. I found a lot of stuff that talks about there's the Chinese tradition where you burn effigies of things that you own in honor of your ancestors. So if you've ever been to like I've been to Chinatowns where you go into the store and paper cars and paper TVs and paper dresses and all these things their effigies that you

burn in respect to your ancestors. Because your ancestor doesn't want you to actually burn the real thing because that would be a waste of money, but to burn these things in respect for them to help them in the next life. I don't know if if that's what it was, but they say that that's what was found with the body, so lend some creedence. That is part one of this theory. Part two diverges a little bit. Part two says that Warmon wasn't the only one who survived and made it

to the atoll on the martialized lens. This version says at least one other person from the crew would have survived, and that they both made it to the Marshall Islands and tried to live their shipwrecked until they could be rescued. The issue is that this is a toll. If anybody wants to take the time to look this up on Google Earth. It's not a pleasant place. It's extremely arid. There's vegetation, but it's nothing that you would want to really eat. I mean's grasses and some bushes, but not

food stuff. And how far is it from the closest next closest island. It's a couple well, it's it's like a hundred or from the next toll. But that's the thing. It's a series of a tolls and then there's open ocean and then more tolls. And a toll, for anybody doesn't know, is literally a coral reef that has built up high enough to catch sand and then it creates and a toll typically will create a lagoon in the center.

So this thing is kind of a a D shape, and the boat hit on the right hand curve of the D and that's where they found it because that's where the majority of the sand is at. That's a okay, yeah, I was, you know, I was thinking, well, maybe this person could have like escaped down the atolls to the Marshall Islands, which are inhabited and have some times of society, and but this is this is very far away. Yeah,

that's a that's a huge distance to travel. Yeah, and here's here's okay, So technically speaking, you could possibly survive if you were living on this atollw what what's the distance to the net the very next door at all? Though we're talking. Yeah, that's why it's over miles if I remember correctly. I don't have the number written down, but I know it's it's a disk. It's it's not like you could swim there in a day in shark

infested waters, because they're literally it's shark infested waters. But you could live on the island sort of off of the vegetation. Well, there's a well, there's fish, there's a ton of migratory birds that come through there, crabs, so you can get protein. But the problem is water. Fort of annual rainfall on this at all, So that's not a lot of water. If you've got something to catch the water, that's great. But if you're just trying to live off of it pooled up, you are jacked. You're

completely adolest. There's no way to make that happen. As the boat was the boat smashed when they found it. It doesn't say I know it wasn't in good condition, but it doesn't say what condition the boat was in. I know that one of the family members has the boat now and they have it as a bit of a memorial, and they mean because it's it's been the it was sev so we're at thet five year mark, so they just did a memorial at the thirty five

year mark. But I don't know that the boat is seaworthy in terms of being able to actually go out and motor around in it. I just thought that to make a nice water basins, have the boats clean the boat out and set it out there to catch rain water. I'm gonna guess it probably had holes in it, and it's probably too big for one man to drag on his own. Maybe two could do it. But we we I mean, we've we've gone pretty far into the conditions

on this a toll. But the theory is is that Mormon dies and then this other person, through some means, decides to get out of there. My friend has died, all my other friends are dead. I got to get off of this place, and somehow tries to swim away to find something closer for whatever reason. Well, he obviously tied some sea turtles together exactly. That's what I would do, because sea turtles are do this, whoa do Yeah, yeah,

it's exactly yeah. But I mean the problem with the theory is, how would this person, other than swimming, try to leave because it seems like a foolish venture if to try and swim hundreds of miles or again, I don't think you can see the other tolls, right, but I guess it um a little matters like how banged up the boat was slash, how much of the boat they found, like if it had been cracked into he could have, like you know, makeshift paddled this boat out,

since apparently they float if they're you know, cut into three pieces. Even you know, you you find a stick or something that will allow you to paddle, and you just say, well, you know, I can't see another island, but I can't live here, so I'm just gonna take my chances and paddle on out. But well, the hard part is, and what we don't know is did whoever survived?

If there was this other survivor, I would think if I was going to go on the open sea on a itsy bitsy piece of styrophoe and try and paddle my way away, I'd want to have supplies as in water, So is there anything that they had whole water, because if you just go out on the paddle out on

the ocean, within five hours you're dawned. Well, it kind of depends on what was left in the boat, Like say they went out with at least one cooler, and if they had to have the fourth thought to strap it into the boat, then you know, and it didn't get lost in the storm, then the cooler could actually hold water. Um, they might have had other things like Baylor's on board. Yeah, I mean, but the problem is there's not standing fresh water for you to collect. I guess.

The other thing is, like you do dumb things to survive sometimes, like humans are great at making decisions in survival mode, and oftentimes they're just super stupid decisions like right, you've just watched your friend I. You're super dehydrated, you're malnourished. You think, well, I can't live here, don't have any fresh water, but better go out again. You know you're not that desperate, you know you do anything right. I mean, And there's there are by the way, they're they're they're waste.

If you have if you have the problem with too there are ways to desalinate water and purified water. You know, plastic clear plastic sheet doesn't check every time, you know, and so it's a it's a drip system. Yeah, absolutely, really easy to do if you have if you're lucky enough to have some plastic sheeting they may or may not have had, right, Yeah, I guess something you're collected in. This doesn't address like the first theory that of course

popped into my head was aliens. You're laughing, but seriously, like, okay, so if we if they really didn't find it when they did that geographic surveyor so you're you're using the time lag, okay, yeah, they like and then yeah, okay, something weird happened and then they popped out or you know, a little bit of it dropped out. You know, they seem to have disappeared for a really long time. Is it possible that the survey crew just didn't hit that

at all? Sure? But is it also possible that like there was some kind of time lapse and they just weren't there? Also? Sure? You know, you know, who's what who's to say that, like they can't say another island in between? Surely there are more islands in between. Hawaii

and these atolls. Who's to say they didn't hit another island, stayed there for as long as possible, and then realize, crap, we can't live here anymore, or decided, oh we are going to live here, but our friend Mormon is dead, so let's give him a sea burial, send him out to see. I mean, there's this is one of those ones right where there's like so little information that there are a multitude of crazy and that's all we know is they disappeared on that day and ten years later

the boat and a buried body was found. Was it a full buried body well or was it just but not not all the bones were actually in the grave. Yeah. I I didn't get the impression that the entire body was there. The impression I had was the only thing was there was a job on, which would be wrong. I had heard that somebody else later on found a bunch of bones like vertebrate and stuff like, not in the grave, but like down by the water and the rocks,

you know, near the water or something. Weird. It's so weird, yeah, I mean, there's there's all these there's a lot of weird conflicting stuff, and there's The problem with this is there's been a lot of interpreted writing about the story,

as in people are taking liberties with it. And I know people take liberties with stories that we report, that we talked about all the time, but these people have turned it more into the story of the Sarah Joe and so they've you know, they write, this is what the crew did, and this is what they we're feeling, and on and on and on. Um. It's it's like that Movidra. Yeah, it's like the movie what is the

Greatest Storm? The perfect story, the perfect story. Yeah, they don't know exactly why, but somebody went ahead and his dramatizing it on their blog or on their free riding space, and then that gets mixed in. Right, What we really know is boat disappeared, boat found, job, bone found, and I don't I mean other than the fact that okay, well, if truly it was found with this paper foil system,

I could see that that being applausible explanation. But I have no idea what happened to the rest of the crew, nor what happened in the ensuing prior ten years. We assuming that they all five survived the storm and they found themselves obviously they must have been out of fuel or maybe their engine crapped out so they couldn't get back to Hawaii. So they were adrift for a long time. And of course now that some of them might have been injured somebody assuming what, or another would have died

the hydration. And what do you do. You can either eat him, you know what, does nothing to happen, or more clearly, they just pushed him overboard and give him a barrel at sea, because you can't have a rotting corpse in your boat. Uh, that will kill you faster than anyhing else. Yeah, and so and that might have been the case that they kept dying off and getting thrown in the sea. Only one guy was left and

he died eventually. And just you know, I spent years after that drifting in the boat, or months at least. And like Devin said, he could have gotten stuck on some of their a toll for a while before being broken loose and sat on onward. And yeah, I I can't believe that they made it to any island. Yeah, I know, it's very it's amazing that they made land anywhere. Yeah, it kind of is, Yeah, because boats drift for years

and years and years and it never come aground. Maybe who knows, maybe he actually circled the world a couple of times. Who the hell knows, it's possible. This is such a good segue into my boat story. We should probably start on a year boat story, because really we've run mine into the ground. No pun intended. The boat ends up on an island, Yeah, my mine. Also it's you know, a boat on an island that a boat shouldn't be on, right, Yeah, I'm just gonna jump right

into mine, you guys. So we're gonna talk about Bouvet Island. It's literally the most middle of nowhere you can be. It's widely touted as the most obsolete, not obsolete, what's the word I'm looking for, isolated, I want to be. Yeah, that's actually southeast Oregon. It's um um four hundred miles south southwest of the tip of South Africa and about eleven hundred miles north of Antarctica, so it's in the Arctic Circle. But it's just, I mean, it's so far

away from everything. There's there's really nothing around. There's nothing around it. Yeah, it's it's totally inhospitable to life. About nineteen square miles large of it is a glacier, again, totally inhospitable to life, and as is the case with many tiny, tiny islands, apparently, uh, they're super popular. So this island was first sighted. I'm just gonna give you guys a little history to like inform where we're going

with this. Um. The island was first sighted on January one, seventeen thirty nine, by Jean Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier. So that how you would say that great, my my French is really good. He that the island was later named for him. Unfortunately, this guy, you know, it was January one, he was probably super hungover. It wasn't great at accurately recording things because he wrote down the wrong coordinates and effectively lost the island until eighteen o eight.

It's losing an island. The island. It's super tiny, right, It's so tiny and so out of the way. It's not even like there's an island like right close to it, right, like like we were just talking about with the atolls there within three hundred miles of each other. Right this actually yeah, this this is like a fun little bit. Thompson Island was said to have been close by quote unquote, it didn't never give like any kind of modical nautical miles or anything like that. But as it turns out,

that was just a phantom island. It was. It was never an actual island. They were like, yeah, there's an island close to it, kind of it's called Thompson Island. It's It's another mystery in and of itself, the fact that like four or five different people said, yeah, there's an island over there, and it just never really existed, it turns out. So we'll talk about that maybe some other day. So in eighteen o eight, British whaler named James Lindsay spotted Bouvet Island and you know, named it

after himself. Like yeah, so it's called Lindsay Island for a while. And then in George Norris claimed the island for the British Crown and named it Liverpool Island. Liverpool later my favorite shaped pool. So excited about this island that one there, Well, that's it, right, somehow super fopular island. That's not the end of the history of it. Later in seven Norway decided, oh, actually that's our island because

we're really close in proximity to it somehow. Uh So they landed on it and declared it was the Dependency, and they renamed it after the original finder, Dudekay. Technical it is the technical term finder dude. Yeah. So in nineteen seventy one it became a nature preserve, although I'm not sure what they're preserving. I think ice maybe. Yeah, I think there are they. I'm sorry, they call them

sea elephants. Okay. In every literally every account I read of this, they talked about the cl elephants and I had to google it. What's the elephants were? I think, I think it's sea lions, but apparently other people call them sea elephants. Somewhere between nineteen and nineteen fifty eight, some volcanic activity or maybe a landslide created a brand new ice free rocky part of Bouvet Island, and it included a small lake or lagoon. Always a lagoon, they always, Yeah,

it's like the atolls. They always call them a lagoon. But I guess if it's a body of water inside an island, then it's you know, I tend to think that a lagoon is attached to the outer to the ocean, so it's kind of like a harbor. Yeah, and this was hard to kind of I guess us out. I looked at some drawings that expeditions had done, um, particularly pertaining to this little new bit and the mapping of it, and I couldn't get a really really good sense of if it was a landlocked lake or a lagoon that

like fed into the ocean. So that, again is information to keep in your mind as we talked about this story, because it drastically changes how weird the story. Well, and there's there's there's maybe I'm jumping ahead and the fan tell me, but I remember seeing the photo and I didn't. I never saw an outlet of the la dude. Well, but it depends on what angle that photo was taken from, because it's my impression that it was taken from a boat as they left the island. And I don't want

to get too far ahead. Yeah, So, and actually I don't know if anybody's ever got for a way through. And it's not that big, and nobody even knows it could be six inchest deep. I mean it could just be a big puddle. Well, actually we'll get to that. So this is an ice free area of Bubet Island. And as we previously for well for now, well, actually the um as we discussed it is great glacier. This

is the seven percent that is not. And a geologic survey expedition that went there measured the ground temperature, stuck a thermometer into the ground. It is seventy seven degrees fahrenheit. So it's volcanic. It's super hot that area. That's yeah, that's super warm. But for ground in general, I think seventy seven degrees is pretty freaking warm activities. I don't know. I'm pretty sure I could stick a thermometer in the

in the front yard right now and close. Sure. But for a place that's glacier, oh yeah, so it's not glacier that was in that that measurement was taken, so you can assume that that is the cooled version of the area that we're about to talk about or have been talking about. Again, accounts very but in nineteen sixty four, either a helicopter or a British naval ship set out to explore this little bit of land because Norway it owns it now, so of course the British Navy took

an extra big interest in it. Again, politics are hard to tell the tiny little places like this. I was thinking that it was that was a Norwegian ship or something like that that had a helicopter pad and a helicopter. It was British. Yeah, for sure. That's the one thing I am sure of in this story is that it was British. Yeah. They they go to explore this little bit of land. Um, they took some scientific measurements. Um. And remember this little bit of land is ten years

old at the time. They take scientific measurements. They you know, kind of take a look around. Oh. And also they find a life raft in the middle of the newly formed lagoon. A life raft but actually digging a boat. Yeah, like a life like an old timey life raft wooden. And from the map that I dot and again I'm not saying with certainty that this is how it is, but it looked like it was cut off from the ocean with scree which is what they call um jagged rocks.

So a man by the name of Alan Crawford was a part of this expedition and wrote a book about it, and he described the site Joe, would you chose my like go to reader, Yeah, what drauma, we wondered was attached to this strange discovery. There were no markings to identify, so old internationality. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it with the dumba accent on the rocks the hundred

yards away. It was a forty four gallant drum and a pair of oars with pieces of wood and a copper flotation or buoyancy tank opened out flat for some purpose. Thinking castleways amount have landed. We made a brief search but found no human remains. So puzzled understandably, the expedition snaps a photo of the boat with an elephant seal close by. Another reason why they might have been in a rush to get out of there and headed off because their window of time to leave this island was

limited because the weather is so bad. In fact, this expedition had to sit at sea for like five days because the weather was so bad that they couldn't land, and their entire expedition accounted for minutes. Yeah, they were on the island, if I remember correctly. So that it's not a very thorough investigation. It's not. If you can

stick with us, that mystery deepens a little bit. In nineteen sixty six, two years later, you know, give or take a couple of months, another expedition made its way to Bouvet Island, this time allowing much more time for study. They were really interested in that new area and now it had formed, and why it was remaining glacier free. And they spent a lot of time looking at the lagoon as well, because they thought, oh, this is inhospitable

kind of area. It's subarctic, and we're really interested in what kind of life thrives in subarctic temperatures. They did a lot of measurements in the lagoon, talked about the different types of algae that had flourished there despite the cold, but never once mentioned the fact that there was a lifeboat in there, or oars or anything else on the shore around the lagoon, which leads many people to believe that two months later the lifeboat, ors buency devices, whatever,

we're all gone. M hm, that was only two months later, two years years? Ask the two months? Sorry, I'm sorry now? Can I can I ask something to clarify because I didn't understand in the description? Is the buoyancy tank laid out flat? Does that mean somebody took a It was a copper tank and they hammered it open and hammered it flat. That's my understanding of it. And I wish that that picture was better. There's just the one picture.

It's pretty picture. It's a pretty crude picture. But so you can see the lifeboat and an elephant seal, but you can't thought at first I thought the seal was the tank. Until I realized it was a seal. I felt really dumb. Yeah, like an elephant a seal shaped tank. Yeah, there's none of the other You can't see this stuff that that was apparently on this Okay, And so that for me is like a big I can explain away

what happened there. If it's like kind of like just an inlet lagoon that opens up into the sea and has just a boat floating in it, right, But if it's a landlocked lagoon, this is a much larger mystery to me, right, yeah, right, yeah, well yeah, I mean, I don't even understand why somebody would take a tank and hammer it flat. That's a lot of freaking effort. But I don't know if we're if I'm jumping ahead here, but I mean, okay, I can see somebody taking the

time and effort to drag a boat in. I can see him dragging their oars in, but cutting in half or mashing flat a copper tank. It's just a weird thing. Doesn't make any sense. I was a theory, okay, okay, and I don't know are there but we're not at that theory. Okay. I'm sorry. That's that's fine. I like jumping around and I have I think four theories that

I'm going to go through one. The first one, the most romantic one, is that there was an actual shipwreck and there was an actual lifeboat that happened to find this island, and there were survivors that tried to live on the island and perished. Of course, their skeletons were never found. Of course, you know, who knows. Maybe the

sea elephants dragged him into the water. Well, as you say, there's there's no there's no structures in terms of land mass, it's of any kind that you could use for protection from the weather. Yeah, so your run away they blow around. I gotta say, that's uh. That latitude is fifty four degrees south, which is what we call the furious fifties. Yeah, it's serious. It's dripping winds. Yeah, I've actually been at that latitude. That's Sway, Argentina, which I spent several days

in is it's almost the exact same latitude. And actually in the summertime it's pretty warm and nice. It's not as inhospitable as you would think the latitude, but the wind is ferocious. Yeah. So, and there are a lot of problems I have with this theory, right And granted, you know the tank pounded flat. It speaks of kind of a desperation that you want to attribute to people trying to save their lives. But there was there were no skeletons found, there were no signs of camp, there

were no signs of attempts forages. There's no signs of like, you know, somebody trying to kill a sea elephant or anything like that. Well, there's there's nothing on there's nothing there to burn beside the boat, so there's no gonna be no signs of fire that if you kill one of those cea elephants, good luck, because they're they're massive. But okay, let's say you steal a pop well there, you know, their bones are about the size of yours.

And if these are ripping winds with massive waves, at some point I can see that all being washed away. I don't see what are the signs of quote unquote camp there would be, Well, it can't be like camp fires, for example, there's nothing on this island to burn rock.

So here's my number one complaint with this whole thing is that anybody, well, in my mind, anybody who's in a survival situation, particularly with a lifeboat like this, knows that the way that you survived that situation is you pull that lifeboat up on shore and you make it your shelter. There are numerous, very well to document cases of people surviving for months, very extended amounts of time

that well, but that's right, okay. So and again that's where you know comes in, like it depends on where their waves hitting this shore or is this like a fairly calm lagoon kind of area when did believe me, the wind down there is strong enough to take a boat like that and knock it over and push it around. Right, But so you assume that if if they're using this as shelter, they found a way to secure it. Yeah,

probably he's probably piling rocks around it and such. But eventually when they're gone, you know, the wind works at loose and flips, flips it around, pushes it around. And I'm going, but you would see those rocks, the piles of rocks, Yeah, probably, but they might have looked fairly random. That wouldn't have been right up against the boat by

that point in time. Well, let me let me I mean, I know I'm jumping off the track here, but okay, So the island was quote unquote first officially discovered in the early se and there were whalers in that area or a couple hundred years. So wouldn't it be possible to to follow your I'm going to use the boat

as my shelter theory to say that. But let's say before this this fallout area became this, this slide area happened, that maybe somebody had been using their boat as a shelter on the ice and then died there, and then when the ice crumbled because of this slush out, the boat was left behind and everything else was buried. Because the boat is big enough, it would bounce on top of the this landslide. It's light. Light things always kind

of get pushed the top. So I don't know if a wooden boat is light compared to several tons rock. It's the lightest thing it's possible. So you're thinking how far back, I don't know, seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds. At some point some porch love gets stuck on the island, like this theory is running with. But let's say I'm saying it's pre this area becoming established and then when it all sloughs out, you know, breaks away from the

ice or whatever. I don't know, I'm spitballing here. So it could be older than people are trying to establish it as having come about. Well, not necessarily that old though, because they also He also noted the presidence of a forty four gallon drum is not something an No, you're right, you're right, you're right. I'm I hadn't. I forgot about that bit, yah, I mean, I don't know. I'm just I'm just trying to as everybody is grasping at strong

as for the little bit that we've got. Right. So the other thing that I you know, I think about when I think about this, like drum that's metal that's been pounded out, I think of somebody in the you know, kind of mid sixties, early seventies, there's planes flying around, maybe trying to use it as an S O S signal kind or like our giant reflection. Yeah, wondered about that. I can see that, sure, but it's not my favorite theory.

It's a theory, but it's not a favorite theory. Another theory is the lifeboat just kind of lost at sea, you know, torn off, a boat just randomly happened to find this lagoon, although of course that doesn't explain the oars and all that stuff on the shore, and also the highly improbability. And this is the other thing that I didn't really talk about with that first one. It's like,

we lost this island for a real long time. You know, it's so remote that it seems really unlikely that somebody would just luckily happen upon it in a life threatening situation, or unlikely or an unmanned boat would just happen to wash into this lagoon right up somewhere. A crap in the ocean floats up onto places all the time. I mean, it happens. It's it's rand happenstance, but it's still happen. It does. It's just it washes up on places that

are like huge land masses by and large. I mean you know, every once in a while you'll see uh, you know sand bar that's got a bunch of stuff washed up on it, But really that's because the tides wash it. You know, they pass right through there. This is not a place that is known or recognized as a high traffic area by any means, and the tides don't run through there. It's not like, yeah, it's not like, you know, the Western Seaboard tides run through and deposit

a bunch of stuff. Because this is it's a lone incident. So you know, the the odds of some like sad souls on a lifeboat and life situation washing or an unmanned lifeboat seemed fairly low. And again I come back to the whole I can't tell because I've looked at the Google Earth images of this place and I can't see a look boon of any kind I saw, and I could pretty small, and I couldn't tell if it was if it's land locked or attached to the sea in any way, if I was looking at the right lagoon. Yeah,

And the other problem is it's it. I don't remember when, but it was only fairly recently that they got the first full aerial photo of the entire island without clouds, because it is always socked in at some portion of it with clouds just because that's the way the weather is in that area. Yeah. So the next theory, the third theory is my favorite theory. It's that it's the remains of an fairly undocumented landing party that did an

expedition to this island or land on this island. Um. So, you know, the theory goes that a landing party used their lifeboats to dock in, right, which you kind of wood if you had lifeboats like this, there's a high possibility that you could reattach them to your ship. Of course that's fine, you know, well, and a current kind of commercial ships don't have that capability. Once you abandoned ship,

you've abandoned ship. But there are used to be, and I think as late as like the eighties and nineties and maybe still today, there are ships that you could, you know, like send a docking party out or landing party out in your smaller ships. Yeah. Yeah, that's the tenders. That's what whaling ships used to do all the time. Yeah, exactly, so they would be tenders. Think you know, on recent I guess actually no, this was back in the early sixties. As I say, they would be using zodiac. But I

keep forgetting out it was back in early sixties. Yeah. So the theory goes that a landing party of whaling ships from wherever went by the island and thought, there's an island, let's go check it out. Dropped two ships, two boats, excuse me, landed. One of them got a

little bit ruined in the landing party. They went around, you know, they explored, they realized there was nothing really there, and then decided, well, this one, this, this boat is damaged, so we'll just leave it here and we'll all pile back into this other boat, go back to the ship and be on our merry way. I like this theory for a number of reasons. One, it explains how the boat got there. It explains why it's there. It explains why there's no sign of camp or anything like that.

I also think, and I didn't see this anywhere, but in my mind, it explains why a tank may have been pounded out, because it seems as though that could have been a potential attempt to repair the ship in some way to say oh or the boat excuse me, to say oh, well, let's just see if we can Jerry ready real quick. Oh no, that's not working, okay, or it's not worth our time, or the weather's coming

in or whatever. Okay, we'll just leave it. We'll all pile back into this one boat that's not damage make shifting, just kind of like throw it on the it we hit in the water, open, pop right out, yeah exactly. And then you just don't think that I don't think that would have solved their problems. I don't think it would have solved their problem either. But you know, I think that it's a possibility to just be you know,

like on shore kind of like troubleshooting the problem. Then think that never, never mind, all right, we'll just pile back into this boat. We'll leave it here, go on their merry way. Nobody reports to Norway or Yeah or whoever wherever that you know, says we landed on this thing and we left a boat here. But before they leave, they they and this is the fundamental clues to who did it. They dragged the boat to that lagoon and they put it in. And again that's a practical joke,

and this tells us who it was. It was the Russians. I mean the Russians, they had that kind of sense here. So and that's you know, again that comes back to my biggest problem with this whole story is that whole big question mark that's attached to I don't I don't

totally and know the situation of this lagoon. I mean truly, all of the geographic maps that I've seen, all of the Google Earth images that I've seen, the Google Earth images that I've seen, I don't know what Google Earth images you were looking at, but I didn't see a single lagoon in any of them. I saw a bunch of kind of you know, alcoves in the shore of the island, but I didn't see any lakes or anything like that. And you know, and I may have just

missed it or whatever. So I I don't have a good satisfying answer of is this a landlocked lake, lake, lagoon, whatever, or is this a just a like a inland. Now It's like there was somebody actually made a map of that little peninsula and it showed the location of the lagoon, and then that's what I saw. But the spot, a dark spot on the Google the Google Earth image in that location. So I guess then we go back to

why is it there? And then you know there's the four theory, which is of course that perhaps it never existed photoshop it would have been a really good photoshop, because there is photographic evidence. It turns out that Alan Crawford is the only person to have ever mentioned this, So eveno there were a bunch of the there, that's the he's the only person. He wrote a book about it. And then you know the scientific survey that went back

how two years later I didn't mention it. And again you know, they were studying the lagoon and they said it was shallow, but I don't know how extensive there's you know, I don't know if they went out to the middle and like stepped in it and said, oh, yeah, it's super shallow, or if they just said, uh, it looks pretty shallow. Probably fine in it, just like to

know the deeper it is. And yeah, I have no idea. Again, there are a lot of big question marks attached to this one, which is of course what makes it an unsolved mystery, which is why we're talking about it. Well, yeah, I I never was able to actually track in on which theory I thought was best, And it's because of

the fact that there's one mention. Yeah, if there was documentation in the logs or from other people besides this one guy, and if that initial crew had spent more than forty five freaking minutes on the island, I could give it more credence. But I don't because it's just it's so wishy washy. Yeah. So that's, you know, an interesting one. And by the way, this was a listener suggestion. It was suggested by Tarken. I probably have just butchered

your name. I greatly apologize. Yeah, would you give me a pronunciation guide because I can't figure out how to say your name? But it was a listener suggestion, and it was a great listener suggestion I had actually never heard of. Again, you know, I keep saying, although at this point I think maybe more times than not, I'm saying, oh, I say that I know a lot of unsolved mysteries,

but I've never heard of this one. I think at this point I need to like shelve that response because at this point, and you know, actually that that I feel a bit foolish now is I just realized that the Sarah Joe was also a listener's suggestion, and for the life of me. I didn't write down who suggested that I don't Steve Steve Joe's turn at this. Yeah, unless you guys want to talk more about making of creepy scary boat mysteries. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah you can.

You can round us off on creepy scary boat mysteries. So I'm going to talk about another boat. This one did not end up on an island when I'm talking about, of course, the Envy Joita Envy standing for I Believe Merchant Vessel also known as Mary Celeste Pacific. This is why you pick this. You love the Mary Celeste's favorite. Any any any ship or boat found this like everybody's gone and it's just just cool. Before you go any further,

this was suggested by Ben our listener. This was on my radar already because if you go out to the web and you find one of those those web pages that's the ten creepiest, weirdest ghost ships ever, this one's usually on it with joy to perfect. So this is this entire short episode is a listeners suggestion. I like this listener suggestion. Didn't even I didn't even realize that these were all listeners suggestions. Boats boats alright, so let's let's get let's get down to our mystery here. So

this takes place. This starts in October nine. So about five am October three, the Joy Da Celeste left Samoa bound north bound for the Toklau Islands, which are We're about two seventy miles still are actually I don't think they've moved apart, but the hundred seventy miles away. There were twenty five people on board. That included sixteen crew and nine passengers, which I think is a little strange when you think about it. That's the first that's the

first part of our mysteries. Why so many crew this boat was about seventy long. That's a mystery. Well, it's it's all about the money. The owner was trying to get extra cash by paying his crew, but by having by having extra passengers. I'm not mystified by the passengers. I'm just wondering why he needed sixteen crew. So it was captain. The captain's name was quote unquote Dusty Miller, and his first mate. Um, I won't bother with the

name because people are gonna forget him anyway. So Dusty Miller, his first mate Mr Simpson, and a whole bunch of other guys and nine passengers. One of the passengers was a doctor who was heading up there to perform an amputation. So he had this a little black bag with him. Anyway, so they again, they steamed out of the They steamed out of the harbor and Samoa and we're the people were needless say, never seen again. Are we going to

talk about the fact that they left a day light? Oh? Yeah, they did leave a little bit late, not quite a daylight. They were gonna leave late the night before, and then they wanted to laying because the clutch went bad on their sports side engine, so they were running on one engine. Yeah, they wanted to try and find some parts. It couldn't find some parts, and so they decided to leave at the leave at the tide at five am on just

one engine. Yeah. Always a bad idea. And by the way, and I think it's always a bad idea, is just getting on one of these ghost ships to begin with. Somebody says, hey, you want to go for a ride at my ghost ship? No, no, okay, So they left on one engine. Her cargo was consistent of that. Yeah, this boat was not just a tour boat or anything like that. It was it was it was a cargo boat. Her cargo was medical supplies, some timber eighty empty forty

five gallon oil drums, and food. And I assumed they were taking food up there for resale to the Tacou Islands because apparently the Taco Islands are even smaller and more ice lated than Samoa. It was supposed to take between forty one and forty eight hours. In other words of we're all off. We've ever done my singing career is tank People don't download our episodes for the singing. Yeah. So anyway, so the Joda was scheduled to arrive on

October five. Of course they didn't show up. So on October six, they sent a message reporting the ship was overdue the port they were supposed to land, part the port that they were supposed to land, and reported them overdue. Uh. Nobody reported hearing any sort of distress signal from the from the crew, and there's a reason for this. Turns out the radio tent tent had been disconnected. They didn't

know about it. UH. Search and rescue mission was launched and from six to twelve October planes from the New Zealand Air Force cer Scenaria roughly one square miles and found no sign of the boat or the people. Five weeks later, the No've ever ten merchant ship Tuvalu sighted to join you to more than six hundred miles west of her scheduled route that would be somewhat north of Fiji,

I think northeast of Fiji. Uh it was partially submerged listening to port and there was no trace of any of the passengers passengers of crew of course UH four times of cargo was missing. And they also noted the radio was tuned to Killer Hurts, which is the International Marine Radio Telephone Distress channel, So obviously somebody was trying

to get help. Yeah. It turns out that this is discovered later on during the inquiries, That is that there was a break in the cable leading to the the external antenna and apparently the break had been painted over at some point and so it looked like it was intact. But actually though there wasn't there weren't really vppy things. This was not the most well maintained ship. I mean, um for you know, like obviously it's a little risky

taken off to see with only one engine working. Although I when when you think about it, I guess it's d was had at the starboard engine quit. Then you could always dismantle the clutch and fix the port engine clutch and get it work. But there were some other problems too, like, for example, they had builch pumps like all boats do, and these ones didn't have screens on the ends of their intakes, and so the bulge pumps

became clogged. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This was discovered later when they actually got the boat back to port and started examining it. They discovered the cooling intake, the cooling water intake for the sea for the starboard engine was a galvanized pipe. It rusted through and it started leaking. And so this was there was a fairly

old ship at this point right now. Yeah, it was like, well it wasn't that inch I think it was built, yeah, I mean, and it had served in the war certain World War two, you know, it had seen some time number of yeah, and that you would expect that perhaps if it were going to continue to operate, that like these things would have been replaced, they would have it would have been rebuilt or whatever. But that for whatever

reason that those things had been overlocked. Yeah, and it turns out, you know, as we all know now, galban ice pipe used to be the all the rage, and now we know that it kind of rushed through dominized pipe. And what's sad is when this boat was originally built, it had brass pipe. But at some point in it's refitting. I think the U. S. Navy refitted it when they took it over for World War Two. They stripped the old piping and replace it with galvanize because Galvian ice

was better. And so then maybe if they hadn't done that, this might not have happened right, quite possible, or if they'd put you know, coffer or brass, yeah, copper brass back in. There were shortage, there were shortages during the war. That that wasn't the only problem, not at all the only problem. When they got to join it back to back to harbor and looked her over carefully, discovered the whole was sound, there was there were no holes in that.

But they imediately discovered that leaky pipe which had rested through. As we said, kelvanic corrosion isn't that um when you've got different types of metal within a loop, and that you know, one type of metal, like the offcasts from like a copper loop for instance. Right, if you've got copper and GalF and I steel, copper corrodes the galvanize steel. The little particles from each of them corrode the other and kind of becomes it's a weird chemical reaction. Yeah. Yeah,

it's my understanding. I could be wrong, yeah, yeah, But anyway, so back to our story, So the crew would not have known about this leak until the water rose about the floorboards of the engine room. So by that time it was really too late. The whole thing is underwater, and getting to it to plug it would have been pretty much impossible the leak, right, yeah, getting to the

leak to plug it. H And as I as noted previously, the bills pumps were not did not have strainers on their intakes, so they got clogged and stopped working, so they kept taking on water. But my understanding of the construction of the whole of the ship, maybe I'm jumping ahead, that it was even more unsinkable than yeah it was the ship that yeah, it was. Well, it was two and six seater planking, it was, which is what it

was built up. And then the hole. At one point they decided to refrigerate the hold, so they aligned it with cork to ancelate it. So yeah, and also on top of that, as I mentioned previously, they were carrying eighty empty barrels and full of air, full of air exactly, so the boat was unsinkable. Now this is this is saying that those those were sealed and so they would

hold the air, not just open. Yeah. Yeah, And and the I would assume they would have been sealed because they're transporting for a purpose, I would useless for the purpose without there, without their their plugs, that would be And also just to keep the fumes down and the hold of the boat, you'd want to have them plug. Yeah, So it only makes sense that these things were sealed up. But even without that, the boat was still more or less unsinkable, right, So, and it was taking on water,

but it was unsinkable. Yeah, But nonetheless it's still a stressful situation. Well, anyway, let me talk a little bit about the damage here though, that they they found there was damage to the superstructure. The boat had had a flying bridge which apparently had been torn away. What's a flying bridge? Sorry, it's kind of a it's a cabin that's opened at the back. Okay, yeah, that's on top of the regular on top of the regular bridge. You know. It's it's like you see a lot of those in

there for fishing boats and stuff. You get a lot of height and so you can you can spot the fish ees from further away like that. But apparently it's not it's not always enclosed. Yeah, sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't, but it's it's a pot. Yeah. Often it's just like a platform with the windscreen and extra steering station and then and then that the awning. Maybe it's just like, yeah, it's open like an awning or something like that. So that had been torn away a lot.

Most of the windows have been broken. Somebody had ranked the canvas awning on the top of the deck house behind the ridge, which makes sense. It's hot, and then you want to get some one more shade. I assume uh an auxiliary pump had been rigged up in the engine room. I'm sorry. The canvas awning Was it intact when they found the shipper. It appears it was intact.

It wasn't like there wasn't shredded or anything. That now, well, yeah, and that's why, there's some images of it and you can see that it's still in place, and you would see the damage to the flying bridge and it's significant, but it's not as if it was torn away. Yeah, it's it's curious to me, Yeah, it's I just thought that it was worth noting that part of it had been torn away but other parts were undamaged, and that

that seemed that appeared to be from waves. Yeah. Essentially, it's a little odd to me that the the temporary owning that they rigged that they had rigged up was more or less intact, you know, so much of the damage had been done. That's kind of interesting. Any Way, back to the story here. So they had rigged up

an auxiliary pump in the engine room between the two engines. Uh, but it was not connected, which would indicate to me that the starboard engine probably quit right about when they were ready to connected, because obviously you're taking the engine to run the pump. Yeah, I'm assuming that this probably wasn't a power takeoff kind of situation from the engine. They probably was an electric pump, right, and so as long as they had electricity, which they got when the

motor was running, then they could run that thing. But when the motor stopped running, well no juice and no auxiliary pump. So yeah, they were kind of hosed as I As I mentioned, the boat was left listing and it was semi submerged. It was you said, you've seen the pictures. It was very heavily The barnacle growth on the on the outside of the hull above the usual waterline show that it had been It had been in that position for a considerable amount of times weeks. Yeah,

at least don't grow like crazy fast. Um, I don't know, I have no idea how fast they grow. Well, I mean it took it took a number of weeks, was about five weeks, and so there was enough growth in that couple of weeks period for being recognizable. Yeah, so that that gives you some frame reference of their speedy growth. What else they had a dinghy with like a tender And also what are they what they call carly life rafts also called carly floats, and these are like these

are like non inflatable life rafts. The military used them like in World War Two. They're kind of hard plastic,

they're not higher plastic. What they are is is there that there's a central core that's formed in a noble, and the central core is made up of either a copper tubing or sometimes steel tubing, and it's like twelve in diameter, and it's formed in a big oble, just like a regular inflatable life raft would look right, And then that's covered with cork on the outside for additional buoyancy. And then that's all covered with canvas which is in sealed with and stuff like that, and then it's got

like a like a mesh floor. Yeah, there you go, Devin showing us a picture right now, and I'm the Google grea. Okay, So if anybody has ever watched I swear you've watched Jaws, right, and there's they kind of do a discussion of when all the guys were floating in those boats and the sharks were coming along. Yeah, and they they kind of did a bit of a filming of the scene. Am I confusing that with something else where they showed those boats and they showed how

they had the that kind of net flooring to them. Yeah, some of them had like lattice like wood slat floors and some of them had a mess sort of flooring. Okay, that's that's that's what we're talking about. But there so they had three of those, all those were missing, which was suggest that they took to the life rafts at some point in a bandoned ship. But of course that doesn't really make a lot of sense because as we all know, the boat was unsinkable. Those and and the

carly life rafts. I'm sorry, excuse me if I'm wrong here, but those are the kind of life rafts that are like stored, they inflate. They had the canister, it's hatched to them and they inflate. Now these are these are not inflatable, They're always inflated. And the dinghy as well, always inflated. Danny was a wooden dinghy like like the one that so they weren't that that would have only been seaworthy if there was an emergency, like if you

inflated them yourself. So they could have just been washed off if there had been. I'm assuming they were pretty pretty carefully lashed down, but they could have been. They could have been broken loose and washed off. I would say that somebody somebody took them, either an abandoned ship or somebody else came along maybe after the fact, found that the boat floating, and thought, well and life Fest grab a few things. They're not enough life Fest for everybody.

They had them, but not enough. I may have been googling while we just covered oh you were uh yeah, see what other mysterious things. The starboard engine was covered by a mattress. Well. Yeah. One of the theories about that is that the as the water level was creeping up, the flywheel and the and the belt on the starboard engine was flinging up water unto the electrical panel, and they might have wanted to cover it, so they stopped

wedding down the electric panel. So that's one possibility match like they didn't have you're not you're not, Yeah, and you're not. That's probably the closest thing that they had. But you know, a max especially like it's full of water already. Yeah, you're thinking of like a seely posture pedic. And I'm not talking this is like a c matress, Like that's the one that's a couple of couple. I know what you're talking about. H that's one of those one of those guys. I just is still weird to

me that would be what they would use. But as I'm sorry, continue yeah, uh, as I said that the radio was was disabled, and so they it's estimated the range of the radio is about two miles, and so they were broadcasting in a stress signal. Undoubtedly that nobody that nobody heard. Yeah, quite sad. The electric clocks on board stopped at ten twenty five switches for the cabin lighting and the navigation lights were on, which indicates that

power finally was lost at night. And there's I I'm not sure if I believe this what I when they've heard in the standard of couches that the everything was wired directly into the ship's generator, the lights and the clocks and everything. But I can't. I find that hard to believe you'd wired You'd wired them to the batteries. For example, do you want your clock shutting off every time you turn the engine off, Yeah, it should go to the battery and and same, I mean the same

thing with the lights. You should have the capability of running your nav lights even if your engines out. So so a lot of people said, oh, this is in the case that whatever cataclysm happened to them happened at night. Not necessarily, it just means the battery finally ran down. At night, So that's all it means, although the lights switched on does indicate something happening at night, right you

you don't turn the lights on if it's broad daylight. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we have the lights on at night. So they obviously they finally lost all their juice sometime at night. Uh, let's see what else the log book, the sextant, their chronometer, and also Dusty Miller of the captain kept a few guns on board. All that stuff was gone. And they also found the doctor. Remember I

said there was a doctor on board. Yeah, they found his bag on the deck and had a stethoscope and a scalpel and some bloodstained bandages that I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the stuff. Maybe it got washed over board. If you gotta go perform an amputation, do you think you need more than a scalpel unless

you're unless you're unless you're to have that. Maybe, Yeah, you think you had more in the doctor's bag and a stethoscope and a scalpel, though I thought part of the cargo were medical supplies, which just keeps smaller medical supplies in your bag. That he had some great stuff in the supplies. Yeah, yeah, it's entirely possible. But still, I mean, you don't really like a bone throwe doesn't really actually fit? Yeah, probably not. Yeah, you still think

you've seen those black doctor's bags. You've been a lot more in the stethoscope of a scalpel in there. So I necessarily don't really keep bloodstained bandaged. Not necessarily yeah. Yeah, maybe he was into recycling. I don't know, but yeah, And last of all, there was fuel in her tanks. Uh, And they calculated from the amount that had been used that she had gone about two or three miles before the engine shut down. That was, that was probably roughly

fifty miles short of their destination of Tokalau. Yeah, I know, I know. So the league had probably started about nine pm or so on the second night of the trip. Yeah, so I guess the thing like, okay, and I have been really pushing against doing this all night, this whole Like, well, I lived on a ship for six months, so I

know everything resident collection, I am. But one of the things, you know, and I don't know in situations like this how long the sixteen crew members had been with this ship or how often they did this run or anything like that. You know, we did a run fairly frequently, and one of the things within the first week they drill into your brain is like, assuming we're going at our normal speed, this is about where we are at any given time, and in your cabin you have a

little map of that. So if you wake up and the ship isn't moving and like for whatever reason, the it's a it's a huge ship, right, it's not like this is going to happen to me, like definitely not part of the captain's circle. You know, I don't work

on the bridge anything like that. But if like the first mate woke up and was like, wow, that's super weird, we're not moving anymore and walked onto the bridge and mysteriously everybody was dead or something, you know, super suspension of disbelief story, that person could say, all right, it's about this time. We are probably about this distance away

from the closest land mass. I can know that. So, you know, for me for them to say, well, they were about fifty miles away from their destined nation, assuming that they had done this run a couple of times, the thing that gets me is that, like they were super like fifty miles away from your destination is like close enough to abandon ship and paddle your way over there, certainly. Yeah,

And that's uh, you know, definitely is. And that's the thing that like again, you know, like I don't know how strong the currents were in that neighborhood, sure of course, but and and that's the other thing, is that just that it would be like hopefully the crew would know that, right, So, like in the situation that a captain had had something horrible happened to him, or first mate, or a bunch of the crew had had something horrible has happened to them,

if even one of the crew members had survived whatever horrible thing happened, that they would know, Okay, we're only fifty fifty miles out, you've got a compass and some paddles, let's go. There's no reason, like, there's no reason they couldn't have taken some of that cloths for that makeshift on ing over the that they could have, right, absolutely, So you know that's my thing with the like they

were really close. Yeah, they were close there close. So there was an inquiry, an official maritime inquiry to the whole thing, and their conclusion was that the fact that the passengers and crew were gone was quote inexplicable unquote. The life rafts and the dinghy were missing. But it didn't make any sense, and it was obvious to the people that did this inquiry that it made no sense

to abandoned ship given that it was unsinkable. And I know for me, I mean, before I abandoned ship and got into a lifeboat, it would have to be a lot lower in the water than the joy it was. I go back to my well, we were just talking about, right, and then like it's drilled into your head that like the only time that you leave a ship is when

you are one sure that that ship is thinking. It got to be like the water, which has then got to be based upon the knowledge of the people who were involved, which I think is where Jove's going to go. I hope, because I know that that's part of the theories. That's one of the theories. Yeah, one of the theories is that I'll just go through the series theories now, and this is one of the one popular theory is that the captain down theory, which means that he was

disabled or dead. This theory goes that he was aware that it couldn't sink, so he would have told the passengers that there was no danger and everybody would stayed on board. So the theory is that he must have been incapacitated and people panicked and took to the life

raster because he was incapacitated. Uh. And as they're very in this series there so there was a rumor that there was tension between the captain and his first mate, and so in this series they had a fight and one or both fell overboard and they rushed the cruise in the crew of the passengers took to the lifeboats.

I think you're probably going here, but like, there's no way that those were the only two people on the ship who knew that about the well exactly of course, you know, you know, at least the first mate and probably at least several of the members of the crew were aware that of all the cork on board, the cedar planking, the eight barrels, I mean, And so even if the captain was down, uh, and you know, they

still wouldn't know the boat's not going to sink. And secondly, as I said, no sensible person would abandon ship until it's absolutely for sure about to go under. That would be that would be my criteria. Another popular theory at the time was that the Japanese did it. There are two various on this. One. One is that hate this theory. This is so bad. Yeah, that's lame. It's it's pretty lame. They were passing into the joy that was paid, passed

through a Japanese fishing fleet. They saw something they weren't supposed to see and apparrently so that everybody was murdered. And I don't know what they were not supposed to see. Maybe they were using the illegal lure. I don't know, but this is like and they quoted this is from the Fiji Times and Herald. They said that this was

from a then quote unquote impeccable source. But uh, they produced no further evidence, so that well there was there was, and there was further ado about this when something about some Japanese knives were found on the boat. Yeah, yeah, they found below decks in the boat, they found some knives. They were stamp made in Japan. Of course, if they said made in Japan and English, that means they were made for exports to English speaking countries. Japanese people are

going to be carrying them. Another area is that they were like there was Japanese soldiers who were on some island or another who wasn't weren't aware that the war it ended, so they were so they went out in a boat and just bushwacked people and randomly killed them. And yep, yeah, continuing ef Yeah, but of course the problem with this is there it seems like there would have been a lot of people in the area who disappearing that didn't happen. Another there, let's move right along, Ivan,

good old Ivan. The Ruskies. Yeah, that's right. They were abducted by the crew of the Soviet sub That's outlandish. Do you want to go further into that theory, because we've we've debated being abducted by a crew of a submarine in multiple stories. We have done that, and I I we've we've never found any of our favorite theories. Even that's fun, it's one of our funnest But I think we might have literally chewed the fat off the

bone on that. Well. Yeah, but then why submarine cruise with Why to go around abducting crowds of people is beyond me because crowded boat, Yeah exactly, I don't think So. Okay, next theory, pirates they that took all the valuables, or possibly they came on board and put everybody in the life rafts and says sayonara, and then they took off with the boat, which they didn't know what the time was, taking on water and then broke away. Yeah, but yeah,

I bet you know. And the reason that people are taking this is because four tons of cargo was missing. And they'll say what four tons? If it was if it was a medical supplies, a timber or what was, or if it was the containers that were empty. I don't know why anybody take those, but but I can see if the boat is listing and the hatch pops open, they didn't pop out and float away. Yeah, just see floating away. It depends on else how well secured they were.

And then you know, SpongeBob SquarePants is going I got a container. Yeah, but those things didn't. I mean, any of those things aren't gonna wait four tons, so they're not gonna wait much of anything. I'm just saying that

these things in general may have come out. So they might have actually, but you know, it just it just depends not small there because the boat was listening over far enough that water was actually coming into the top hatch that you used to access the whole of the boat, which as far as I know, it is the only way to access the whole. That's through that's through the decks. See. I didn't look any any kind of drawings of the

actual boat. I didn't see those. Yeah, and so the so and large items weren't about to float out through those hatches, but something small could have. I mean, barrels could have, but not that many. Probably again, because so many things were missing, like the guns and you know, the navigational equipment and four tons of cargo, and people immediately went to pirates. And and actually this is not as this doesn't doesn't suck as bad a lot as

a lot of the other theories. It's possible piracy does exist. Yeah, and so the reason I think that they didn't just like, there's no reason to just kill everybody on the boat. If all you want to do is pill take their stuff. Number one. If you wanted to do the more rational things a pirate and take the entire boat, which is what I would do, then you put them all in the life roust. Yeah, you put them all in the life raft and and then you you take off with

the boat. Later on we discovered the boat is taking on water. You, of course, being a pirate, you don't know that this boat can't sink. So you radio your buddies in the other boat that brought you there originally, you meet, you get off, you take what you can, and if you take off believing the boat is going to sink, which it didn't do, the steak and would.

A stick in the heart of this series is that the radio was tuned to the stress channel, So if they were using it to communicate with their buddies in the other boat, it would have been tuned to a different channel. Yeah, so they couldn't have taken the radios. Yeah maybe, I don't know if hand radios are that common back in those days. Yeah, yeah, so, and so that's why I think, I mean, I could be wrong. They could have had other methods of signaling their buddies too.

But what else we have here in terms of these, uh, these fun theories. Another fun theory Insurance FRAU Captain Dusty Miller had serious debts because he had several failed fishing expeditions and that left him in debt. But he didn't he didn't know on the boat, did he didn't know the boat he was leasing the boat. Yeah, so that's dumb, but that explains why he was taking on passengers, because he was trying to get as much money as he

could out of every run. Yeah, and I believe that the inquiry that you talked about had found that he had lost or let laps license to have passengers on the boat. Yeah. They actually found quite a bit of fault with him for the condition of his lot of version of like a firefly kind of yeah, yeah, okay, but but yeah, so he didn't on the boat. He knew the boat couldn't sink, for God's sakes, So if he'd wanted to like turn into claim for insurance, he

would have lit it on fire. He wouldn't have done it with twenty four other people on the boat, did, Okay. I swear that I've seen somewhere talk of the fact that the sea cocks were open, were open, and that's say that I've seen theories that the that they were going to scuttle it in the sea cocks were open for insurance reasons. But I don't remember in there officially inquiry anything about that. So the sea cocks were never open.

They discovered that which would be stupid because the thing still wouldn't sink well exactly, so it makes it, like I said, he would have torched it trying to sink it. That would have been the obvious thing to do, alright, alright, so don't want that one onto the next one. Mutiname. So in this theory, the boat encountered heavy weather, the crew wanted to turn around. The captain refused because he you know, again, he was in desperate for cash. He didn't want to lose any money, so he wanted to

keep on going. And also if they were actually truly within fifty fifty miles of their destination, then there's no there's no same reason to turn around rather than just

continuing to go. Yeah, that doesn't make sense, but that's one that So the crew, when when he wouldn't turn around, the mutiny, and there was there was blows were traded, the captain was either killed or knocked unconscious right about the end of starboard, engine stopped running, and everybody took off for the life boat because remembered, only the captain knew that the boat was unsinkable, right, yeah, and taking the captain and of course the navigational equipment which you need.

We're gonna be floating a life boat. So the abandoned ship in heavy seas I I eat storms to take to a bunch of flimsy life rafts, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, so, and it doesn't make sense that the crew would be wanting to turn around when they were that close to their destination. Alright, So we put that one and put that theory to rest.

About the only one that's held any water so far has been the pirate one, and the pirate I'm afraid, I really I hate the pirate theory, but it really is the only one that makes sense that we can talk a little bit more. Another theory is this is mine. That they didn't abandoned ship, at least not right away. So because they had food on board, they're part of their cargo was food for for the the boat had behind. Besides the three thousand gallon diesel fuel tank or tanks,

had also had twenty five gallons gallons of water. Of course, we don't know that that tank was completely full. It might have been full and left, but it should have had a substantial amount of water. Yeah, it should have had a fair amount of that. So they the official inquiry, and I I'm so sorry I was not able to get a copy of this because it would have been

nice to get that information. But they mentioned the amount of fuel left in the in the tanks, but they don't say how much water was left in the water tank water, or nor do they say how much black water well exactly exactly, So if the if the water tank was empty, that would be a big clue. What that would mean is that they stayed with the boat until they ran out of water. And if the black water tank was all full of well, you know what, then it was all all full then uh. And I

don't know what boats in those days did. I assume they had black water tanks and then didn't just flush it directly. And the other problem is is that if if the batteries dead, I've been on how did you say a house boat and I pushed the knob and I hear the electric pump turn on and it spits out water. But if that's not going, how do I get the water out of the big holding tank? Well,

that's that's a question, you know. I mean, I would assume that they had some sort of pump like manual pump back up for that, but of course you're know, given the state of the boat, maybe not, maybe that wasn't working. And I guess, since this is your theory, do you have an explanation for the list? The list? Uh? Yeah, Actually I think that it is possible, quite possible that the crew actually induced the list on their own because the starboard engine, remember, is the one they needed to

get running again, and so it's a portside list. So how would you induce the list? Well, you remove say four times of cargo from the starboard side of the ship and throw it overboard, and you're both starting to get something out of trying to pull the starboard engine out of the water or whatever. Yeah, apparently makes sense to me. Actually, it's a lot of sense. It's yeah, logical. Yeah.

So anyway, apparently they didn't succeed, because they had, they would have immediately hooked up that auxiliary pump that they had rigged up ready to go. It still doesn't explain why they left, because even if you run out of food and run out of water, you're still better off on the big boat than being on a life raft. Your profile is higher, you're more likely to be spotted, You're you've got shelter from the elements, which you don't

really have on a raft. So the only reason I can think of that they would they would leave if they if they spotted an island and they weren't too far away from they might have decided to make a break forth they're all out of food and water, or if they're really low on that stuff. If you go to an island, at least there's going to be like birds and fish that you can kill and eat and stuff like that. You know, they didn't abandon the boat

because they thought the boat was going to sink. They might have abandoned the boat because they were they were starving and out of water, and if figured you know, and it was what you correct me if I'm wrong. It was five weeks after they went missing, was found twenty five people. How much how much does the average person drink? About a gallon a day? A gallon a day. You don't need a gallon a day to survive though, okay, but about a gallon a day the average person drinks.

So that's twenty five a day by five weeks comes out how many days five let's say so le's let's just same. They're drinking a full gallon, So that's that's twenty five by five weeks, which is thirty five that nobody knows what that number is. Well, let's say if it was gallon tank right, undred right, assuming it was full, that means that they had ten days of drinking water, assuming they drink gallon a day, Yeah, would have a

hundred days. Hundred gallons by twenty five people is a hundred gallons hundred gallons per persons per person, which means they could have theoretically gone a hundred days if the tank was full and the drinking a gallon and yeah, and and of course you know the tank was probably not full, probably wasn't full. At half full, it's fifty days. At a quarter full, it's twenty five days. So we're now running into that gray area of let's say it was half or a quarter full when they left board.

That would explain why they were out of water and would have wanted to leave because they had nothing left. But then again, if you're on a boat boats, and we talked about this before, there's tons of plastics, so you would think that you could use evaporation to make drinkable, potable water, But who knows what the circumstance was we're also assuming that, you know, the nine passengers didn't get sea sick, and there wasn't any kind of going not anything,

you know, And that's a fairly large assumption as well. Yeah, and so it would have been other uses for the water. Obviously you're gonna need to use a little bit of water to wash up occasionally and things like that if you do get sea sickondy bar, if you're gonna want to wash your face, probably rench your mouth out, so you need to be hydrated more. Yeah. I have no idea if after the search, after the discovery of this, if they went along and check that checked on Wikipedia.

Then in the South Pacific there are roughly twenty islands in there, you know, a lot of them just specs like the islands that we've been talking about there. So I don't know if anybody thought to go back and check any small islands that were sortable on the course of bones. Yeah, exactly, exactly, but I think they probably made a break for an island. Yeah. Well, I don't know.

And I think that's the problem with all of these stories is that they they's just very little information apart from the start and to finish to really know what's going on well. As always, ladies and gentlemen, all of our shows and all of the links to the stories that we've been talking about tonight, as with all episodes are gonna be on our website. The website is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. Uh, you're probably most a lot

of folks are listening to us through iTunes. If you're listening to iTunes, please remember to take the time to subscribe and leave a rating. Uh. If you're listening to another venue, that's awesome, that's great. We really appreciate that. If you forget to download an episode and you realize you know one's come out, because we try to put them out on the same day every week, you can go ahead and pull that from Stitcher. You can listen

to its streaming from any mobile ready device. You can always find us on Facebook, so we put up a lot of stuff on Facebook. We've got the group as well as the page for everybody to to talk and discuss and the interesting things that we find. You have a theory for us that we've forgot, or you've got thought or comments. We've got a lot of great feedback lately. If you've got something you want to say to it, you can always send us an email. That email address

is Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. And by the way, if you are one of the passengers on the joy They or one of the crew, we'd like to hear from you. We'd love to hear from you, or the Sarah Joe or the random boat that we don't know the name of Buve Island. Yeah, if you're a resident Bouve Island, which is inhospitable to anything but

see elephants, please let us know. Well that having been said, ladies and gentlemen, Uh, this short has gone on a little longer than a short, so we're gonna go ahead, and yet we've got long shorts, so we're gonna go ahead, and we're gonna sign this one off. Thanks again for taking the time to listen, and we will talk to you next week. Everybody, hie, guys,