Speaker 1: Hello, survivalists. This is the Crux True Survival Story podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Casey McIntosh.
Speaker 2: And I'm Julie Henningson.
Speaker 1: And we are medical professionals with a passion for wilderness survival.
Speaker 2: Join us as we explore real life survival stories and
Speaker 2: the critical moments that determine their outcomes. Buckle up, adventure awaits,
Speaker 2: let's dive into this week's story. It's six o'clock in
Speaker 2: the morning on June fourth, nineteen eighty nine, and you're
Speaker 2: lying in a bunk in the dark, roughly one hundred
Speaker 2: and forty miles off New Zealand's East Cape. Your name
Speaker 2: is Jim Nalpka. You're thirty eight years old, and you're
Speaker 2: from Minneapolis, and until three days ago, you had never
Speaker 2: sailed a boat in your life. You cook for a
Speaker 2: living and when your friend Rick asked you if you
Speaker 2: wanted to sail to Tonga, you thought about it for
Speaker 2: about five seconds and said yes. For two days, a
Speaker 2: winter storm has thrown this forty foot trimaran around like
Speaker 2: a toy. But this morning, finally the wind has dropped,
Speaker 2: the waves have stopped breaking through the porthole, you see
Speaker 2: the first gray light. The skipper's already up, breakfast, sails
Speaker 2: and head north to warm water. Then you hear it,
Speaker 2: a sound different from every wave that came before. It, bigger, louder.
Speaker 2: When you were a boy in Minnesota, a tornado took
Speaker 2: your whole block, and what you remember is how quiet
Speaker 2: it went right before it hit. This is that quiet.
Speaker 2: Then the wave arrives and the world rotates. The boat
Speaker 2: goes up and over without hesitating. Ceiling becomes floor. Black
Speaker 2: water pours in and climbs your body in the dark, knees, waste, chest,
Speaker 2: and you have no way of knowing when it will stop,
Speaker 2: but it does stop at chest height. Your head is
Speaker 2: in an air pocket. Four men in an upside down
Speaker 2: boat in a patch of winter ocean. Your skipper will
Speaker 2: one day call a marine desert. Nobody is coming, and
Speaker 2: you're going to live inside this hole for the next
Speaker 2: one hundred and nineteen days.
Speaker 1: Hello survivalists, and welcome back to the Crux to your
Speaker 1: survival stories. I'm Casey McIntosh, joined as always by Julie Huntingson.
Speaker 1: Today's story is the Rose Noel. Four men, most of
Speaker 1: them strangers to each other, who spent nearly four months
Speaker 1: trapped in and on a capsized trimaran in the winter
Speaker 1: South Pacific. It is one of the longest survival stories
Speaker 1: ever recorded on a capsized vessel. And I want to
Speaker 1: plant one thing before we start, because it's a pretty
Speaker 1: unique part of the story. Surviving the ocean turned out
Speaker 1: not to be the hardest part.
Speaker 2: Hold on to that thought. We will get there quite interesting.
Speaker 2: But first, a big thanks to listener Amy Moffatt Mercer
Speaker 2: and her man friend who suggested this harrowing tale. A
Speaker 2: grateful shout out to both of you. So to get
Speaker 2: us started, let's introduce you to four men and one boat.
Speaker 2: We'll start with John Glennie. He's forty eight years old,
Speaker 2: a New Zealander who spent most of his life on
Speaker 2: the water. Back in the nineteen sixties, he sailed the
Speaker 2: Pacific in a trimaran with his brother. The Rose Noel
Speaker 2: was twelve point six meters about forty feet three holes,
Speaker 2: six and a half tons, and Glennie had built her
Speaker 2: with his own hands. She wasn't just his boat, she
Speaker 2: was his address. Everything he owned in the world was
Speaker 2: a boarder, right down to his bicycle which he kept
Speaker 2: on board. And yes, remember the bicycle. He comes back
Speaker 2: at the very end of our story today in a
Speaker 2: way that you might not see coming. The plan was
Speaker 2: a winter escape from a New Zealand winter north from
Speaker 2: Picton at the top of the South Island, up to
Speaker 2: Tonga Head towards warm Water, and to get there he
Speaker 2: needed a crew, which he found by putting an ad
Speaker 2: up at the local Backpecker's hostel. That ad is how
Speaker 2: Rick Hellraigel came aboard, thirty one years old, a Kiwi
Speaker 2: from the outward bound school at Onakiwa and the most
Speaker 2: naturally able seaman of the three crew. And when you
Speaker 2: read Rick's own account of the first night out of Picton,
Speaker 2: you can get a feel for the trip he thought
Speaker 2: he was getting. They came out into the cook straight
Speaker 2: in a strong wind, reefed down and still hit sixteen knots,
Speaker 2: the fastest that boat ever went. Rick and John traded
Speaker 2: the helm in the cockpit. Rick wrote that it's an
Speaker 2: amazing feeling hanging onto the wheel of a sailboat doing
Speaker 2: sixteen knots. That's the last unambiguously good moment of this
Speaker 2: entire episode, a man laughing at the wheel in the dark,
Speaker 2: going fast. Rick brought his friend Jim Jim Nalpka was
Speaker 2: thirty eight from Minnesota, a state with sixteen thousand lakes,
Speaker 2: and he'd never sailed on any of them. He was
Speaker 2: the catering director at Outward Bound, which meant Jim's job
Speaker 2: was to feed the people going out on adventures. He'd
Speaker 2: wave them off, then go back to planning a menu
Speaker 2: or cutting up potatoes. So when Rick turned up one
Speaker 2: morning and said I'm going sailing to Tonga, Jim later
Speaker 2: said he thought about it for four or five seconds
Speaker 2: and then said, yes, I'll go. I'd love to go Tonga.
Speaker 2: In his head was warm weather, blue water, and being
Speaker 2: for once the guy on the adventure instead of the
Speaker 2: guy waving. And when Jim got to Picton and saw
Speaker 2: the boat, he compared her to a Cadillac, a TV
Speaker 2: satellite navigation radar, wind generator VHF and Ham radio, two
Speaker 2: stereos and a galley with stainless steel walks and a barbecue.
Speaker 2: Everything was meticulous, classy. Jim said that he thought, I'm
Speaker 2: going to be proud to be on this boat. The
Speaker 2: fourth man was Phil Hoffman forty one, a builder from Picton,
Speaker 2: married to Karen and father of four. His own boat
Speaker 2: was tied up right behind the Rose Noel in Picton,
Speaker 2: which is how he and Glenny got to talking. Karen
Speaker 2: said Phil was always looking for adventure and this would
Speaker 2: be the first time in his life that he'd ever
Speaker 2: left New Zealand. Phil had a history that the others didn't.
Speaker 2: Three years earlier, he'd had a triple bypass surgery.
Speaker 1: He was pretty young at that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he would have been in his late thirties, which
Speaker 2: is quite young.
Speaker 1: Right, So this cardiovascular history is worth one honest comment.
Speaker 1: A successful bypass three years out doesn't make you fragile.
Speaker 1: Plenty of these patients are hiking and working, sailing and
Speaker 1: live full lives, and Phil clearly was. What it does
Speaker 1: mean is that he was one of the crew members
Speaker 1: with a known cardiac history heading into an environment that
Speaker 1: would eventually deliver cold, dehydration and sustained fear, none of
Speaker 1: which is a problem on a two week sial to toga,
Speaker 1: all of which just becomes a problem if the sale
Speaker 1: stops being just two weeks.
Speaker 2: So our team here is a self taught sailor sleeping
Speaker 2: aboard everything he owned, a young outdoorsman who loved going fast,
Speaker 2: a cook who'd never sailed, finally getting his turn and
Speaker 2: a builder taking his first trip abroad on a boat
Speaker 2: he met because it was parked in front of his own.
Speaker 2: So on June first, nineteen eighty nine, they slipped out
Speaker 2: of Picton bound for Tonga. The weather turned early on
Speaker 2: the second night, wind rain and darkness so total that
Speaker 2: Rick said he couldn't steer by the compass. He steered
Speaker 2: by the feel of the wind on the side of
Speaker 2: his face. They streamed a drogue off the stern, a
Speaker 2: drag device on a long line, essentially a break to
Speaker 2: try and slow down. By the third day, it was
Speaker 2: bad enough that they stopped sailing altogether and lay a hole,
Speaker 2: sails down, wheel lashed, letting the boat fend for herself
Speaker 2: side on to the seas. Rick described the ocean as
Speaker 2: a heaving green mass, the tops of the swells shearing
Speaker 2: off white. In the wind most waves, the boat rowed
Speaker 2: the odd one broke against her with a crack, and
Speaker 2: shoved her sideways, shuddering across the water. The next morning
Speaker 2: they set a sea anchor, essentially an underwater parachute meant
Speaker 2: to hold the bow into the waves. Rick said it
Speaker 2: took an hour and a half of struggle to set,
Speaker 2: and for four hours. It worked and the ride went
Speaker 2: almost gentle. Then it partly failed. The boat swung away
Speaker 2: and the boat ended up side on to the waves again.
Speaker 2: But by Rick's account, the anchor was still dragging just
Speaker 2: enough to hold her in place. And that's the part
Speaker 2: that mattered. Because a boat like this isn't supposed to
Speaker 2: stand and take a wave. It's supposed to get shoved.
Speaker 2: When a wall of water hits you broadside. You want
Speaker 2: the whole boat to slide away sideways with the punch,
Speaker 2: skid across the surface, spill the energy. What you never
Speaker 2: want is anything anchoring you in place while a wave
Speaker 2: shoves your side. Think about a car sliding sideways on ice.
Speaker 2: Sliding you're fine, but it's the instant the tire catches
Speaker 2: on dry pavement that the car would stop sliding and
Speaker 2: start rolling.
Speaker 1: And Rick knew that he wanted the sea anchor gone,
Speaker 1: but it had taken an hour and a half of
Speaker 1: fighting to get that thing set, and Glenny was worried
Speaker 1: about someone losing fingers hauling it back in. He argued
Speaker 1: for leaving it, and Rick agreed in his own telling afterward,
Speaker 1: With hindsight, they should have gotten rid of it.
Speaker 2: Below deck Jim described being catapulted out of the double
Speaker 2: bunk by waves and slammed onto the floor, and Phil, claustrophobic,
Speaker 2: wedged into a narrow quarter berth he compared to a coffin.
Speaker 2: Three days into the first sea passage of his life,
Speaker 2: Phil was, in Jim's account, the one who was panicking.
Speaker 2: He kept saying they were going to flip. He said
Speaker 2: he couldn't take it, he had to get out. At
Speaker 2: one point, Jim said, Phil wanted Glennie to call a helicopter. Glennie,
Speaker 2: who didn't consider this an emergency, didn't call. Then came
Speaker 2: the morning of June fourth, and this is the detail
Speaker 2: that kind of hurts. The storm was easing, the wind
Speaker 2: had dropped. The white caps at this point were gone.
Speaker 2: Rick said he and John looked at each other at
Speaker 2: the first light and agreed, today's day we can go sailing.
Speaker 2: All that stood between them and Tonga was breakfast. And
Speaker 2: then the wave announced itself with a sound. Rick said
Speaker 2: he could still hear it, bigger and louder than everything
Speaker 2: before one boom. Glennie had described it as a sixty
Speaker 2: foot vertical wall of water. That's his estimate, not a measurement.
Speaker 2: And Rick never saw it at all. In every account
Speaker 2: he gave, he couldn't tell you what it looked like,
Speaker 2: only what it sounded like. Rick's own belief was that
Speaker 2: the sea anchor was the difference, that it stopped the
Speaker 2: boat from skidding away. So instead of sliding down the
Speaker 2: face of this wave, the rose Noelle tripped and went
Speaker 2: up and over in one moment, no hesitation.
Speaker 1: And there's one piece of design physics buried in that
Speaker 1: moment that decides the rest of the story. Many offshore
Speaker 1: monoholes carry a heavy ballast keel that helps them recover
Speaker 1: from a knockdown lead in the bottom, levering the boat
Speaker 1: back upright. A trimran gets a stability from beam instead
Speaker 1: from that wide three hold footprint, which makes her tremendously
Speaker 1: stable right side up and stable upside down too once
Speaker 1: she's fully inverted. Writing her might be flatly impossible for
Speaker 1: the crew, but those same light, buoyant, unballasted holes are
Speaker 1: what let her keep floating. Their prison was also their
Speaker 1: life raft.
Speaker 2: Inside the cabin in the dark, the water rose to
Speaker 2: their chest and then stopped. Phil was trapped in that
Speaker 2: coffin sized berth, screaming and in Jim's account, Phil panicked
Speaker 2: so hard he kicked out the companionway doors, which opened
Speaker 2: the hole to the sea, and the surge began sucking
Speaker 2: their gear out into the Pacific. Jim salvaged nothing of
Speaker 2: his own but the clothes he was wearing, and by
Speaker 2: Jim's telling, that was a grudge that Glennie carried against Phil.
Speaker 2: Those kicked out doors for the next four months. This
Speaker 2: tells you a little bit about the kind of four
Speaker 2: months that are coming for these men. In the first hours,
Speaker 2: though the men worked, Jim said, Glennie was the one
Speaker 2: who knew what to do. Grab everything, throw it, aft apples,
Speaker 2: sleeping bags, anything floating. Then for hours they filled the
Speaker 2: flooded floor of the aft cabin with drawers, cupboard doors,
Speaker 2: life jackets, an old mattress, building this wreckage up like
Speaker 2: landfill until they had kind of a sleeping plat form
Speaker 2: that fell above the waterline. That platform was Glennie's old
Speaker 2: double berth. Phil later described it to reporters as a
Speaker 2: cave like living space, and he gave the measurement that
Speaker 2: sticks with you. They slept four abreast on a mattress
Speaker 2: fifty four inches wide, about the same size as a
Speaker 2: US full size bed with less than an arm's width
Speaker 2: of headroom above them. They would lay down in the dark,
Speaker 2: all facing the same way, pressed together like spoons.
Speaker 1: Jim said that on the very first night they were
Speaker 1: already arguing about who was taking up too much space.
Speaker 1: I can just picture it now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't even imagine four grown men in a
Speaker 2: full sized bed spooning each other. And this is one
Speaker 2: night of many to come, although they don't know this yet.
Speaker 1: Also, if you're on the edges of the bed and
Speaker 1: you roll, you end up in the water.
Speaker 2: In the water, Yeah, this stakes or high. At this point,
Speaker 2: they weren't desperate, Yeah, because they had one object that
Speaker 2: was supposed to make this whole thing survivable. The night
Speaker 2: before they capsize, when Rick was worried about what might happen,
Speaker 2: he pulled the EPERB the emergency position indicating radio beacon
Speaker 2: out of its cupboard and he sealed it in a
Speaker 2: waterproof bag. So when the boat went over, that bag
Speaker 2: was the first thing he grabbed. Rick's thought, in his
Speaker 2: own words afterward, was essentially, what a bummer. But we've
Speaker 2: got the beacon. That's the only thing we really need.
Speaker 2: And the beacon, of course is a radio transmitter. A
Speaker 2: radio transmitter is pretty useless if its signal can't get out.
Speaker 2: Their whole world was now inside an overturned hull, surrounded
Speaker 2: by water below and fiberglass above, and Rick said they
Speaker 2: weren't even sure that the thing would transmit through the
Speaker 2: boat's structure, so they made an opening for the beacon.
Speaker 2: Phil and Glennie went forward and cut a hole in
Speaker 2: the hole just above the new waterline about a meter square.
Speaker 2: Hammer and chisel through fiberglass and foam, then a key
Speaker 2: hole saw. They clamped the beacon inside the opening, with
Speaker 2: the aerial pointing out at the sky, and flicked the switch.
Speaker 2: The little light started blinking right on que transmitting. They
Speaker 2: cut a second hole aft so that they could climb
Speaker 2: out and sit on the upturn hole to keep watch.
Speaker 2: A few days later they found a V sheet, the
Speaker 2: bright orange distress flag with the black V, and lashed
Speaker 2: it across the hole, face up, and then they said
Speaker 2: the word that runs through this entire episode, tomorrow. Jim's
Speaker 2: description of that period is four men reinforcing each other.
Speaker 2: As soon as a plane sees the V sheet were home.
Speaker 2: Someone will surely see us tomorrow. But the wind shredded
Speaker 2: the V sheet to ribbons over the following days, and
Speaker 2: after roughly nine days, the beacon's battery went flat and
Speaker 2: the light went out. In Jim's words, their biggest chance
Speaker 2: of being found was gone. And what none of them
Speaker 2: knew is that it had never been a chance at all.
Speaker 2: The signal was never received, not once.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about how the bottom of the
Speaker 1: boat just blends into the ocean. It should be bright orange.
Speaker 1: All bottoms of boats should be bright colors, like sutures.
Speaker 2: I feel like we've come to that conclusion before on
Speaker 2: this podcast, but I agree, you know, why not? You
Speaker 2: got to paint at some color.
Speaker 1: Right, might as well be fluorescent orange or yellow.
Speaker 2: Yea, like sutures that you're going to use on somebody's
Speaker 2: scalp of brown hair.
Speaker 1: Right. Well, this is where the story stops being bad
Speaker 1: luck and starts being a system's failure. Their older generation
Speaker 1: beacon simply did not provide the global near instant satellite
Speaker 1: alert that a modern four h six megahertz EPRB CAN
Speaker 1: and New Zealand did not yet have the satellite receiver
Speaker 1: station that was later established at Lower Hut so that
Speaker 1: light could blink faithfully for nine days into what was,
Speaker 1: for rescue purposes, an empty sky. There was a search.
Speaker 1: An air force o'riyan spent two days on it, but
Speaker 1: it was concentrated up around the Kermadex in Tongo, hundreds
Speaker 1: of miles from where they actually were chasing garbled radio
Speaker 1: messages the authorities thought might have come up from the yacht,
Speaker 1: and that with no beacon and no position, Search and
Speaker 1: Rescue concluded something catastrophic had happened, and on its August
Speaker 1: to September nineteen eighty nine bulletin the New Zealand Water
Speaker 1: Safety Council listed all four men as drowned while they
Speaker 1: were alive rationing liquid a few hundred miles from.
Speaker 2: Home, so essentially, their families were told to start grieving.
Speaker 2: Phil's wife, Karen, has described people gently pressuring her to
Speaker 2: accept that her husband wasn't coming home, and remember they
Speaker 2: had four kids, but she refused. She said that she
Speaker 2: made a private pact with God. If Phil came back,
Speaker 2: she would take him however he came, even if the
Speaker 2: sea returned a different man.
Speaker 1: We always do those private packs with the God when
Speaker 1: things like this happen.
Speaker 2: Right, all kinds of rationalizing and bargaining definitely bargaining future
Speaker 2: of grieving.
Speaker 1: I just can't imagine what it would be like to
Speaker 1: just simply accept it without any proof.
Speaker 2: It would be impossible, I think, at least at first.
Speaker 2: So for these men, water was their first priority. The
Speaker 2: rose Noel carried about one hundred and forty liters of
Speaker 2: fresh water in her tanks and upside down without the
Speaker 2: crew knowing, those tanks were quietly draining themselves. So what
Speaker 2: was left was salvaged soft drink and juice, and they
Speaker 2: rationed it hard. The figure that appears in later accounts
Speaker 2: is roughly four ounces per man per day. We haven't
Speaker 2: confirmed that number in a survivor's own account, but whatever
Speaker 2: the exact amount, it was a fraction of what a
Speaker 2: body needs.
Speaker 1: At anything close to four ounces a day. Were borrowing
Speaker 1: water from other body fluids, blood volume falls and concentrates.
Speaker 1: Thinking slows, and the kidneys shut down every loss they
Speaker 1: can afford to shut down. Without rain, this story was
Speaker 1: almost certainly over. So they built the thing that saved them,
Speaker 1: a rainwater catchment system rigged on the upturned hull. That system,
Speaker 1: more than any other single object on that boat, is
Speaker 1: why this is a survival story instead of an unsolved disappearance.
Speaker 2: And food came from three directions. They still had some
Speaker 2: stored provisions aboard, some cereal, apples, cans of food, but
Speaker 2: access was the problem because the galley was now underwater
Speaker 2: inside the flooded cabin, so Glennie would dive for it
Speaker 2: again and again down into the blackwater, feeling his way
Speaker 2: through lockers that he half remembered Jim's description of this
Speaker 2: is almost funny. Glennie would surface out of some compartment
Speaker 2: with a fine and say, look what I've found, or God,
Speaker 2: where has that been? And this was still happening two
Speaker 2: months into this adventure. The man kept discovering his own boat.
Speaker 2: The second source was kiwi fruit. Trays of unripe kiwifruit
Speaker 2: survived the capsize, and because the fruit was green, it
Speaker 2: didn't have to be eaten all at once. It ripened
Speaker 2: gradually over weeks, and they rationed it out as it ripened.
Speaker 1: And they probably didn't understand how beneficial this really was.
Speaker 1: This was an extraordinarily lucky find because kiwifruit is rich
Speaker 1: in vitamin C, comparable to or higher than oranges by weight,
Speaker 1: and vitamin C is the shripwreck vitamin we can't make
Speaker 1: it on our own without it. Collagen production fails, gums bleed,
Speaker 1: old wounds reopen, blood, vessels get fragile. That's scurvy, and
Speaker 1: it's a classic killer of long voyagers. A tray of
Speaker 1: green kiwifruit, ripened one piece at a time is about
Speaker 1: the most fortunate cargo you could be carrying. And the third.
Speaker 2: Food source, the maybe strangest one, is the boat itself
Speaker 2: came alive. Week by week, barnacles colonized the upturn holes,
Speaker 2: and the wreck slowly turned into a kind of floating
Speaker 2: reef Reefs attract tenants, and fish began sheltering around the
Speaker 2: hole in the same stretch of ocean that Glennie had
Speaker 2: written off as a marine desert with no fish in it.
Speaker 2: The crew learned to take them with a gaff and
Speaker 2: keep these barnacles in mind. They have a second important
Speaker 2: job in the story, and it's one of the strangest
Speaker 2: aspects of it. We'll get to it. So here's the
Speaker 2: ordeal inside the ordeal. The Pacific was arguably the second
Speaker 2: most dangerous environment that these men were living in, and
Speaker 2: the first was each other. Three of the four men
Speaker 2: were strangers before pict in They had no shared history,
Speaker 2: no chosen loyalty, no exit, just that fifty four inch
Speaker 2: mattress and a southern winter handing them twelve hour nights,
Speaker 2: sometimes sealed in the dark for days while storms hammered
Speaker 2: the hole. Nearly everything we know about that dynamic comes
Speaker 2: from these men themselves, so take it as their accounts
Speaker 2: rather than a verdict. Jim described a specific fear that
Speaker 2: stalked him in that corner position, what if the boat
Speaker 2: comes back up? Because if the boat re rided while
Speaker 2: all four men were in the aft cabin, all that
Speaker 2: gear would come down on them, the water would pour in,
Speaker 2: and the four disoriented men would be feeling for an
Speaker 2: exit in the dark. Glennie kept telling him never, she'll
Speaker 2: never turn right side up, and Jim's response, which tells
Speaker 2: you something about the mood in there, was that Glennie
Speaker 2: had also said she'd never flip over in the first place.
Speaker 2: He didn't have a lot of faith. Jim said, the
Speaker 2: first week, they all sweated so much that their perspiration
Speaker 2: gathered on the ceiling and dripped back down on them,
Speaker 2: like being in a cave, their own bodies raining on
Speaker 2: them in the dark.
Speaker 1: And what happened to those four psychologically is a pattern
Speaker 1: researchers see over and over. In isolation. You get confined
Speaker 1: environments like polar stations, submarines, long duration space crews, and involves, irritability, territory,
Speaker 1: fights over absurdly small things, factions, the authority figures status
Speaker 1: quietly eroding over time. Agencies screen and train for months
Speaker 1: to help crews survive each other. These four get a
Speaker 1: five second phone invitation and an AD from a backpacker's hostel.
Speaker 1: And here's the piece I find most human. For a
Speaker 1: claustrophobic band like Phil, panic and a genuine entrapment isn't irrational.
Speaker 1: It's a normal alarm with nowhere to go, But the
Speaker 1: account's described is still going to the opposite direction. Over
Speaker 1: four months, panic early and steadiness later. Routine and having
Speaker 1: actual jobs to do is usually going to reduce the
Speaker 1: panic and casey.
Speaker 2: This is actually an important concept in what we would
Speaker 2: call psychological first aid, attending to the psychology needs of
Speaker 2: others in challenging situations. We know that creating agency, giving
Speaker 2: an element of control, giving somebody a job or a task,
Speaker 2: something that helps build that feeling of being useful, can
Speaker 2: really go a long way. Towards calming anxiety and fear
Speaker 2: in a high stress situation. It's a powerful tool.
Speaker 1: And underneath all of this psychological stress, the ocean was
Speaker 1: doing something nobody aboard could see by the charts. Glenny
Speaker 1: knew that region should have pushed them east, away from
Speaker 1: New Zealand, towards thousands of miles of nothing and eventually
Speaker 1: South America. That expectation is part of why nobody looked
Speaker 1: closely to home. Instead, an unusual combination of winds and
Speaker 1: currents carried the wreck into a wide, slow looping arc
Speaker 1: back toward the country that had already written them off.
Speaker 1: Somewhere past day one hundred and ten, a smudge appeared
Speaker 1: on the horizon and didn't go away. It grew closer.
Speaker 1: It was Great Barrier Island Outaya, the rugged island guarding
Speaker 1: the outer Hiraki Gulf, and about fifty six miles northeast
Speaker 1: of Auckland. After four months of nowhere, they were being
Speaker 1: delivered at a walking pace toward the approaches to New
Speaker 1: Zealand's largest city. They couldn't steer, They could only watch
Speaker 1: it come. On September thirtieth, nineteen eighty nine, the Rose
Speaker 1: Noelle came home the hard way. She struck the rocks
Speaker 1: at Little Waterfall Bay on a remote stretch of Great
Speaker 1: Barriers coast, and the surf that had failed to kill
Speaker 1: her crew in four months finally beat the boat herself
Speaker 1: to pieces. The men got off the disintegrating wreck and
Speaker 1: on to land. Gaunt, weak legs that had barely walked
Speaker 1: since June suddenly required them to climb. Glennie later told
Speaker 1: reporters that he'd lost twenty one pounds. They spent that
Speaker 1: first night in the bush on the island. They later
Speaker 1: said they shied a single can of food in the
Speaker 1: dark and under them for the first time since June,
Speaker 1: first ground that did not move. That had to be
Speaker 1: an incredible feeling.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine the sea legs sensation that you would have. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that would be hard to adjust to, but so amazing.
Speaker 2: You just want to like get on your knees and
Speaker 2: kiss the ground. Right.
Speaker 1: Have you ever gone to a carnival before? And when
Speaker 1: you get home and lie down, you still feel like
Speaker 1: you're moving.
Speaker 2: You got to hang one leg off the bed so
Speaker 2: your foot's on the ground for right rounding. So what
Speaker 2: followed their landing, According to the reports spiled that week,
Speaker 2: was two nights of indecision before they reached the authorities.
Speaker 2: They found a batch that's the New Zealand word for
Speaker 2: a small holiday cottage, and they broke in on the island.
Speaker 2: They washed, they changed into clean clothes from the wardrobe.
Speaker 2: They cut and shave their hair and beards that had
Speaker 2: to feel amazing. They cooked a real meal, and they slept.
Speaker 2: And then they heard a telephone ringing at a nearby
Speaker 2: property and used it to call the island's sole policemen,
Speaker 2: Constable Shane GodNet, and he drove out and collected these
Speaker 2: four gaunt men in his truck. So this is the
Speaker 2: part of the story where we returned to the fact
Speaker 2: that surviving the ocean was not the hardest part for
Speaker 2: these men. For about a day, this was the story
Speaker 2: of the year. Media helicopters raced out to Great Barrier,
Speaker 2: publishers came running four men back from the dead after
Speaker 2: one hundred and nineteen days. And then people got a
Speaker 2: proper look at these ghosts, and the ghosts looked wrong.
Speaker 2: They looked unexpectedly clean and well groomed. They were steady
Speaker 2: on their feet. Why are reporting at the time described
Speaker 2: them as appearing surprisingly fit and well, doctors in Auckland
Speaker 2: checked them over and pronounce them well enough to go home.
Speaker 2: So where are the wild castaway beards? Where's the wreckage
Speaker 2: of four months? Officials said? So out loud, a national
Speaker 2: search coordinator wondered how a drifting yacht could cross four
Speaker 2: months of shipping in air lanes without anyone seeing her.
Speaker 2: There were those unexplained radio messages apparently from the Rose
Speaker 2: Noelle received days after the crew said she'd capsized from
Speaker 2: a position hundreds of miles from where they said they were,
Speaker 2: and the drift itself defied the charts. They had come
Speaker 2: ashore in exactly the direction the currents said that they shouldn't.
Speaker 2: So a theory took shape. New Zealand Customs working suspicion
Speaker 2: was that all of this was part of a drug
Speaker 2: run to South America gone wrong. Here are these four men.
Speaker 2: They've survived the waves, the dark, their thirst, the winter,
Speaker 2: each other, and the reward is an interrogation.
Speaker 1: I mean, the story just wasn't exciting enough, Julie. They
Speaker 1: needed to bring it up a few notches.
Speaker 2: Needed to throw a little spin on it, exactly. Well.
Speaker 1: Also, it's not like these guys were starved, you know,
Speaker 1: they had a whole boat full of food that they
Speaker 1: were munching on this whole time. I mean, if anything,
Speaker 1: they were probably more dehydrated than they were starved.
Speaker 2: And it's true. It's different being trapped in a capsized
Speaker 2: boat than say some of the other stories that we've
Speaker 2: encountered in the past, being on a life raft for
Speaker 2: a similar amount of time.
Speaker 1: Right when you're directly in the sun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and all you're eating is the fish or the
Speaker 2: marine life that you can harvest.
Speaker 1: So investigators did the correct thing and it saved them.
Speaker 1: They questioned all four separately and very closely, and the
Speaker 1: central details of four independent accounts matched, including the odd
Speaker 1: ones they had all lived inside the wreck, not on
Speaker 1: top of it, the rain catchment, glennies dives into the
Speaker 1: flooded gallery, the kiwi fruit ripening in trays.
Speaker 2: And then the physical evidence came in. Captain mel Bowen,
Speaker 2: an investigator with a Ministry of Transport's Maritime Transport Division,
Speaker 2: went out to Little Waterfall Bay with Constable Gottinet. They
Speaker 2: ran down through the bush to the beach and backup
Speaker 2: looking for the spot where the men said that they
Speaker 2: had camped and shared that can of food, and then
Speaker 2: Bowen put on dive gear and he went down on
Speaker 2: the reck site itself, and what came up off the
Speaker 2: seabed was not contraband, it was this jumble of household effects,
Speaker 2: a man's entire life. They found Glennie's bicycle, a chef's
Speaker 2: size walk from the beautiful gallery. And then there were
Speaker 2: the top sides, the paint that on any boat sailing
Speaker 2: right side up lives above the waterline and stays clean.
Speaker 2: On the Rose Noelle it was covered in barnacles.
Speaker 1: Which is just one of many unique aspects to the story.
Speaker 1: Barnacle larvae can only settle and grow unsubmerged surfaces, so
Speaker 1: marine biologists could look at the species and the maturity
Speaker 1: of the growth and say something that men couldn't prove
Speaker 1: in any other way. These hull surfaces, the ones that
Speaker 1: belong above the water, have been underwater for a long time.
Speaker 1: That doesn't give you a day count. Growth rates vary
Speaker 1: with species in temperature and water conditions, so this isn't
Speaker 1: a stopwatch, but it is strong physical evidence that this
Speaker 1: yacht floated inverted for an extended period of time. The
Speaker 1: Ministry of Transport's preliminary inquiry that November brought in an
Speaker 1: Auckland University zoologist, Associate Professor Brian Foster to analyze it.
Speaker 1: The Barnacle Report is an actual appendix of the official inquiry.
Speaker 1: Think of it as tree rings loosely, not a precise date,
Speaker 1: but a record you can't fake, scrub off or hurry.
Speaker 2: So ultimately, no single piece cleared them. It was these
Speaker 2: separate interviews matching the household, wreckage on the seabed, the
Speaker 2: condition and configuration of the hull, the drift evidence, and
Speaker 2: this marine growth all pointing the same way.
Speaker 1: Also, there were no drugs on board, so that probably.
Speaker 2: Helped absolutely, although their suspicion was the drug deal gone wrong.
Speaker 2: Oh right, might not be drugs on board gone wrong.
Speaker 1: But how would you ever proved something like that if
Speaker 1: there weren't drugs on board.
Speaker 2: It's like, I don't know, like you said, it sounds
Speaker 2: pretty Hollywood, pretty exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Or money, I guess you could find lots of money.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: That might suggest a drug deal gone gone right, gone right,
Speaker 1: and then gone wrong. First gone right, then gone wrong.
Speaker 1: So these four men told the truth for one hundred
Speaker 1: and nineteen days, and in the end the animals living
Speaker 1: on their boat backed them up. The inquiry did one
Speaker 1: more thing, and it may be the most consequential. It
Speaker 1: forced New Zealand to consider the fact that a distress
Speaker 1: beacon had blinked for nine days and no one had
Speaker 1: heard it. The case helped expose a real gap in
Speaker 1: the system, and New Zealand subsequently established a satellite receiving
Speaker 1: station at Lower Hut to pick up those distress signals.
Speaker 1: So the system that failed the Rose Noel was eventually
Speaker 1: improved and rebuilt. And then there's the ending. Four men
Speaker 1: survived one hundred and nineteen days pressed together on a
Speaker 1: fifty four inch mattress, and they did not come out
Speaker 1: of it as brothers. Days after the rescue, Glennie told
Speaker 1: reporters that being together for four months like that isn't good,
Speaker 1: and per the wire report, he added that he didn't
Speaker 1: much care if he ever saw the other three again,
Speaker 1: though he supposed the feeling would pass, He said it
Speaker 1: with a laugh. Twenty years later a reporter went looking
Speaker 1: to see if it had passed.
Speaker 2: It hadn't. The surviving men remained estranged, not one of
Speaker 2: them staying in touch.
Speaker 1: It was that mattress. They just could not get over
Speaker 1: the fact that somebody was hogging two inches of width
Speaker 1: on that mattress.
Speaker 2: Yeah, mattress hogs never win.
Speaker 1: Never. Glennie wrote his book The Spirit of Rose. He
Speaker 1: moved to the United States and married and built a
Speaker 1: new life firmly on land. Phil went home to Karen,
Speaker 1: who'd kept her packed. Their fifth child was a daughter,
Speaker 1: and they named her Rose, and he and Karen later
Speaker 1: bought another trimaran and lived aboard it, which tells you
Speaker 1: something about this man who spent four months trapped inside
Speaker 1: one of them.
Speaker 2: And Rick, the one who had bagged the beacon the
Speaker 2: night before the wave, the one laughing at the helm
Speaker 2: at sixteen knots. He tragically died of a brain tumor
Speaker 2: several years after the rescue. He was in his early thirties.
Speaker 2: And here's another thing about the crew. The men the
Speaker 2: ocean threw together didn't stay together, but the friendship that
Speaker 2: existed before any of it did. According to later reporting,
Speaker 2: the man who helped Rick's wife, Heather, care for him
Speaker 2: as the tumor progressed was Jim Nlepka. Jim went back
Speaker 2: to the United States and then returned to New Zealand.
Speaker 2: He was trained as a nurse and worked at a hospital.
Speaker 2: The cook who had kept the four men fed through
Speaker 2: a ship brick was again looking after people. He told
Speaker 2: his side of the story in his own book, Capsized,
Speaker 2: written with Steve Callahan, and if that name is ringing
Speaker 2: a bell for our listeners, it should. Callahan survived seventy
Speaker 2: six days a drift in a life raft in the
Speaker 2: Atlantic and wrote his own book A Drift one long
Speaker 2: duration Sea survivor, helping another get it down on paper.
Speaker 1: One hundred and nineteen days, four men declared drowned, delivered
Speaker 1: home by winds that overruled the charts, and believed in
Speaker 1: the end, partly on their testimony of barnacles. If you
Speaker 1: want to go deeper, both survivor accounts are imprint Glennie's
Speaker 1: The Spirit of Rose Noel and no Lepka's Capsized, and
Speaker 1: the full reference list is in our show notes. This
Speaker 1: has been the KRUX True Survival Stories. I'm Casey McIntosh and.
Speaker 2: I'm Julie Henningson. Thanks for listening. Have a great week.
Speaker 1: This is the KRUX True Survival Stories. I'm Casey McIntosh
Speaker 1: and I'm Julie Henningson. Join us next week for another
Speaker 1: true story of survival against all odds. Until then, stay safe,
Speaker 1: stay prepared, and stay alive.