Biography
On 27 January, 1971, Dougal departed from Falmouth, England on board Lucette, a 43-foot wooden schooner built in 1922 which the family had purchased in Malta with their life's savings. He was accompanied by his wife Lynn, daughter Anne, son Douglas, and twin sons Neil and Sandy. Over the next year and a half, they sailed across the Atlantic, stopping at various ports of call in the Caribbean. Anne retired from the voyage in the Bahamas.
During their transit of the Panama Canal, the family members took aboard an inexperienced crew member named Robin Williams, who was to accompany them on the next segment of their voyage to the Galapagos Islands and beyond to the islands of the South Pacific.
On 15 June, 1972, Lucette (Lucy) was holed by a pod of killer whales and sank approximately 200 miles west of the Galapagos Islands. The group of six people on board escaped to an inflatable life raft and a solid-hull dinghy with little in the way of tools or provisions.
Using the dinghy as a towboat powered by a jury-rigged sail, the group made its way towards the doldrums, hoping to find rain there so they could collect drinking water. They did so successfully, while catching turtles, dorado, and flying fish to eat. The inflatable raft became unusable after 16 days, so the six people crowded into the three-metre long dinghy with their supplies. They then continued to use the wind and current to their advantage, moving to the northeast towards Central America. By their 38th day as castaways, they had stored dried meat and fresh water in such quantities that they intended to begin rowing that night to speed their progress. However, they were sighted and picked up that day by a Japanese fishing trawler (Toka Maru II) on its way to the Panama Canal. Robertson, who had been keeping a journal in case they were rescued, recounted the ordeal in the 1973 book Survive the Savage Sea, which served as the foundation for the 1991 film of the same name. The story was revisited in his son Douglas's book The Last Voyage of the Lucette.
Dougal went on to write "Sea Survival: A Manual", and continued to sail until his death in 1992.
The fact that Dougal's party survived because of their dinghy, which they were able to use as a proactive lifeboat, is used by proponents of the multifunction self-rescue dinghy to make their case that the self-rescue dinghy can be a better survival option for blue water sailors than is the inflatable liferaft.
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