Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean • Hacker News Board

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#81

Post by saiya-jin » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 12:49 PM UTC

ralphie02 wrote: post #62

jeffhuys wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people simply cannot float. Me included. I've had 3 different instructors try to tell and show me that everyone can float. I can't. I have 5 swimming certificates, I'm fit, but I think I just don't have enough body fat? Even in the Red Sea (if it's called that in English) I can't float. Not for more than 5 seconds.

Maybe your bones are too dense, though to be honest, I've never heard of anyone with your issue in floating/treading water. I've always assumed that everyone has enough buoyancy to float most of their body.

I have a counter-story - sister of my best friend can float easily in fresh water, she just doesn't sink at all. I've never ever saw anybody else do it, I go down even with full lungs. She has a bit of body fat, but not too much.

So I presume there is quite a bit of variation in our body densities, more than meets the eye certainly

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#82

Post by andrewflnr » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 12:50 PM UTC

narag wrote: post #73

philbarr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? You said: > Divers' suits are not dry Wetsuits are wet. Drysuits are dry. Sometimes divers wear wetsuits, and some of the more experienced ones wear drysuits.

It's getting ridiculously difficult to write something in HN without receiving some absurd answers like that. The comment I responded to said that divers use drysuits so this guy should be wearing one. No matter how you put it, the article says that the guy used a wetsuit. Please, stop for a moment and let this little fact sink: the guy wore a wetsuit and the article clearly states this much. Yes, I could have said t…

You were trying to explain the difference between dry and wet suits to people who obviously already knew the difference, because they brought it up themselves. Now you're pointing out that the article specifically mentions wetsuits to people who obviously already knew that and chose to discount it. So yeah, if you make context-oblivious comments, you're going to get downvoted.

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#83

Post by daurnimator » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:05 PM UTC

jeffhuys wrote: post #54

joevandyk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salt water is buoyant. If you know how to float, it doesn’t take much energy.

Some people simply cannot float. Me included. I've had 3 different instructors try to tell and show me that everyone can float. I can't. I have 5 swimming certificates, I'm fit, but I think I just don't have enough body fat? Even in the Red Sea (if it's called that in English) I can't float. Not for more than 5 seconds.

I have the same problem! Sinkers unite!

My theory is that I keep less air in my lungs on a normal out breath than others.

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#84

Post by daurnimator » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

philbarr wrote: post #46

narag wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

drysuit given that he's a diver Divers' suits are not dry. There's water between the skin and the suit. Actually that warmed water layer is what isolates the body against the cold outside.

No that's wetsuits. Dry suits don't let water in.

I dive in a semi-dry-wetsuit. It lets water in but not out. So it starts off cold, but eventually the water warms up with your body

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#85

Post by Flip-per » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:21 PM UTC

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #32

jamiegreen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it near impossible, mostly due to waves that push water into your eyes and mouth!

Most big waves are only close to the beach when water breaks over the sand

Big waves travel over long distances in the open sea. But it's not the big waves that would disturb when you are floating around, they would just make you float up and down a bit. More disturbing are the small waves that are caused by nearby winds. At the ocean you very often have some wind nearby (depends on the region, season etc).

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#86

Post by cafard » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:24 PM UTC

jeffhuys wrote: post #54

joevandyk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salt water is buoyant. If you know how to float, it doesn’t take much energy.

Some people simply cannot float. Me included. I've had 3 different instructors try to tell and show me that everyone can float. I can't. I have 5 swimming certificates, I'm fit, but I think I just don't have enough body fat? Even in the Red Sea (if it's called that in English) I can't float. Not for more than 5 seconds.

I float, but not much more of me is out of the water than I could cover with my hand. Even with more fat than I like to carry, I can stand on the bottom of a swimming pool. This greatly amuses my wife, who can lift her toes out of the water, while mine are pointing straight down.

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#87

Post by LeifCarrotson » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:32 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #21

aslushnikov wrote: post #8

This reminds me about Stanislav Kurilov [1], who successfully escaped USSR by jumping off the cruise ship with a snorkeling mask and swimming for the following 2.5 days towards Philippines. He wrote an interesting book called "Alone In The Ocean" [2] where he described his endeavor. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov [2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HYLLOZ2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

How did he combat hypothermia?

Swimming continuously.

It's one thing to sit neutrally bouyant in a Scuba suit, or in a flotation device, with nothing but shivering to keep warm. Asleep, you can get hypothermia in water that is nearly at body temperature.

However, endurance athletes (like this 2.5-day-swimmer apparently decided he was) can keep warm by exertion. Competitive swimmers will keep warm, and actually sweat a great deal, in a very cold pool throughout an hour or two of practice in nothing but a speedo.

The problem only comes when one discovers, like the protagonist of Jack London's "To Build A Fire", that you lack the endurance.

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#88

Post by bennyp101 » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:34 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #69

beastman82 wrote: post #65

Tldr; fetal position

I don't understand how you can stay in the foetal position while floating. Even face-up foetal (without a mask) seems very likely to be stressful.

He would have inflated his BCD when he got to the surface, and that would have kept him afloat, probably dropped his weights as well. That way his kit is actually keeping him afloat.

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#89

Post by jasonkester » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:49 PM UTC

danilocesar wrote: post #75

So, a guy with tons of experience goes for open water dive without a diving marker or diving alert device, decide to leave his dive-buddy and return to the beach by himself. Some other articles says he was a navy veteran. That would probably explain his overconfidence, as those are things that recreational and tec divers are explicitly trained not to do. Lots of diving accidents reports starts with someone being over…

I did a month worth of diving in Dahab on the Red Sea a while back. Talking to the instructors and dive masters there, their big challenge is keeping the Israelis from killing themselves.

Being just over the border in Egypt, they get a steady stream of young guys fresh out of the army who are accustomed to surviving lots of things and now want to go have some fun. So they nod along to the safety instruction on their "discover scuba" dive, then swim off over the lip to the 30M deep underwater caves filled with lion fish and opportunities for knife fighting.

It doesn't surprise me that the guy in the story thought he could swim to the beach from a few hundred yards away.

Re: Surviving 75 hours alone in the ocean

#90

Post by specialp » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:59 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #21

aslushnikov wrote: post #8

This reminds me about Stanislav Kurilov [1], who successfully escaped USSR by jumping off the cruise ship with a snorkeling mask and swimming for the following 2.5 days towards Philippines. He wrote an interesting book called "Alone In The Ocean" [2] where he described his endeavor. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov [2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HYLLOZ2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

How did he combat hypothermia?

The most important aspect of this is he was wearing a 5mil wetsuit. All of the rest of the things they mentioned are much smaller factors in him staying warm. The wetsuit also makes him slightly more buoyant. I kayak in the winter and have a dry suit, and a 5mil wetsuit when the water gets a bit warmer. In the winter my survival time would be minutes unprotected. The most dangerous time of year is May and June as unprotected kayakers come out in response to the warm air temperature. But the water is still very cold.

In that water he would have succumb to hypothermia in hours. I spent 2 hours wading in water with no protection in the same temperature that he was in. My body temp was 95 degrees, lower than his after 72.