Doomsday boat.

Discussion in 'All Things Boats & Boating' started by river runner, Apr 29, 2012.

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  1. Jetboy
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    Jetboy Senior Member

    "When he weighed 40 kilos he was in the Zero ward, a palm roof over cots on the ground, with all the other 100 guys who were dying that day, and he saw how weak the medics were and how hard it was for them to drag the emaciated bodies to the big hole where they threw them, so he dragged himself there all afternoon until the sun was going down so they wouldn't have to when he died.
    And he looked in that hole and saw the maggots and dogs and said I ain't goin' in there, and he crawled back, and got better.'

    This is exactly the kind of story that makes me doubt the stories. It sounds unbelievable - I don't believe it. If you take a step back and look at it, it's clearly an embellishment at best. I know this is probably a touchy subject. I'm not looking for a e-tard fight. I'm just pointing out the obvious.

    I'm glad you feel that you somehow understand "survival" better than everyone else. Hate to burst your bubble, but everyone else also thinks they understand it better than you. Its human nature.
     
  2. CatBuilder

    CatBuilder Previous Member

    E-tard! Ha ha ha! That is hilarious! :)
     
  3. BATAAN
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    BATAAN Senior Member

    On the VA form where they give you lots of room to write your experiences as a POW, he wrote one sentence, 'None that would be believed'.
    It sounds unbelievable because you have nothing in your life experience that is comparable, therefore it 'did not happen' for you and you can call if fiction because it's so extreme as to be unbelievable.
    Why would he lie?
    Here's a photo of one of the grave pits at O'Donnell.
    They were close to the huts and inside the wire.
    His VA records say he was at O'Donnell, Cabanatuan and F17.
    He was a very carefully truthful guy at all times as far as I could tell.
    I don't 'understand' survival.
    I've spent my life trying to, unsuccessfully so far, by seeing what others have experienced, starting with him from my earliest memories.
     

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  4. BATAAN
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    BATAAN Senior Member

    "The Cabanatuan “hospital” was first opened in June 1942 under the command of Col. James Gillespie. At the hospital there were 30 wards (made to hold 40 soldiers each), often holding up to 100 patients. In each ward were upper and lower decks made of bamboo slats. Each patient was allotted a two-by–six-foot space. The seriously ill were kept on the lower deck. Fenced off from the hospital was a quarantined area containing about ten wards, called the dysentery section. Within the dysentery section was a building missed when the wards were numbered. Later, it was called the “zero” ward, due to the fact that a prisoner had “zero” chance of leaving it alive, serving as a place to put seriously ill or dying patients."
    -History of O'Donnell and Cabanatuan
     
  5. Jetboy
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    Jetboy Senior Member

    To sum up, you genuinely believe that a person suffering from dysentery can simply decide that they don't want to die, and then get better?

    Is that your plan for surviving if a social meltdown occurs?
     
  6. BATAAN
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    BATAAN Senior Member

    I don't know if you can or not and it's a wonderful question, he lived, with life long health problems that included a very damaged gut flora giving him a lingering prison camp smell that can't be described, but he lived.
    And no, that is not my plan.
    This is about survival boats and I apologize for diverting it onto the philosophy of survival itself.
    In my area a major hazard is the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which causes large earthquakes in the Pacific NW every 300 years or so, and the last one was in 1700.
    A big shake here would cause an impressive Tsunami, probably washing the entire marina where my lovely 23 ton survival boat is berthed several miles inland, so I'm counting on my tiny old 1887 house high on the bluff above the water, our large garden and the disaster supplies I have for, well, disasters.
    If Fukushima #4's spent fuel pool collapses, as it seems about to, we're all screwed, so I'm not very optimistic.
    The most successful 'survival' boat users will probably be guys in Kayaks with fish hooks and harpoons, working close in by the shore.
     
  7. souljour2000
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    souljour2000 Senior Member

    Did someone say submarine?...Dont wait...get YOURS ordered today!

    http://miami.craigslist.org/pbc/boa/2937996811.html
     
  8. Submarine Tom

    Submarine Tom Previous Member

    Okay, this is not quite correct.

    The Cascadia Subduction Zone is known to release, statistically, every 300 - 500 years, sometimes longer.

    So, we have only just entered the probability envelope. It could happen in two seconds, two minutes, two hours, two days, two weeks, two months, two years, two decades, two centuries, or longer...

    Secondly, the mechanism sends the tsunami west. Sure, there will be some effect east but the main thrust (literally) is away from us here on the west coast. It will depend almost entirely on tide state and atmopheric pressure when the fracture occurs. The odds are hugely in our favour.

    But, if you can get in a boat and get to deep water within 20 minutes of the release, you'll be fine.
     
  9. pdwiley
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    pdwiley Senior Member

    That bit is entirely possible. Some people have immense inner reserves of will power & toughness, others don't. Call it a combination of genetics and personality. There are lots of documented cases of people with incurable cancers living far past their expected time. Not quite the same, but still.

    As for the Japanese camps, I believe every word of it, both the good & the bad in human nature. There are a number of books in my library documenting the Japanese atrocities (and occasional kindnesses) in POW camps, those books written by the survivors to document who died and how.

    Anyway, back to boats, once again I agree with Catbuilder. 1 - 2 years survival with a bit of preparation is dead easy on a boat. 5 years? Maybe. 10 years, I don't think so unless it's both big (therefore lots of room for spares) and simple like Bataan's. The rest of you aren't going to have functional engines or sails if they're UV sensitive.

    I'd still take my 3 acres of waterfront with machine shop, fruit trees, garden and wildlife, thanks. A tsunami might be a problem but not much else. If I wasn't spending so much money on a hole in the water, I'd have 5kW of PV panels as well but as nearly all power is hydro-electric it'd take a major problem to knock out the entire system.

    PDW
     
  10. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    River Runner,

    Do you still think this thread should be under BOAT DESIGN?

    I just read the last two pages and didn't see anything about boat design.

    Sorry you were offended in the PM - really.

    But I was right. This belongs somewhere else.
     
  11. BATAAN
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    BATAAN Senior Member

    I guess a lot of this comes down to is what situation are we all individually in BEFORE any major disruption to our established lives.
    This, which of course includes where we are (Downtown LA, remote Montana?), seems to bear hardest on what is our ideal survival boat.
    If I couldn't take BERTIE, it would be some alongshore thing, light and shallow draft, you could drag up and hide in the bushes.
    Say a 22 foot narrow flat bottom, open or half decked boat that would row easily, paddle well, sail well with a very small rig, and carry enough food and water to live well for two weeks or survive for a month or so.
    This could, with lowered mast, be paddled at the edge of the kelp forests, fishing on the seaward edge, where the big cod feed.
    Or dried out on a clam flat, allowing you to dig as many as you could on a tide.
    As said before, it's easy to hide from those whom would take what is not theirs.
    Kind of like, or maybe just like, a Haida Gwaii canoe, evolved over a good long time for surviving in the Pacific NW.
     

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  12. BATAAN
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    BATAAN Senior Member

    If the shore was possibly heavily contaminated with radio-active fallout, I'd want BERTIE with her 10 ton cargo capacity and huge hold, stuffed with drums of grain and MREs and water...
    But still, you can't stay at sea forever. That's the problem.
    I guess the poster above who said be prepared to stay at sea until things settle down does make a lot of sense.
    At least 30 days I suppose.
     
  13. SheetWise
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    SheetWise All Beach -- No Water.

    Depends on the scope of the unrest, but I would measure in months or years, not days. If Katrina taught us anything, it's that the government has no plan, is incompetent, and will take months (if not years) to respond in any meaningful way -- and that was a localized disaster surrounded by fully functioning cities to use as staging grounds. In a widespread disaster I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I depended on the government at all.
     
  14. Submarine Tom

    Submarine Tom Previous Member

    You've got that right SheetWise, in fact, I don't like to be in ANY situation where I have to rely on the government.

    You'd think if anyone was going to get it right it would have been Japan, especially when it comes to a nuclear reactor. And it was some pretty basic design flaws too, not some off the wall, unforeseeable anomoly.

    "Hold onto your hats boys..."
     

  15. DStaal
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    DStaal Junior Member

    There is a difference between 'the government has completed an organized response' and 'things have settled down': The latter can occur entirely independently of the former. Continuing to use Katrina as an example, it had largely settled down within a week, and I would probably say it had fully settled well within a month.

    That's not to say that their had been adequate response, or that the situation was resolved, or even that a meaningful start on recovery had occurred, but in the type of worldwide disaster we are considering in this thread I very much doubt such would ever occur. But if you pulled up in your boat and asked who was in charge, you would be given a coherent answer, and you could deal with that person (or their deputies) in good faith and expect that faith to be returned. (And would be able to gauge whether that was likely to be a good idea based on dealing with those in charge.) That's enough to be able to set up a stable trading relationship.
     
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