The Day Everything Changed
On a June morning in 1972, just before 10am, 18-year-old Douglas Robertson heard terrifying sounds that would change his life forever. Ear-splitting bangs echoed through the wooden hull of his family's schooner, the Lucette, as it sailed the vast Pacific Ocean.
Douglas instantly recognised the noise as disaster - and he was right. Three killer whales had attacked the 43-foot vessel, sending water pouring through shattered planking. Within moments, the Lucette began her descent to the ocean floor, leaving six people scrambling for survival.
The crew - Douglas, his parents Dougal and Linda, siblings Neil and Sandy (11-year-old twins), and family friend Robin Williams - had mere seconds to act. They grabbed what belongings they could before clambering into a rubber life raft, 200 miles from the Galápagos Islands with no maps, compass, or navigation instruments.
37 Days of Hell
What followed was an extraordinary fight for life that would last 37 nights. The castaways began with only ten days' supply of water and three days of emergency rations, facing a limitless horizon of sea with nobody aware they were missing.
'To this day, I don't really know how we survived,' reflects Douglas, now 71. 'Every night we'd watch the sun go down and wonder if we'd still be here to see it rise in the morning. We never knew if we'd make it through the night.'
Their ordeal included multiple challenges:
- Surviving on just one sip of water per day during drought periods
- Catching flying fish, Dorado, and eventually turtles for food
- Discovering that Dorado eyeballs provided precious fresh water
- Enduring saltwater sores from sitting chest-deep in seawater
- Battling sharks that followed their tiny craft
- Surviving a 24-hour storm with 20-foot swells
After 17 days, their life raft disintegrated, forcing all six survivors into a salvaged 9-foot fibreglass dinghy called Ednamair. 'If you saw it, you wouldn't believe six people could fit in that tiny dinghy,' Douglas recalls. 'We were so close to the water, we could see fish swimming underneath us.'
Against All Odds: Rescue and Aftermath
On day 38, a miracle appeared on the horizon - the Japanese fishing trawler Toka Maru II. After firing their last flare, they watched with 'hearts in our mouths' as the ship changed course to rescue them.
The rescue itself was perilous, with sharks circling as the exhausted castaways reached for helping hands. They had drifted and rowed more than 750 miles during their ordeal, surviving against unimaginable odds.
Four days later, the family arrived in Panama to international publicity, prompted by the captain's telegram: 'Six stranded Britons saved.' The British Embassy arranged their return home, though they had no house to go to and drifted between relatives.
The experience profoundly shaped Douglas, who now works as an accountant in Barnet, north London. 'It made me fearless,' he says. 'When people say, "We can't do this", I always think, "Why not?"'
Now, more than half a century later, this gripping survival story has been transformed into an immersive eight-part podcast, allowing the Robertson siblings and Robin to relive their ordeal in their own words.
