Mariners II

By R.Z. Sheppard

STAYING ALIVE!

by MAURICE and MARALYN BAILEY

192 pages. McKay. $6.95.

On March 4, 1973, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey had their breakfast interrupted by sperm whale, which rammed their twin-keel sloop Auralyn about 250 miles northeast of the Galapagos Islands. The boat suffered a fatal portside hole below the waterline. Within an hour, the couple--who had been on their way from native England to New Zealand--embarked on a spectacular survival adventure in a round, covered rubber raft roped to a nine-foot dinghy. The publisher claims that the Baileys set a record--117 days*--for time adrift following a shipwreck. Though each lost about 40 pounds, suffered vitamin deficiencies and the raft-man's excruciating equivalent of bed sores, their condition was far from critical when they were picked up by a Korean fishing boat 1,500 miles from the site of the sinking. The Baileys--he, a 42-year-old printer's clerk and she, a 33-year-old tax officer--were not particularly well equipped. Before Auralyn sank, they salvaged 33 cans of food, ranging from steak-and-kidney-pie filling to treacle, along with a variety of plastic containers for collecting rain water, a knife and a handful of safety pins. Incredibly, the Baileys' emergency kit did not contain fishhooks; the pins enabled them to catch small fish. Big turtles let themselves be grabbed by a flipper and, with some difficulty, wrestled aboard and butchered.

The inability to preserve fish meant either feast or famine. Days of intense heat alternated with days of rain-soaked chill. Storms repeatedly swamped the dinghy. Spirits soared--and fell--as seven ships maddeningly passed within one or two miles without sighting the Baileys. Future transoceanic yachtspersons who think that waving a shirt attracts nautical attention will be sobered by the Baileys' experience. Sharks kept bumping the bottom of the raft, whether in hopes of turning it over or simply scratching their backs the Baileys could never decide.

In the tradition of British husband-and-wife writing teams, the Baileys exercise considerable reserve in sharing the more personal aspects of their ordeal. "We talked without the encumbrances of modern living; we explored the hidden depths of each other's characters," Maralyn at one time confides. But that is as much as either Bailey will allow in a book that is essentially an expansion of water-logged diaries kept during the trip, plus photographs, maps and useful illustrations. Just this capacity for even-keeled privacy seems to have pulled them through. "In some weird and detached way," Maralyn concludes, "we found peace in our complete and compulsory isolation." Mrs. Bailey admits that she is a fatalist. She also cannot swim. . R.Z. Sheppard

*Poon Lim, a native of Hong Kong, spent 133 days on a raft in the South Atlantic after his ship was torpedoed in 1942.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.