To this day no-one has spent longer at sea in a raft.
#Lim raft survival full#
He had lost 9kg and spent four weeks in hospital but made a full recovery. Miraculously, after more than four monts at sea, three Brazilian fishermen discovered the raft. Poon counted the days by tying knots in a rope, but after spending so long at sea, he decided that there was no point in counting the days and began counting full moons instead. A German U-Boat also saw a stricken Poon but did not help. However, it should be noted that at the time U-Boats often offered ‘dummy’ survivors to ambush their enemies. Poon thought it was because he was Chinese that they didn’t offer help. A freighter and then a squad of US Navy patrol planes went past him. Then he cut the fins and let them dry in the sun – a Hainan delicacy.Īside from sunburn and seasickness, Poon also had to suffer the agony of watching boats go by. It had not rained for days, and he was out of water the blood quenched his thirst. After, Poon Lim cut it open and sucked the blood from its liver. The shark attacked him after he had it on the raft, so he used the water jug half-filled with seawater to subdue it. He had braided the line so it would have double thickness and had wrapped his hands in canvas to enable him to make the catch. The first shark to pick up the taste was only a few feet long but hit the line with full force, but Poon Lim was prepared. He also tried to catch sharks using the remnants of a bird he killed as bait. Poon, barely alive, caught a bird and drank its blood to survive. Once, a large storm hit and spoiled his fish and fouled his water. When he caught a fish, he would cut it open with a knife he made out of a biscuit tin and dry it on a hemp line over the raft. He took a wire from the flashlight and made it into a fishhook, and used hemp rope as a fishing line.įor larger dish, he dug a nail out of the boards on the wooden raft and bent it into a hook. He could not swim very well and often tied a rope from the raft to his wrist, in case he fell into the ocean. Lim initially kept himself alive by drinking the water and eating the food on the raft, but he later resorted to fishing and catching rainwater in a canvas life jacket covering. The raft had provisions on it - several tins of biscuits, a forty-litre jug of water, some chocolate, a bag of sugar lumps, some flares, two smoke pots and a flashlight. As the ship was sinking, Poon Lim was able to grab a life jacket and jumped overboard before the ship’s boilers exploded.Īfter about two hours in the water, he came across an eight-foot square wooden raft and climbed onto it. The German U-boat U-172 intercepted it on November 23 and attacked the ship with two torpedoes. The ship that Lim was on was armed but slow moving, and was sailing alone. He would hold the world record for time spent surviving as a castaway adrift at sea. Of the 53 on board, Lim was the only one to survive the attack. The Germans intercepted the boat 750 miles east of the Amazon, and in just two minutes, a pair of torpedoes sank the ship. Chinese native Poon Lim was a cabin boy on a British passenger freight, the Ben Lomond, during World War II that was traveling from Cape Town to Surinam.
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