A good boating buddy of mine, David George, gave me this book as a present a few years back, and coincidentally, I received another copy when I took a Safety at Sea course in 2010. I noticed that despite its 2003 publishing date, and the fact it's still pretty relevant, this book has been remaindered at my local nautically themed bookshop (see here), and so it's certainly cheap to acquire.
Written by Chris Beeson, a professional sailor and journalist, The Handbook of Survival at Sea combines clear illustrations and no-nonsense prose into a very good reference book most distance sailors should consider carrying. Frankly, most distance sailors should already know most of this stuff, or they risk themselves and others by their ignorance, but that is just the previous post soaking into this one.
Beeson assumes that your boat has gone and you've taken to dinghy or (more likely) a lift raft. His focus is less on getting somewhere than it is on maintaining health and attitude long enough be found. As was seen in the sinking of the S/V Concordia (which sank just over a year ago from this post), it was a triumph of training over sudden misadventure that everyone aboard got into the rafts, but even 40 hours on the ocean made for depression, salt sores, exhaustion and lethargy. Attitude, inventiveness and fitness are key, says Beeson in his book, and some of the tales of long survivals at sea were based on this inner fortitude. Today, of course, it's the rare sailor that doesn't carry an EPIRB or even a satphone into the raft, but that doesn't mean it will work, or, as has been known to happen, that the various search and rescue (SAR) services will be able to co-ordinate your recovery in a timely fashion.
In addition, there are still many places in the world beyond the ability of rescue helicopters or planes to reach, and seeing a raft from a ship (which may have to divert hundreds of miles to attempt to see what is in essence a speck on the ocean) may not go off well on the first tries. You may be adrift for some time in a very hostile environment, and so Beeson gives descriptions of supplies, tools and gear to consider bringing, such as medical kits, fishing gear and how to ration vital things like water, and how to collect fresh water via condensation at sea. He breaks down the book into "coastal" (where more accidents happen due to the number of sailor and, perhaps, their relative level of experience), and "offshore", where the better-prepared sailor may nonetheless spend a longer time prior to rescue.
Fishing, obviously, is one way to keep occupied, particularly as the food brought into the raft is exhausted. Care is needed using hooks and improvised spears on a rubber liftraft, obviously, and Beeson spends a lot of time explaining how to manage this, how to handle larger catches and when and why a fish would not be good to eat. Attracting rescue is discussed (again, flares in a raft can be hazardous!), as it the possibility and the dangers of self-rescue, in which a liferaft is cast ashore, but far from habitation or aid. Something I knew, for instance, but hadn't integrated into my "mental survival kit" was that if you can spy a creek or river emerging from an otherwise coral reef-strewn shore, make for it, because corals won't grow in fresh water, i.e. no reef there to cut your raft to ribbons. Small stuff, to be sure, but a measure of how the book logically tackles possible real-life contigencies.
In many ways, this book reminded me strongly of one a fair bit older, Survive Anywhere Safely. Written by a British former commando, it's a compendium of survival techniques in nearly every environment that not only assumes that you won't be rescued right away, but that it would be a bit of a letdown if you hadn't built a condo out of twigs, skins and skulls by the time you were.
Survival At Sea, being a more recent book, is more focused and likely more relevant. I can't recall any situation in which advice on how to remove a pinned arm with a penknife was given, but nonetheless I endorse this book (particularly as it's now in overstock) as a way to sensibly prepare one's safety gear, survival supplies and oneself should you have to step up into your raft from a deck awash with the sea.
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