Last Man Off: A True Story of Disaster and Survival on the Antarctic Seas - Softcover

Lewis, Matt

 
9780147515346: Last Man Off: A True Story of Disaster and Survival on the Antarctic Seas
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0147515343 ISBN 13: 9780147515346
Verlag: PLUME, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

"A sinister version of The Perfect Storm . . . Thrilling." - Sunday Times (UK)

For readers of The Perfect Storm , Between a Rock and a Hard Place , and Into the Wild

There's nothing that armchair adventure lovers relish more than a gripping true story of disaster and heroism, and Last Man Off delivers all that against a breathtaking backdrop of icebergs and killer whales. On June 6, 1998, twenty-three-year-old Matt Lewis had just started his dream job as a scientific observer aboard a deep-sea fishing boat in the waters off Antarctica. As the crew haul in the line for the day, a storm begins to brew. When the captain vanishes and they are forced to abandon ship, Lewis leads the escape onto three life rafts, where the battle for survival begins.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Matt Lewis is a trained marine biologist with an MSc with distinction in Marine and Fisheries Science. He now lives with his wife and two children in Aberdeen.

Matt Lewis is a trained marine biologist with an MSc with distinction in Marine and Fisheries Science. He now lives with his wife and two children in Aberdeen.

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MATT LEWIS is a trained marine biologist with an MSc with distinction in Marine and Fisheries Science. He now lives with his wife and two children near Aberdeen, Scotland.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book is my attempt to record an event that took place in June 1998 during the winter in the Southern Ocean. I was a Scientific Observer aboard the Sudur Havid, a South African deep-sea fishing boat, and it was my first job since graduating from university as a marine biologist.

Outside South Africa, the fate of the Sudur Havid was never big news. It was just another foreign fishing boat in trouble. Really, I should be calling her the Sudurhavid, or even Suðurhavið, for I have come to learn that this was her proper name. But on board I only ever saw the word split on life-rings, and I've known her as the Sudur Havid for far too long to change. To continue with the confessional, I have used the more familiar term 'Antarctic Seas' for the subtitle of the book when we were technically only 54
South - but we were south of the Antarctic convergence, so the water masses and ecology are much the same.

I waited a long time before I started writing Last Man Off. Partly this was due to a lack of self-belief, but it was also because I was trying to get on with my life and forget. I was trying to persuade myself that nothing of any significance had happened, so to write a book about the events was the last thing on my mind.

I'm glad I waited to start writing. In the immediate aftermath of the accident I was so caught up in being a participant, and there was so much emotion, that it was impossible to be objective in description. When the police in the Falkland Islands asked me what had happened, I barely paused for breath for three hours, producing sixty-five pages of descriptions, times and details. I kept the transcript of the interview and, eight years later, this and other evidence helped me relive and reconstruct the events. By that time the need to blame had mellowed, I had listened to others as they discussed what had happened, and processed the events myself. Time passed has made the story clearer, and less painful to tell.

There was coverage of the Sudur Havid in Cape Town. Some accounts were based on fact, some were more like fiction, but none were complete. I slipped quietly back into the UK, no cameras or journalists waiting for me at the airport, and I was grateful. My friends and family let me be; they didn't want to drag up traumatic memories, and assumed that I would talk about things in my own time. But I didn't want to tell those I cared about for fear of scaring them, and didn't tell others for fear of upsetting myself. It took years for me to realize that there was a story that deserved to be known. How could the struggle of a crew against the toughest seas in the world have slipped by? While I have been writing, a number of my fellow survivors have died, leaving the biggest story of their lives untold.

I knew that I would need to describe events that I had not directly witnessed. After years out of touch, I managed to make contact with Phil Marshall of the Isla Camila and Magnus Johnson from the Northern Pride, and met to interview them. For Phil, in particular, the memories were upsetting. It wasn't pleasant to ask him to recall as much detail as I needed, but he helped me to describe the search and the moment of rescue.

As the book took shape, and I became more committed, I travelled to South Africa to interview some of the crew. In a series of one-on-one interviews, I checked my recollections with Morné Van Geems, Sven Lizamore and Stephan Truter from the Sudur Havid, and they described events I couldn't have witnessed in the other raft. There were small conflicts between their memories and mine, but I expected this. They also helped me to build up a better picture of the techniques that we used in fishing, which was something I wanted to describe as vividly as

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Verlag
PLUME
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0147515343
ISBN 13 
9780147515346
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Softcover