Called A MARRIAGE AT SEA in the US, not sure why in the UK it has this name, this is the true story of a couple who spent 117 days in a lifeboat after their sail boat went down.
Lots of SPOILERS. The husband was a pretty rigid and eccentric character, and was fairly lonely till his late thirties, where he met his wife, who was ten years younger. They did not come from money and saved hard to have the chance to go on an epic sailing trip. They made it across the Atlantic okay, but in the Pacific, a few days away from the Galapagos, a dying whale sank their ship. They scrambled onto the lifeboat with what they could, and Maralyn (the wife) took a photo of the tip of its sail as it went down.
Then began 117 days. They saw 8 ships, none of who saw them, before they were rescued. They got through their food in 20 days, and then started on what they could catch. They fished with safety pins, and caught turtles and sharks (!) with their bare hands. They sometimes caught birds too, and ate not just the birds but the fish the birds vomited back up. They were thirsty enough to think fish eyes were delicious water source. Hardest of all was the despair. Maurice was willing to give up, but Maralyn insisted they would live. Towards the end the raft started deflating, so they had to pump it back up EVERY HALF HOUR. They were near death (and I’m talking pressure sores that reached to the bone) when a South Korean ship rescued them.
They are (get this) eager to get back on the water again and use the money they make from selling their story to buy another boat and sail on. Eventually though they run out of money and are forced to go home. I felt bad for them that YouTube was not invented yet. They would have raked it in. They are less happy on land, but still extraordinarily happy together, until Maralyn dies at 61. Maurice is bereft.
Bizarrely, the author begins the ending of the book with this:
“There are many ways to take the measure of a life. In the linear version, Maurice’s life had a hard beginning, a dramatic middle, an isolated end”
Yikes. Imagine thinking it’s your business to take the measure of a life. What does that even mean? Luckily she takes a steer from Maurice, from his self-published autobiography (which, charmingly, only begins on the day he meets Maralyn), where he says:
“Although I am wary of accepted truths, I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life.”
So she concludes with the idea that you could “measure (a life’s) success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved. On that count, his life had been a triumph”