Nacho chips, crackers and tiny fish: How a B.C. senior survived on the open sea for nearly 6 days

Don Cavers didn't realize how weak he was until a giant merchant ship pulled up within metres of his life-raft to rescue him.

For the previous 5½ days, the B.C. senior had been floating on the open water of the Caribbean Sea, eating only nacho chips, crackers and a handful of tiny fish he was able to catch.  

The covered raft had been his only protection from the elements after he ran the Starlight, his Ericson sailboat, onto a reef near the coast of Cuba — enroute from Colombia to Puerto Rico. 

"You basically just deal with one thing at a time and figure out a solution," he said.

Cavers was rescued on Dec. 14, 2021.

He's no stranger to tight situations or seeking adventure. He said he previously survived amoebic dysentery in Afghanistan in the 1960s, had a sailboat destroyed by hurricane-force winds off the coast of Texas in the early 1990s and navigated a forced landing in Kelowna, B.C., when his four-seat plane malfunctioned in the mid-2000s.

Through it all, Cavers, 77, who lives in Blind Bay, B.C., said he has learned an important lesson about how to survive: "It's the panic that kills you."

The most recent misadventure started back in November 2021 when he flew to Colombia to pick up a sailboat he had purchased sight unseen. 

Pretty quickly after he set sail for Puerto Rico on Dec. 2, 2021, Cavers ran into trouble with the winds off the coast of Colombia. 

"The boat seemed a little sluggish, so I took my headlamp and took a look down below and discovered I had three inches [eight centimetres] of water over the floorboards ... it turned out that every hatch in the boat was spraying water."

He managed to bail out most of the water, but within 36 hours, the salt had destroyed most of the boat's electrical systems.

For the next two days, he said he hand-steered the ship for 16 to 18 hours straight before managing to get his autopilot working on the morning of Dec. 7. He spent the next day and a half trying to fix his other equipment, only taking short breaks to sleep.

"I fell asleep at a very inopportune time and woke up to a very heavy bump and found myself bouncing on a reef … the keel caught and probably tore the stern open because the boat started sinking pretty quickly."

As the boat sank, Cavers said he was able to grab a few things that would end up being key to his survival — a working computer, his bag filled with life-saving supplies, including flares and a signal mirror, a bag of nacho chips and a package of crackers, a waterproof backpack with his identification, a 20-litre container of water and his personal locator beacon.