A Sailor's Review of All Is Lost

The movie "All is Lost" appears to be getting good reviews, and is even being hailed as the performance of Robert Redford's career. But if you are an offshore sailor, or even someone who owns a boat, you might want to pass.

Fair warning, major spoilers follow...

The movie joins our solo sailor, a well-heeled man on a blue-water 39-foot sloop (a Cal 39, in fact), in the middle of the Indian Ocean. By the end of the movie, he has lost his boat, spent several days in a liferaft, failed to signal several large passing ships, and intentionally burned his own liferaft in a last-ditch effort to attract assistance. Non-sailors watching the movie have apparently enjoyed what they have taken as an interesting story of a skilled sailor facing adversity and striving to survive to the end. But as an offshore sailor who has gone from Massachusetts to New Zealand on a 35-foot sailboat, the movie has some serious problems.

A couple things they got right

To be fair, let me mention some details that were spot on.

• When the hull is damaged, he correctly puts the boat on the opposite tack to lift the hole out of the water. This reduces the water ingress, and allows inspection and repair of the damage.
• When he moves to the life raft as the boat is sinking, he leaves the raft tied to the main boat right up until it sinks. This is indeed the correct approach, as many sailboats that seemed to be sinking are found later, still afloat. Staying attached to a large object increases the odds of being spotted by search and rescue (boats or aircraft). 
• Our sailor does always seem to have his knife with him, which is good practice.

Minor errors and implausibilities

Beyond these few accurate points, things go from bad to worse. Very little that you see in the movie is realistic:

• Our sailor is shown waking up after sleeping in the forward V-berth at sea. This has never happened, especially on a 39-foot boat like this with large, comfortable settees in the main cabin. The motion up front in a boat at sea is so unpleasant, even in calm seas, that most offshore sailors convert their V-berths into storage during passages. Many sailboats designed for long-distance cruising eliminate forward berths altogether in favor of storage, workshops, or full-size shower stall.
• At one point when working on the radio, he does so on the cabin top and foredeck forward of the mast. This is extremely unrealistic, since even at a dock, the motion of a boat will send items over the side. All sailors work on such things in the cockpit, where dropped items are contained by the seat backs and easily retrieved from the seats or floor. 
• I understand the difficulties of filming on a genuine ocean. But those are the flattest seas I've ever seen, especially during bad weather. What is the point of telling a story at sea without showing the real environment?
• Several times, you see many small or fragile items loose on counters. No sailor has glasses or plates made of actual glass or ceramic, except perhaps items wrapped and stowed away for special occasions.
• At one point he removes a nut from something (a battery, I think) and puts it down on a counter. No one on a boat would ever do that. Nuts, bolts, crimp ends, etc. always go in a cup or a pocket. Otherwise they almost immediately fall and drop in the bilge, never to be seen again.

(These initial inaccuracies gloss over something which to me is a fundamental aspect of the day-to-day experience of offshore sailing: constant motion.)

• Just before and during the storm, there is a strange focus on our sailor's efforts to raise a storm jib. At the same time, the genoa (another forward sail) is hanging loosely and partially unfurled. In reality, that genoa would be tightly furled or removed altogether and stowed below. And the first priority before a coming storm would be to either deeply reef (partially lower) the mainsail, or furl it and to instead put up a storm trysail (which is a small mainsail that is attached to the mast).
• The other sail-handling error is that the "storm" jib appeared to be immense. True storm sails are quite small (e.g. tablecloth- or bedspread-size), even for a 39-footer like this.
• He wears a safety harness with a safety line, but attaches it to the lifeline rather than a padeye or jackline (a web strap attached to the deck). This attachment would definitely have come loose when he fell overboard. Then, inexplicably, he later doesn't wear the harness (during a second rollover). This seems purely to provide the drama of him being in the water and not attached to the boat.
• When he first wakes up to find water in (and still entering) the cabin, his reaction is strangely lethargic. I can assure you that such an event would trigger the most vigorous action a sailor is ever likely to take. A real sailor would not stop moving until all damage had been located, all holes plugged, and all water removed.
• Hand-held marine radios are always watertight, and most sailors have at least one, often several more. This seems to be left out solely to provide the dramatic moment of container ships steaming past his liferaft without his being able to signal them.
• His supply of 2 handheld flares and 2 shooting flares is unusually sparse for such a large boat.
• His life raft is stored in the forward cabin. Normally a liferaft is stored on deck, or near the main door precisely because it may be needed with very short notice.
• For a long-distance cruising boat, the story devotes far too little focus on the self steering gear (the wind-vane apparatus on the back of the boat). Such gear is a crucial, major component of offshore travel, as it allows sailors to rest, eat, sleep, etc. while the boat continues to move forward. Without it, fatigue quickly sets in.
• When he ends up in the liferaft, and discovers that the water in his blue water tank came from a source contaminated by salt, this provides an excuse for him to use his survival skills to distill fresh water using a solar still. But why was the blue tank empty in the first place? Normal cruising practice is to fill several such blue 5-gallon tanks before leaving on a passage, and only use water from the main sailboat tanks for normal purposes. That way in any emergency, you have a ready supply of easily-grabbed clean water. Moreover, several containers ensure that if one is contaminated, the others are not.
• During the roll-over, several open ports are clearly visible. But there is little or no water intrusion from the roll-over itself.
• He forgets his PFD (personal floatation device) and life-ring when jumping in the liferaft. Why? He seemed to be fairly safety-minded about donning his harness when putting on the storm jib? As it turns out, this is in service of the narrative. At the end, if he had flotation, we wouldn't get to see him sink into the depths.
• After the dismasting he cuts away mast and makes no effort to keep it. In reality sailors try to keep at least some of a mast, in order to fashion an emergency sailing rig. Moreover, he cuts it away after severing one (rope) line. In reality a mast is attached to a boat with at least 4, and sometimes 6 thick stainless steel wires. He would have had to saw these away with a hack-saw, or use bolt cutters. Many cruisers carry large bolt-cutters for just this situation.
• When using the sextant, he takes single sights and writes an X on the page, rather than getting three "lines of position". This is how celestial navigation actually works--each measurement and calculation gives you a single line. It takes at least two of these to estimate where you are. Getting a third generates a triangle on the chart-- you are most likely within the triangle. At one point he has a straightedge, and even seems to threaten to use it, but then just draws an X after all. And where is his hand-held, portable GPS? Again, most sailors now have at least one, and often several aboard.

Major errors and impossibilities

Here is where things truly fall apart, because these technical errors either are so egregious that they make the primary events of the story nonsensical, or they directly speak to the character's competence, planning, or state of mind. These issues have a profound effect on the story's narrative.

• He strikes a container, but above the waterline and aft (rearward) of the mast. This isn't impossible, although it is unlikely. Why would it hit him in the rear? If he hit a container it would strike somewhere in the front of the boat, just like hitting a tree with a car. Striking a container is dangerous precisely because they are submerged, can be hit at full speed, and they strike below the waterline, where a leak can sink a boat in minutes.
• Further, the container *sticks* in the hole. Again, physically possible but very unlikely. The motion of waves would wiggle both apart rather quickly--containers are just steel boxes with no protruding parts or hooks on them.
• Wanting to get the boat unstuck, he attaches a sea anchor to the container, which supposedly pulls it away from the boat. This is simply impossible. The physics of a sea anchor are that it slows you down when wind and waves are blowing you in a certain direction. If there is a sea current, *everything* (container, surface water, and sailboat) are all moving in the same direction at the same speed, so there is nothing that would make any of the three things go in a different direction or at a different speed.
• His subsequent fiberglass and epoxy patch job is truly bad. Far more sensible would be a solution using multiple battens from the forepeak walls. The strips are placed in parallel across the hole, attached using epoxy and screwed into place. Fiberglass cloth can then be applied across the supports. Such a repair can be extremely strong and last as long as necessary. Done from the inside, it could even be cosmetically pretty.

What exactly is the point of the epoxy repair to the story? Is it that he is well-prepared with materials and the skill to apply them? If so, where is his battery-powered drill/screwdriver, and why not show him doing a proper repair?

• He appears to have no manual bilge pump handle and is forced to create a makeshift one from something aboard. The pump is in a terrible position, and combined with the short handle, is clearly causing fatigue and pain. No sensible offshore sailor leaves port without such a basic implement, and most sailors give a lot of thought to effective water removal for emergencies. And where is that most basic tool, a bucket? He could have emptied water from cabin directly into the cockpit (where it runs out the drains) rather quickly.
• The sailboat appears to have no working motor? Batteries are not disabled by salt water. While a motor cannot be started while submerged, by no means is it clear that the motor would n't start after pumping out the boat. Far more time should have been taken getting motor (re-)started--to use the water pump to clear bilge, recharge batteries, or make way toward possible rescue. All this seems contrived to ensure he has no communication capacity.
• In trying to fix the radio, our sailor climbs to the top of the mast, at sea, to fix an antenna. So our sailor is resourceful enough to have gear, skill, and strength to climb the mast at sea, but not sensible enough to have the dozen other basic survival/emergency items on hand, a well-maintained masthead VHF antenna, or the skills to re-start his motor.
• The story of the sextant and the liferaft is another profound problem. After he is in the liferaft, he spends a great deal of time finally learning to use the sextant he had aboard. He uses it to plot his position relative to the container-ship sea-routes on the chart. That is fine, but it is strongly implied that he is somehow steering, or guiding, his liferaft to the sealane. But liferafts are entirely passive--they go where the wind and current take them. This is one of the reasons liferafts are a last resort item.
• Perhaps the most profound problem of the movie is the complete avoidance of the issue of satellite emergency beacons, i.e. Emergency Position Indicating Rescue Beacon (EPIRB). These are $400 items which signal a global rescue system to call for help. In the early days of cruising, when they cost thousands of dollars, some sailors chose to put that money into their boats rather than an otherwise-useless emergency-only purchase. But for the last decade, no sensible sailor would forgo this item--certainly not a sailor on a 39-foot, ~$70,000 boat. How hard would it have been to address the issue? The author could have had the EPIRB lost through the hull after the container strike. The author could have shown our sailor discovering that the EPIRB battery had died, or it had suffered some other malfunction. But instead, the author pretends such things don't exist, emphasizing even further the fundamental foolishness of the sailor for not being better prepared to fend for himself offshore.

Lastly, the container strike and the storm rollover/dismasting were independent mishaps. In no way does the first mishap cause or lead to the second. Only a few cruisers have ever struck containers, and full roll-overs are likewise very rare occurrences. Two independent events like this happening on one journey is simply not plausible. In reality, disasters on the ocean typically result from cascades of mistakes and failures, where small errors and and bad luck get compounded by subsequent failures with eventual dire consequences. Tracing such a chain of events happening to a skilled, prudent, and competent sailor would make a thrilling movie. It is too bad we weren't given such a film.

Narrative Nonsense

Lots of movies about technical subjects have been made where certain details or elements of realism are glossed over in order to tell a compelling human story. But for this movie, the glaring technical errors are not incidental, they call into question what the story is about. Is "All is Lost" a story about a skilled, experienced sailor who refuses to give up in the face of disaster, or an "Into the Wild" story of an incompetent fool suffering the consequences of facing nature utterly unprepared. Is he supposed to be an intrepid world traveller, or a man committing slow-motion suicide? Perhaps he is supposed to be a suicidal person who changes his mind when faced with actual death?

The screenwriter could perhaps be forgiven for the odd collection of mishaps portrayed in the movie, if only there weren't hundreds of compelling, well-documented real-life examples to draw from. A couple weeks of research would uncover dozens of families and solo sailor's stories of experiencing failures and surviving only through creative problem solving and determination. These stories could easily have been adapted and integrated into a story about our man, while achieving any dramatic goal desired by the writer. Instead there are a series of implausible circumstances contrived only to allow the sailor to demonstrate an irrelevant skill or suffer some unnecessary hardship.

As the story is presented, half-way through movie I was astonished a sailor this stupid had survived long enough to reach the beginning of the movie. After all, we join him in the middle of the Indian Ocean, which implies he had already sailed a few thousand miles. I suspect this is not the reaction that the writer-director intended.