For 10 years, Bill Archer daydreamed and planned his voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and back. In none of those dreams did watching his boat sink in a stormy sea off the Bahamas figure into the itinerary.
“It really defies description,” the 32-year-old mariner told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer in New York on Wednesday. “The wind was howling, the waves are slamming into you, especially on the makeshift rig that I had. It was all I could do to stay in the same place.”
He came dressed for his interview in jeans, an earth-toned sweater and a knit hat. A sea-dog’s growth of ungoverned beard decorated a face that showed the effects of losing 18 pounds during his ordeal.
During the last seven days of his battle with the sea, he had no solid food to eat and only water to drink. For the final four days, he had no food at all.
The final storm he described was a monster that hit his battered, 39-foot sloop, “Alchemy,” on New Year’s Day off the Bahamas, two days before he was rescued by a passing oil tanker just as his boat was sinking. He said he was told it was the worst winter storm in those waters in 30 years.
It was the knockout blow to his ship, which had been hammered by repeated storms for six weeks as he tried to complete the last leg of his odyssey from Cape Verde north of Africa to the Caribbean island of Antigua.
“On any long-distance cruise, the boat starts to deteriorate,” said Archer, who makes his living as a sailing instructor in Fort Lauderdale. “You start losing gear from the first day. But things really started getting bad a week out of Cape Verde. Storm after storm hit, the boom broke, and then the spinnaker pole I rigged up for a jury-rigged, makeshift boom ended up breaking. It was one thing after another.”
Late arrivalHe had been scheduled to arrive in Antigua the day after Christmas, and as he limped across the Atlantic, trying to nurse his boat home, his family notified the U.S. Coast Guard that he was late. The Coast Guard issued an alert, but no one knew where he was.
Archer said he knew it was over when his engine blew and the storm hit. Without the engine to power the pumps, there was no way he could bail out the water that was filling the craft he had spent years saving up to buy. Insurance companies do not insure small boats for trans-Atlantic trips; the risk is too great. Archer lost everything when the ship sank.
“The power of the sea is unbelievable, you really can’t underestimate the severity,” he said in an accompanying news story filed by NBC’s Kerry Sanders. “She’ll take from you what she wants, when she wants to.”
In response to Lauer’s question, Archer said he never considered the danger he was in during his ordeal.
“The best way to put it is, you’re only thinking about the next thing you have to do,” he said. “If you stood back and thought, ‘The boat is sinking, I have to get the life raft, make a mayday call’ — God knows what’s going to happen — it would probably make it impossible to come up with a good plan of action.”
He said he had no survival training other than a few trips to Boy Scout meetings when he was a boy.
“To be honest, it’s just one thing after another,” Archer said. “You know you’ve gotta pull the life raft on deck, you’ve gotta throw it overboard, you get the dry bags, try to find the most important things in terms of survival to get onto the life raft. It’s just step by step.”
He climbed into his life raft and used a handheld communications device to broadcast a mayday call. He discovered later that the device had not been working and the call was never received. He was still tethered to his wallowing boat at first, thinking it would be easier for rescuers to spot a 39-foot sloop than a life raft in the heaving waters, when he saw the tanker Omega Lady Sarah on the horizon.
He fired off a parachute flare to attract its attention. As it changed course to sail to his rescue, he had to cut the rope attaching him to the Alchemy and watch it sink.
“It was awful, like slowly losing a friend,” he told NBC News of watching the boat sink. “You can’t do anything about it. You just have to watch.”
When the tanker pulled alongside, Archer had one more challenge to meet — climbing up the clifflike side of the enormous ship. As weak as he was from not eating, he barely made it.
The tanker took him to the Bahamas, where he was checked out in a hospital. On his release, his first official act was to inhale a conch burger. Back in the States, reunited with his parents, two brothers, two sisters and various nieces and nephews, he devoted himself to recovering the weight he lost.
He told reporters that he hasn’t lost his lust for sailing or desire to cross the Atlantic.
“If I had my next boat,” he said, “I'd be planning my next trip.”