Alone at Sea

The ship took twenty-two souls into the dark. The sea gave one back.

You are Hale, a deckhand off the container ship Meridian Star, and you wake alone in lifeboat LB-2 in the middle of the Pacific. No GPS. A drowned radio. Ships pass, and most never see you. Keep your body alive, and find land with the sun, the stars and whatever you can make with your own two hands.

• Salvage drifting wreckage, hook crates, climb floating containers and pry them open

• Craft from 45 recipes and fit out one 5.6 m lifeboat

• Survive thirst, hunger, cold, fever, bad water, dirty hands and your own bowels

• Fish with rod and spear, catch rain, cook on a can stove, and catch a gull, name it and tame it

• Navigate with no compass to start: the low sun, Polaris, a home-made sextant, a magnetized needle, birds at dusk

• Permadeath. When you die, the sea keeps you.

ONE BOAT. NO FORTRESS.

You can't build a floating city out here. LB-2 has one place for each station: rain catcher, solar still, mast and sail, rudder, drying line, lantern. Each costs tarp, rope and nails you'll never have enough of. You learn new recipes by holding the parts in your hands, and your field notebook keeps the sketches.

YOUR BODY IS THE ENEMY

Drink seawater and your kidneys pay. Eat with dirty hands and dysentery follows. Wash in the sea, relieve yourself over the side, keep the boat clean, and swallow crushed charcoal when your gut turns. Thirst, hunger, warmth, hygiene, morale and sickness all run at once.

NO GPS. NO COMPASS TO START.

Hold your hand against the low sun to read its height. Find Polaris and measure it. Repair the drowned radio, or gut it for the speaker magnet and float a needle on cork. Build a sextant from scrap, pencil your latitude onto the captain's torn chart, and watch the birds at dusk: they fly home to land. Lash the tiller and she holds her course while you sleep, more or less. Navigation here is real, and it is hard but fair.

THE SEA FIGHTS BACK

Sharks circle the boat and come for swimmers. Storms fill the bilge faster than you can bail, and the later ones can swamp her and take her down. Fall overboard at night and LB-2 drifts on without you.

THE LONG DRIFT

Some days bring more than swell. Chase a rain squall across the sea with every bottle open. Cut a sea turtle free of a drifting ghost net. Row up to a dead whale for meat while the sharks tear at the other side. Fire your flare when a plane's lights cross the stars. Land on a islands for coconuts, crabs and a rock pool of rainwater. And when a ship's lamp finally finds you, pray they will save you.

ONE LIFE

A dozen ways to die, each with its own epitaph. There are two difficulties, and both are permadeath: Adrift is the voyage as intended, and Lost at Sea is for those who have done this before.

A lifeboat. The Pacific. Your own two hands.