Experts question tale of women lost at sea for five months

Doubts have been cast on the tale of two women sailors who were rescued by a US navy vessel five months after leaving Hawaii.

Americans Jennifer Appel - an experienced sailor - and sailing novice Tasha Fuiava were spotted around 900 miles off the coast of Japan and brought to safety with their dogs. Both women and their pets were in good health.

In interviews, the women told how they had planned an 18-day voyage to Tahiti, but ended up adrift for five months after a severe storm damaged their engine and blew them off course soon after they set out from Hawaii on 3 May.

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However, authorities have raised a number of questions, saying their account is “not consistent with weather reports or basic geography of the Pacific Oceans,” says The Guardian.

Most notably, the US National Weather Service has said that there were no storms in that area at the time, an assertion they have backed up with Nasa satellite data.

The discrepancy in the weather is one of a “growing list of inconsistencies that cast doubt on their harrowing tale of survival”, says the Guardian.

It has also emerged that a coast guard ship made contact with a sailboat identifying itself as Sea Nymph - the name of Appel and Fuiava’s vessel - in June near the coast of Tahiti, when by their own account they would have been almost 1,500 miles away.

During the call, the captain of the Sea Nymph said the vessel was not in distress and expected to reach land the next morning.

Coast guard officials have also discovered that there was an emergency beacon on board the boat - a fact they had not addressed in media interviews.

Questioned as to why they neglected to use the powerful beacon, which would have sent a distress signal to the US coast guard, Appel said that she had been taught only to activate the beacon if in immediate danger.

In a statement, Appel said it would have been “shameful” to take coast guard resources away from life-or-death emergencies, NBC reports.

“Every sailor knows that. Land people do not; so please do not allow the spin of ignorance to cloud good judgement,” she said.

Retired coast guard officer Phillip R. Johnson told Fox News that if the beacon had been used, its signal would have been picked up “very, very quickly”.

With regard to the women’s claim that multiple other forms of communication - including high frequency radio and a mobile phone - were lost overboard or failed to work, Johnson was sceptical.

“There’s something wrong there,” he said. “I’ve never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time.”