After a collision with a shipping container at sea, a resourceful sailor finds himself, despite all efforts to the contrary, staring his mortality in the face.
Deep into a solo voyage in the Indian Ocean, an unnamed man (Redford) wakes to find his 39-foot yacht taking on water after a collision with a shipping container left floating on the high seas. With his navigation equipment and radio disabled, the man sails unknowingly into the path of a violent storm. Despite his success in patching the breached hull, his mariner's intuition and a strength that belies his age, the man barely survives the tempest. Using only a sextant and nautical maps to chart his progress, he is forced to rely on ocean currents to carry him into a shipping lane in hopes of hailing a passing vessel. But with the sun unrelenting, sharks circling and his meager supplies dwindling, the ever-resourceful sailor soon finds himself staring his mortality in the face.—Roadside Attractions
A man is sailing alone on his sailboat in the Indian Ocean. He wakes up one morning to find that a wayward shipping container which had been adrift has rammed into his boat, gashing a hole in the boat's side, which has allowed water to pour into the boat's cabin. He is eventually able to fix the hole, but he ends up learning that the damage to the boat is more than superficial as many of the electrical and communication systems are no longer working. These issues in combination have placed him into a precarious situation, as he doesn't know his exact location, and he cannot communicate with anyone. When he hits a storm, his situation worsens, where he eventually can only drift. He has to hope that he encounters no other storms while his rations diminish, and he drifts toward what he hopes is the region's shipping lane where there is a greater chance that he will be spotted by passing ships and thus be rescued.—Huggo
A man is sailing alone in his yacht but during the night, his vessel collides with a container adrift on the sea while he sleeps. The yacht is flooded and she loses her navigation and communication equipment and heads to a violent storm. When the yacht sinks, the sailor embarks in the liferaft that is carried adrift by the currents to a shipping lane. His fight for survival begins.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
We first meet the unnamed protagonist -- a sailor floating on the ocean waves, sans hope, minutes from death. On the soundtrack, our hero reads a final missive to the world; he expresses remorse to his loved ones for hurting them, and prepares to enter a watery grave. The picture then jumps back in time by eight days, and an intertitle places us in the Indian Ocean, 1700 nautical miles from the Sunda Straits. The boats-man, lying asleep below deck on his schooner, is suddenly jostled to consciousness by a horrifying crash. He discovers that a steel crate, floating in mid-ocean, has torn a gaping hole into the side of his vessel. From that ominous beginning, the crises mount, including flooding, a ruined ham radio, and blinding thunderstorms. Though the sailor tries everything he can think of to save himself, external challenges ultimately coalesce and threaten to damn him..
Somewhere in the Indian Ocean ("1700 nautical miles from the Sumatra Straits"), a man (Robert Redford) says, "I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried. I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right, but I wasn't." He declares, "All is lost." The man says that only half a day of ration is left.
Eight days earlier, as he wakes up, he sees that water has started to flood his boat, the Virginia Jean, a Cal 39 yacht. He goes out onto the deck and sees that his boat has collided with a wayward shipping container which has ripped a hole in the hull. The man lowers the sails to prevent any further damage to the boat, due to any sudden movements. The container is too heavy to be dislodged with a lever.The damage to the boat is fairly close to the water line, and every time the boat tilts a little, it takes on more water.He goes below to get a sea anchor and ties it to the container. After dislodging the container, the man goes back to retrieve his sea anchor.
He then goes to work patching up the hole in his boat (he has a resin kit on board which he uses to create a fiberglass like material to patch over the hole) and uses the manual- or hand-bilge pump hole to remove the water from the cabin. The electrical systems on the boat are all inoperative. He sleeps in a flooded cabin by setting up a hammock. The patch up and the bilge pump continues into the next day, as the hole is just too big.
After the cleanup, he finds that the boat's navigational and communications systems have been damaged, due to saltwater intrusion as a result of the collision. He tries to repair the radio (by washing it with fresh water and setting it in the sun to dry out) and connects it to one of the boat's batteries but is ultimately unsuccessful. The radio works momentarily, but the man is unable to communicate with anyone.By the 2nd night after the collision, the cabin is dried out and hole is patched up, although not in a very solid way. The man dries out the navigational charts and all his other supplies. He settles into a normal routine, enjoying some drinks and dinner at night, and then finally falling asleep while reading a book.
The next day, he climbs the mast to repair an antenna lead, he sees an oncoming tropical storm. He immediately descends to make preparations for it. He secures all supplies inside the boat, fills his container of fresh water, and gets a shave.He puts on bright orange overalls to protect himself from the storm water.
The storm quickly reaches his position, and he runs before the wind under bare poles for a while, until he feels this storm tactic becomes too tiresome and dangerous. He intends to bring the boat into a hove-to position, but when crawling to the bow to hoist the storm jib, he is thrown overboard and only just regains the deck after a long struggle. The man goes inside the cabin to catch his breath.The boat capsizes and turtles, and after a further 180-degree roll, is dis-masted, and most of the equipment on board destroyed. With the boat badly holed and sinking, he decides to abandon ship in an inflatable life raft.The next morning, the storm has passed and the life raft to tethered to the yacht. The man returns to the yacht to salvage whatever he can. He gets his can of fresh water, cans of food, navigational charts, a sextant and so on. He uses the medicine cabinet to treat a head wound that he incurred during the storm. Eventually, the yacht goes under the water and the man is now on the life raft. The life raft itself is sizable and has a cover to protect the survivors from the harsh sun. The cover zips up to create a completely covered cabin inside the raft. It is clearly built to last in the open sea.
As he learns how to operate a sextant he recovered from the boat, he discovers he is near one of the major shipping lanes and, a day or two later, finds that he is being pulled towards it by ocean currents. During the journey, he survives another storm. During the storm the life raft is turned upside down and the man has to go out of the raft to try and upright it.But his supplies dwindle (the pump to fill air in the raft is damaged), and he learns too late that his drinking water has been contaminated with sea water. He improvises a solar still from his water container and a plastic bag to get fresh water. He snags a fish, but it is snapped up by a shark before he can reel it in.
He reaches the shipping lanes and is passed by two container ships. They do not notice him and continue on, despite his use of signaling flares. He eventually drifts out of the shipping lanes and back to open ocean. However, he is out of food and water and cannot hope to survive much longer. On the eighth day, he writes a letter, puts it in a jar, and throws it in the water as a message in a bottle for anyone to find.
Later that night, he sees a light in the distance, possibly another ship. He doesn't use his last signaling device, but tears pages from his journal along with charts to create a signal fire. After he loses control of the fire and the fire consumes his raft, he falls into the water, struggling to swim. He stops swimming and lets himself sink. As he sinks, he sees the hull of a boat with a search light approaching his burning raft.
He swims up towards the light and the surface to grasp an outstretched hand, and the scene dissolves into white.
