Deb Kiley had a vague sense of unease before her voyage on the 58-foot sailing yacht Trashman with fellow crewmembers Brad Cavanaugh, Mark Adams, Meg Mooney and Capt. John Lippoth. She didn’t get along with Mark, but there was something more, a pervasive gloomy feeling about sailing the boat from Maryland to Florida. Getting to Florida, however, was part of her plan, and she didn’t give other methods of travel serious consideration. Kiley figured the run south would be relatively brief, and then she’d leave the boat and be done with it.
Just one day before departure, however, her gut feeling became more pronounced, telling her something wasn’t quite right. So, she decided against making the voyage. She called the boat’s owner and told him she was backing out and resigning as one of the crew. He in turn reminded Kiley of her commitment, and her resolve weakened: “Before the lecture from the owner was over, I knew I was not going to get out of this trip. I walked back to the boat feeling like a fool, for making the call and for being such a pushover.”
Prior to the voyage to Florida, she had spent several days on the boat with Lippoth, and there were a couple warning signs she chose to ignore. Perhaps the biggest red flag occurred on the first day she stepped foot on the vessel, when she followed the captain down into the galley. “Empty Heineken bottles covered nearly every flat surface and an open bag of potato chips was lying on the floor,” she wrote in her book Albatross. There were other signals that neither the boat nor the captain were shipshape, but she let those slide, instead thinking ahead to the warm sunshine awaiting her in Florida, where she planned to spend the winter or sign on with another sailboat cruising the Caribbean.
She should have listened to her instincts and never made the trip. A storm, coupled with poor decisions by the captain, caused Trashman to capsize. Only Kiley and Cavanaugh survived the sinking. I interviewed Cavanaugh, and he described a harrowing, multiday ordeal in a tiny inflatable Zodiac after the sailboat sank. At one point, he looked up into a wave and saw three sharks, one larger than the Zodiac: “It was bad enough seeing how large the shark was, but even worse was that it was clearly looking at us.”
During the ordeal, the other three crewmembers either perished from injuries or from drinking seawater, which caused hallucinations and led them to exit the raft, into the ocean. Kiley later said about her decision to make the voyage, “A list of pros and cons is not always as important as whether it feels right.”
Suppressing a gut feeling can have heartbreaking results. One tragic case involved Claudene Christian, who was a crewmember on the tall ship Bounty, a replica of the original HMS Bounty, during Hurricane Sandy.
The Bounty, 120 feet on deck with a beam of 31 feet, started its ill-fated voyage from New London, Connecticut, with a destination of Florida. When the ship left port, Hurricane Sandy was in the Caribbean and its projected path was north, along the East Coast of the United States. This would put it on a collision course with the Bounty. But the ship’s captain, Robin Walbridge, had maneuvered around hurricanes successfully in the past, and told the crew he could do so again. Everyone aboard, including Christian (who was a relatively new crewmember), agreed with the captain’s decision to try to sail around the approaching storm.
Christian’s parents, who had been listening to weather reports about the burgeoning hurricane, became quite concerned, and her mother, Dina, texted her daughter asking her not to make the voyage. She responded back, “Bounty loves hurricanes, haven’t you heard? The captain has 30 years’ experience. All will be OK.” She might have been reassuring herself as much as her mother about her decision to sail.
Bounty left New London on Thursday evening, October 25, 2012, and on the ship’s Facebook page the entry at 6 p.m. read “Bounty will be sailing due East out to sea before heading South to avoid the brunt of Hurricane Sandy.”
Shortly after the ship was underway, Christian’s concern, combined with an intuition that things would not go as planned, became clear. Her gut feeling of true danger surfaced far ahead of the problems that later emerged on the ship. While most of the rest of the crew was looking forward to a bracing sail in strong winds, and relished the challenge to show their teamwork, Christian confided her apprehension to a fellow crewmember: “The storm looks like it’s going to be so enormous we are going to have to go halfway to Europe.”
The uneasy feeling she had only grew in strength, just like the hurricane steadily moving toward her. She decided to call her mother before cell phone reception was lost. “We are out on the ocean and I’m afraid I’m going to lose reception. I gotta tell you how much I love you, I really do.” Moments later, she followed up the brief phone call with a haunting text. “If I go down with the ship and the worst happens, just know I am truly, genuinely happy.”
Two days later, on Saturday, October 27, Walbridge, after digesting marine weather forecasts warning the hurricane was growing in size, decided to change course and head west, hoping to slip between Sandy and the U.S. coast. This tactic made sense, as it would put the Bounty on the side of the hurricane where the winds have a bit less power. The move, however, would only work if they could cross in front of the hurricane without slowing down, similar to traversing railroad tracks with an oncoming train heading your way. You can get across safely if you don’t stall.
Unfortunately, on Sunday, October 28, Bounty was taking on more water than the pumps could handle, and soon she lost engine power altogether.
Christian’s earlier feeling that something terrible would happen was now becoming a reality, and even the most optimistic crewmember knew they were in trouble.
Sandy grew to be the largest hurricane ever recorded, with storm force winds spanning 900 miles. And Bounty, wallowing in 30-foot seas, was a sitting duck. In the dark early morning of Monday, October 29, with the crew in their survival suits and ready to abandon ship at first light, Bounty was suddenly knocked on her side by a huge wave. A near-miraculous U.S. Coast Guard rescue ensued, but tragically, both Walbridge and Christian drowned.
Kathy Gilchrist, like Christian and Kiley, felt a bit hesitant before the start of her voyage on the 45-foot Hardin sailboat Almeisan with Loch Reidy, Tom Tighe, Chris Ferrer and Ron Burd. She knew part of her sense of unease was due to the timing of the trip in early May, which she thought might be a bit early for a Connecticut-to-Bermuda sailing voyage. Where the rest of her sense of foreboding was coming from, she really didn’t know. She had complete respect for the captain because she had taken a sailing course that he taught, and she had been sailing countless times. And so, she brushed aside her sense of misgiving.
That uneasy feeling, however, returned the day she arrived at the boat to begin the voyage, but she couldn’t put her finger on the reason. Still, her anxiousness was strong enough that she considered telling the captain she had decided not to go. Then she thought of how she committed to this trip, how the captain was counting on her, and she decided to keep her thoughts to herself.
That turned out to be a mistake that almost cost Gilchrist her life. Almeisan and its crew of five were hammered by a storm so powerful that one wave capsized the boat, sweeping Gilchrist out of the cockpit. If not for the safety harness that tethered her to the boat, she surely would have died.
Kiley, Christian and Gilchrist all had an intuitive feeling that something was wrong. (The fact that all three are women may not be a coincidence. My research in survival seems to indicate women are more in tune with this phenomenon.) In hindsight, each woman’s sense of oncoming disaster was quite different. For Kiley, it was the captain’s lackadaisical manner. Christian had a powerful sense of doom even though the rest of the crew did not. Gilchrist may not have been able to fully articulate her sense of hesitation, but whatever the reason, it was real.
There are numerous reports from survivors who said they had a nagging feeling of trepidation before they embarked on a boating outing they had done many times before without incident. So what is the basis for their gut feelings? I’m convinced that it is the subconscious mind picking up clues that have not yet fully formed in our consciousness. This is why it’s so difficult for an individual experiencing the intuition to articulate why they feel the way they do. If the clues have not yet percolated from the subconscious to the conscious mind, who could blame a person for dismissing an unspecific apprehension?
A premonition, hunch, intuition or sixth sense—call it what you will, but realize that you ignore it at your peril. These feelings don’t have to make perfect sense because your subconscious mind is still working on the situation and has yet to connect the dots. Another way to look at your intuition is to view it as an early-warning system. Logic and rationalization certainly have their place, but the subconscious mind is vast and can assert itself in a subtle way. It’s up to us to be receptive to that mysterious sixth sense or presentiment.
The initial intuitive warning may be as simple as one factor in a familiar pattern being out of place or unusual. Your subconscious mind receives a fleeting portent of a threat. But because we do not deliberately seek to recognize or acknowledge the aberration, it is dismissed. The vague, uneasy feeling is not clear-cut logic, and so is not taken seriously. Research psychologist Gary Klein explains that intuition has a strange reputation: “Skilled decision-makers know they can depend on their intuition, but at the same time they may feel uncomfortable trusting a source of power that seems so accidental.”
To get beyond the trust issue, think of yourself as a detective. Some detectives excel at ferreting out clues that others have overlooked, just as some survivors are better than others at noticing an uneasy feeling. And of course, intuition can also be a positive feeling, leading us to have that sense that it just feels right. Again, the clues are not fully formed, but there are enough positive ones burgeoning inside you that the resulting feeling is one of comfort and enthusiasm, even though you may not be able to articulate why. You will know the difference between intuition and fear because fear is emotionally charged, and it’s a good bet it comes when you try something new or tackle something you have long been afraid of. Fear is often attached to past psychological wounds.
Intuition has been acknowledged by scientists, psychologists and researchers throughout history. Albert Einstein said, “When you follow intuition, the solutions come to you and you don’t know why.” Author Gavin deBecker in The Gift of Fear writes that what people “dismiss as a gut feeling is in fact a cognitive process faster than we can recognize and far different than the familiar step-by-step thinking we rely on so willingly. We think conscious thought is somehow better when in fact intuition is soaring flight compared to prodding logic.”
There is nothing concrete about intuition; no facts are apparent, and the voice of intuition is often a whisper. So the first step is to be receptive to that inner voice no matter how quiet it is. With survivors, the voice they heard is a cautionary one, often nothing more than an uneasy sense. The key is that when we get that message, we need to stop and ask, “What could be making me feel uncomfortable?” We need to become focused on our surroundings, looking for signs that something is amiss and not quite right. This is the process of bringing those unconscious clues to the surface. It is not the same as acting on impulse. Rather, it’s a gathering of all the information, looking at it from different angles, and then making a decision that feels right because it is in keeping with who you are.
So, next time you are heading out on the water and some inner feeling doesn’t seem like your usual enthusiasm, ask yourself: Is there anything different about this outing? See if you can nail down the clue. I’m as guilty as the next person of ignoring an ominous feeling. Recently, in my excitement to go striper fishing with a new acquaintance, I didn’t speak up when the captain was driving the boat way too fast in shallow water, and we hit a rock. The boat seemed OK after scraping the rock, but that’s when I should have said, “Let’s call it a day and inspect the hull at the dock,” which would have given me a chance to exit the vessel. Instead, I had fishing fever, and we went out to rip. The captain’s inexperience resulted in one big wave filling a good portion of the boat. We were lucky; we made it back to port, but the situation could have become more dangerous.
This story is an adaptation from the book Extreme Survival: Lessons From Those Who Have Triumphed Against All Odds by Michael Tougias, a New York Times bestselling author.
This article was originally published in the February 2023 issue.
