THE MAN ON THE RAFT: THE STORY OF POON LIM

The man I’m about to tell you about owns a very impressive record you don’t know about.

His name is Poon Lim:

After working as a Cabin Boy on a British vessel, and being treated like dirt, he swore off ever going on a ship again. He returned to school to become an engineer.

Then - he was lured back into boat service by a relative who assured him that he would be treated better and paid substantially more.

He boarded the SS Benlomond, and began working on the ship as it started its journey from Suriname to New York City.

Unfortunately, this was 1942, in the throes of World War II, and this was a British Merchant ship. A German U-Boat detected, tracked, and then torpedoed this ship, sending it straight for the ocean floor.

Every person on the boat was lost to the ocean, drowning, or perishing otherwise.

Except 1.

Poon Lim. Swimming in the wreckage as the main ship barreled for the bottom of the sea, he scrambled his way onto an 8 foot by 8-foot wooden plank, he then gathered supplies that were nearby, consisting of:

• A 4 Liter Jug of Water.
• chocolate,
• a small bag of sugar
• some flares
• two smoke pots
• And a flashlight

Along with some smaller other misc supplies.

In the coming days, on this raft, he quickly ran out of supplies. Using the makeshift gear he’d assembled, he built a roof with a tarp and then used that tarp to funnel water (his chief problem) into his jug of water.

He disassembled his flashlight, using the wire from it, rope, and a nail to design a fishing line. He used an old empty metal can to design a knife to cut the fish.

Complicating matters, he didn’t know how to swim. (He’d barely gotten to floatation devices in the wreck). He lived most of his day with a limb tied to his raft.

There were non-rain periods on this raft where he flirted with death and dehydration. In several instances, he killed birds that landed on his raft, drinking their blood for hydration.

He then used the bird remains to become bait to catch a small shark, which provided life-saving (hydrating blood) and nutrition to him. He then let the fins dry in the sun to allow him to save the food for later.

In the coming weeks, he continued to harvest rainwater where he could, saving it for as long as it would last, catching food of any form, using makeshift fishing tools from his boat.

After being stranded for a record-setting 133 days on a life-raft at sea, he was eventually found:

If you were stranded on a raft as of today (January 22nd), you’d have to survive past June 4th to beat his record. No small feat.

Poon Lim was later given a special immigration pass to come live in the United States, where he lived out a good life in, of all places, New York City.