The Backcountry Manifesto

The Worst Possible Way to Cross the Atlantic | Steven Callahan, Adrift | Ep. 032

1 h 56 min · 18 de jun de 2026
Portada del episodio The Worst Possible Way to Cross the Atlantic | Steven Callahan, Adrift | Ep. 032

Descripción

Steven Callahan should have died at sea. In early 1982, roughly a week out of the Canary Islands, something — he's convinced it was a whale — holed his self-built 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo in the middle of the night. What followed became one of the most famous survival stories ever told: 76 days adrift in a five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft, alone, crossing nearly the entire Atlantic before a handful of fishermen found him off Marie Galante. In this conversation, Steven walks us through all of it — diving into the flooded, pitch-black cabin to grab his ditch kit, coaxing a single pint of fresh water a day out of a temperamental solar still, spearfishing the dorado that became both his food and his "spiritual companions," and the Day-43 disaster when his spear gun punctured the raft a thousand miles from land. But this is less a blow-by-blow than a master class in the psychology of survival from a philosophy major who treats reality as something to be accepted exactly as it is. We get into the divided self, the brutal "recoil" of giving up, why denial is the number one enemy, and how an ocean nearly killed him and gave him a life.

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34 episodios

episode Amelia Earhart: What Really Happened? | Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Author of The Aviator and the Showman | Ep. 034 artwork

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25 de jun de 20262 h 5 min
episode The Worst Possible Way to Cross the Atlantic | Steven Callahan, Adrift | Ep. 032 artwork

The Worst Possible Way to Cross the Atlantic | Steven Callahan, Adrift | Ep. 032

Steven Callahan should have died at sea. In early 1982, roughly a week out of the Canary Islands, something — he's convinced it was a whale — holed his self-built 21-foot sloop Napoleon Solo in the middle of the night. What followed became one of the most famous survival stories ever told: 76 days adrift in a five-and-a-half-foot inflatable raft, alone, crossing nearly the entire Atlantic before a handful of fishermen found him off Marie Galante. In this conversation, Steven walks us through all of it — diving into the flooded, pitch-black cabin to grab his ditch kit, coaxing a single pint of fresh water a day out of a temperamental solar still, spearfishing the dorado that became both his food and his "spiritual companions," and the Day-43 disaster when his spear gun punctured the raft a thousand miles from land. But this is less a blow-by-blow than a master class in the psychology of survival from a philosophy major who treats reality as something to be accepted exactly as it is. We get into the divided self, the brutal "recoil" of giving up, why denial is the number one enemy, and how an ocean nearly killed him and gave him a life.

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episode Mutiny, Cannibalism & How America Really Began | Peter Mancall, Historian | Ep. 031 artwork

Mutiny, Cannibalism & How America Really Began | Peter Mancall, Historian | Ep. 031

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episode Free Soloing is Actually Really Easy | Lincoln Knowles ft. Cedar Wright & John Long | Ep. 029 artwork

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