"We weren't tourists," Vasquez later wrote in her journal, recovered by a passing freighter. "We were scientists. That made the hubris cut deeper."
No one was looking. On Day 31, a mass of sargassum seaweed washed ashore, tangled with dozens of goose barnacles. The barnacles—boiled in salt water—provided protein and iodine. More importantly, inside the seaweed was a plastic crate stamped "M/V Star Asterisk, Hong Kong." Inside the crate: three sealed bags of dehydrated ramen, a tube of antiseptic cream, and a paperback romance novel in Thai. stranded on santa astarta
"They pulled us out of the water like we were ghosts," Kai later told a maritime journalist. "The crew had no idea the island was even inhabited. On their charts, Santa Astarta is labeled 'Unverified Existence.'" "We weren't tourists," Vasquez later wrote in her
But on the morning of Day 60, just as they were preparing to launch, Kai spotted a light on the southern horizon. It moved. It blinked. It was not a star. The vessel was the MV Pacific Hope , a 600-foot Liberian-flagged container ship en route from Callao to Sydney. A deck officer on night watch had noticed a periodic flash on the radar—too regular for a wave, too small for a ship. He had diverted 14 miles off course to investigate. On Day 31, a mass of sargassum seaweed
For two days, they drifted. Satellite phone? Destroyed by impact. EPIRB? Submerged in a flooded locker. On April 17, a rising swell pushed them toward a wall of jagged basalt. Vasquez made the call: abandon ship. They launched a 10-foot inflatable tender with a single paddle, 12 liters of water, a fishing kit, a waterproof bag of journals, and a broken VHF radio. Four hours later, they crawled onto a black sand beach on the leeward side of Santa Astarta.
