Well, you have some rather polar opposite ways of increasing your buoyancy which will greatly reduce the effort it takes to float and tread water:
- Increase your lung volume via Cardio
- Grow a big beer belly.
It’s possible to do both, but tricky.
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It’s a re-tread.
ducks
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I came here to post that too.
I guess we have some idea of the mean age of Boing Boing readers.
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One of the songs she, ironically, sang was the theme to “The Love Boat”…
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Your best bet in case of a heading that’s awkward yet accurate is to just rewrite it so readers don’t fixate on it:
Woman falls off cruise ship, is rescued after treading water for 10 hours
And as my relatives have been threatening for years to drag me onto a cruise, treading water for 10 hours singing the Love Boat theme is pretty understandable (srsly, though, poor woman; a cruise AND this happens).
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Shark population off Croatia is in bad shape.
I don’t want to speculate on this particular case, but incidences of passengers jumping from cruise ships do occur. When I worked on a small cruise ship in 1990, we had a drunk passenger do just that. Fortunately, a crew member saw it happen and we followed the man overboard procedures for which we trained and was able to recover the passenger. Apparently, he thought it would be fun. I’m not sure he ever understood how close he came to dying that day. A person in the water is very hard to see; had anything at all gone wrong during the recovery process, he would have been lost.
The woman in this story is incredibly lucky to be alive, no matter how she ended up in the water.
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We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore , do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought , is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot . If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.
“The Imp of the Perverse” - Poe
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Seriously. The US Coast Guard says when they’re called out for a COB (crew overboard) event, in 40% of cases that person is never seen again, alive or dead. ie they don’t even find the body.
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I think it’s called the ‘Thanatos impulse’.
When I used to work fish boats off the West Coast of BC I can distinctly remember being on the deck, at night in the middle of nowhere in heavy weather and thinking ‘I could just jump in’.
I was and am not suicidal so of course never had more than just the fleeting thought, but it was a genuine and real thought, and it happened often. When I mentioned it to Mrs. rocketpjs (who also worked on fish boats) she was surprised and said she had thought she was the only one.
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Apparently Winston Churchill avoided going on the Underground because he felt the same sort of thing about jumping in front of the train. He had associated it with his “black dog” depression. By the sounds of some of these posts, it may have been a separate, common condition.
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The French call it ‘L’appel du vide’ which translates to “The call of the Void”
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Like most things in life, there are clubs dedicated to just that:
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Perhaps related to this?
Having been to endured Dubrovnik shortly after a cruise ship docked it’s a shame more passengers didn’t decide to go for a swim.
It would depend on where. The Mediterranean is much saltier than other places. I’m pretty sure that I could float/tread water indefinitely there, as I have found myself to be buoyant while swimming there, and the water is relatively warm.
In the Arctic it wouldn’t matter after a minute or so.
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