A woman stranded in the Atlantic for five days recalled the bloodcurdling screams of her crewmates as they were ripped apart by sharks after the captain of their ship made a disastrous mistake.
In 1982, Deborah Scaling-Kiley, 24, joined four others aboard the 58-foot yacht Trashman for a six-day, 1,300-mile voyage from Maine to Florida, where they were delivering the vessel to its new owner.
Joining her were Captain John Lippoth, his girlfriend Meg Mooney, and fellow yachtsmen, Brad Cavanagh, 21 at the time, and Mark Adams.
“The weather was beautiful, the boat was fun to steer,” Kiley recalled on Discovery’s I Shouldn’t Be Alive. “It doesn’t get much better than that.”
But two days into the voyage, a violent storm battered the yacht with towering waves and winds exceeding 100 km/h. Lippoth, who had the reputation of being a heavy drinker, was asleep at the helm when disaster struck.
‘Fins everywhere’
A massive wave shattered the yacht’s windows, whipping icy seawater inside and forcing the crew to abandon the sinking vessel.
During their desperate escape into an inflatable dinghy, Mooney sliced her leg, spilling blood into the ocean and drawing tiger sharks toward the five helpless survivors.
“There were fins everywhere in the water,” Kiley recalled, according to The Sun. “I don’t mean like two or three, I mean 10, 20. They were everywhere.”
Fight for survival
Trapped in the raft without food or fresh water, the survivors watched the beasts circle beneath them as Mooney’s “huge gaping wounds” became infected.
Lippoth and Adams, already dehydrated from drinking alcohol before the disaster, turned to seawater to quench their insatiable thirst, worsening their condition and triggering terrifying hallucinations.
Convinced he could see land, Lippoth jumped into the shark-infested ocean, leaving behind a “shrill scream.”
“Blood-curdling. Then it was over, silence. There was no crying, nothing. There was no doubt what got him. The sharks got him,” Kiley recalled.
Adams was next. Hallucinating that he could visit a store to buy beer and cigarettes, he also entered the shark-infested water and was killed.
“It was by far the most horrifying moment of my entire life,” Kiley said, adding that meanwhile, her and Cavanagh “were sitting there watching Meg die and it was tragic.”
After Mooney died, the two survivors said prayers before gently lowering her body into the ocean.
‘We were alive’
After five days, the two survivors were finally rescued.
Before Kiley died at 54 in 2012, she became a motivational speaker and published “Albatross: The True Story of a Woman’s Survival at Sea” in 1994.
continued working as a mariner in Massachusetts, but admitted the ordeal changed him forever.
“It’s not something that you turn off once you’ve been through it,” Cavanagh said. “You keep living in survival mode. I don’t know if you’re shell-shocked, but it’s impossible to just turn it off and live the way you did before.”
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