Review of All Is Lost (2013) by Michael W — 24 Aug 2014

The sailor portrayed in this movie is unbelievably hopeless and incompetent. He should never have gone to sea at all, and definitely not alone.

When I was young I did a reasonable amount of sailing on rivers, and a small amount in the Indian ocean, resulting in me learning some basic lessons that any sailor should know.

As I watched the movie I could not help myself from jotting down a list of the most obvious and foolish errors that the sailor in the movie made.

1. He did not have the correct handle for his bilge pump and had to make-do with an ill-fitting piece of wood. To go to sea without a proper handle for the bilge pump, which is a key operating part of the boat, is unforgivable.

2. When he needed some electric power he took a wet-cell lead-acid battery and laid it on it?s side on the roof of his cabin. Wet-cell lead-acid batteries should NEVER be laid on their side. They are designed to work upright. When they are lying on their side the edges of the plates come out of the acid bath and reduce the amount of power they can deliver, and reduce the amount of charge they can take up. And when they are on their side they will leak acid from the vent holes in the filling plugs. The leaking acid will cause further damage to this poor sailor?s, poor-old boat.

3. He had no water in his jerry-can and did not know it until he looked. A competent sailor should know how much water he has and exactly where it is.

4. He had no sea-anchor, even though his trip required him to pass through major shipping lanes. Good sea-anchors are simple and are made of strong synthetic cloth, like mainsail cloth, so they fold up and take up very little room. Every capable seaman will carry a sea-anchor, and a spare on his boat.

5. When he was trying to attract the attention of passing ships he used the wrong flares in defiance of simple common-sense. First he used a flame-flare in daylight. Flame-flares produce a good light which can be easily seen at night, but NOT during day-time. In day-light he should have used an orange-smoke flare, then he could have been seen easily (and the movie would have ended).

6. Wrong flare again. At night he used a rocket flare when he was very close to a ship. That too is just dumb. A rocket flare travels a long way from launch point, and it will not show where he is. He should have used the flame-flare for this up-close, night-time situation.

7. He put a message in a jar with a thin metal lid. It is obvious that the metal lid, in sea-water, will rust in a few weeks. Then the jar will sink and the message will be lost.

8. When he was up on the mast fixing his weather-gauge he used a wrench (spanner) but did not have it tied to anything. Any competent person knows that it is easy to slip and drop a wrench, so it must ALWAYS be tied to something with a cord long enough to enable it to be used, but prevent it from getting lost. If one drops a wrench when one is atop a mast, it will almost certainly bounce and go overboard.

9. He handled the sextant quite incorrectly. It was obvious that he didn?t know how to use it. This shows lack of the most basic seamanship.

10. He had no self-steering system on his boat; not even a simple home made rig to lash the wheel. Even Joshua Slocum, sailing 120 years ago, knew how to lash the rudder to make his Spray a self-sailer.

11. To attract attention, he lit a fire in a plastic jerry can, which would obviously burn up too. But then he had the setting moon behind him which would have made the fire very hard to see, and furthermore, he had the fire obscured by the walls of his life-raft which definitely removed any chance that the fire would be seen.

12. He ruins his water-collector, which he should have regarded as a critical piece of survival equipment and to be protected at all costs.

13. He burns up his own life raft.

14. He does not have a life-jacket on, and it looks like he does not even have one with him at all.

The man is an incredibly foolish sailor, and a danger to himself and anyone else around him. If he had been sailing with me, I would have put him ashore at the first opportunity. If he had been sailing with a crew, I?m sure they would have locked him up after the first day to prevent him from touching anything.

Now as I look back on it, I find myself wondering if this movie was meant to be a parody, or a spoof, of everything not to do when sailing alone. It would make a great training movie for that purpose.

This movie is a disgraceful portrayal of ocean-sailing. It just made me angry at the foolishness of the sailor.

The directing of the movie however, is very good though. It roused great emotions in me. I was tense for most of the movie wondering what stupid thing this idiotic sailor is going to do next.