A test of a woman’s will to live

A 42-year-old Noumea woman, Claudine Pare, joined the ranks of the great ocean survivors after spending 20 days adrift off Papua New Guinea.

Pare was on a solo voyage from Noumea to Japan, via Guam.

Her ordeal began on May 30 when her yacht sank after hitting a reef about 200 nautical miles off Bouugainville. Pare says she jumped into the 1.5 metre liferaft with “a few packets of noodles and some water”. After three days the wind rose and she managed a makeshift sail. But the wind dropped a few days later, and she resorted to paddling.

When the noodles went rotten, Pare says she caught a fish with her hands and ate it raw. But the jettisoned remains

attracted sharks, some of them twice the length of the raft. Pare says she was frightened, but she screamed at the top of her voice and rattled cans in the water to scare the sharks away.

On the seventeenth day, a passing cargo ship failed to respond to her signal light. But the next day she sighted what turned out to be Tanga Island in PNG’s New Ireland Province. Two days later, Fare’s liferaft drifted into a small bay where canoes came out to rescue her.

She was unable to walk and had to be carried from the liferaft by villagers. “If you really don’t want to die,” Pare explained later, “you can use the last energy you have to keep alive.” □

Claudine Pare: survivor