Opinion: Sea survival tale shows dairy farmers’ skills

My neighbour Lorraine brought me a book called Survive the Savage Sea, which she thought I would enjoy.

It was written by a dairy farmer called Dougal Robertson in 1973. She was absolutely right. I didn’t just enjoy it, I loved it and read it late into the night.

This is remarkable given that it’s a true story and normally real life can be quite disappointing. I cannot recommend this inspiring book highly enough.

At the end of the 1960s, there was a similar period of depressed milk prices. Dougal found himself tiring of the unending toil and financial struggles that are a dairy farmer’s lot.

He decided to sell his herd and buy an old wooden yacht to sail around the world with his wife and three sons.

I know what you are thinking. “That’s exactly the sort of ridiculous thing that a dairy farmer would do. They are genetically programmed to make life difficult for themselves. I bet it all goes wrong.”

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Matthew Naylor farms 162ha of Lincolnshire silt in partnership with his father, Nev. Cropping includes potatoes, vegetables, cut flowers and flowering bulbs. Matthew is a Nuffield scholar

And you are right. The boat is attacked by a pod of killer whales 200 miles west of the Galapagos Islands and sinks to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in the space of 60 seconds.

The family all manage to get into the 9ft lifeboat with only the modest provisions of a bag of lemons, some onions, a knife, a distress flare and a few litres of water.

There is nothing like physical deprivation to put fire in a dairy farmer’s belly. What follows is a 38 day fight for survival with hunger, thirst, cramped conditions, 30ft waves, shark attacks and boils and blisters as the Robertson family try to sail towards the doldrums and an international shipping route.

They eat turtles and flying fish and drink rain water as they battle to stop leaks in a small boat with just a few inches of freeboard.

Against all probability, they are eventually spotted and rescued by a Japanese boat. The family returned to Staffordshire.

Happily, Dougal and his wife reached a reasonable age although they died some years ago. One of the sons still farms in Staffordshire.

It is a truly humbling story.

I know that I wouldn’t have survived the first 30 hours of such a crisis, never mind 30 days.

Mind you, I probably wouldn’t even survive a week of 4.30am starts in a milking parlour either so I’m hardly a representative figure for comparison in these circumstances.

While reading, I kept drawing clumsy parallels between the Robertsons ordeal and the challenge that many dairy farming families currently face.

It is bad enough to be an arable farmer losing money but the additional demands that small-scale dairying places upon families require even greater fortitude.

At present, the global economic market is as tempestuous and unfeeling as the savage sea. It is as sad as it is inevitable that we will have fewer dairy farmers in Britain in a decade.

Survival will require the same attributes that are displayed in the book – experience, skill, inventiveness and a very large portion of good luck.

Dougal Robertson’s story left me feeling optimistic, however. It revealed to me the extraordinary skills that dairy farmers have to offer even outside the world of milk production.

Their practical nature, ability to improvise, almost religious dedication to their work and sheer, bloody-minded determination to never submit to failure are powerful and very valuable attributes.

In Dougal’s case, they were the difference between the life and death of his family.