Sailors who braved months lost at sea finally reached land; but parts of their story face doubt

Jennifer Appel, right, and Tasha Fuiava sit with their dogs on the deck of the USS Ashland. Photo / AP

Two amateur sailors set foot on land Monday after spending nearly half a year lost at sea - a journey they said took them through shark attacks and waves as tall as office buildings, and nearly killed them on the brink of their rescue by the US Navy.

"The crew of the USS Ashland saved our lives, not from the ocean, but from the vessel that was trying to render assistance to us," Jennifer Appel told reporters after the Navy ship docked in Okinawa, Japan.

"Had they not been able to locate us, we would have been dead within 24 hours."

Image taken from video provided by the US Navy of Jennifer Appel, of Honolulu, as rescuers approach her crippled sailboat, the Sea Nymph. Photo / AP

Appel's voyage began thousands of kilometres away in Hawaii, when she, Tasha Fuiava and their two dogs set off in a sailboat on May 3 to explore - they thought - Tahiti and other Pacific islands thousands of kilometres to the south.

The saga has captured national attention for its sheer drama. But certain details have begun to draw skepticism in recent days.

Appel had been sailing for a decade, the Guardian reported - but close to her home in Honolulu.

"I have no idea what's going to happen out there," she recalled telling Fuiava, who replied:

"That's okay, I've never sailed."

They stuffed the 15m Sea Nymph with food and provisions - just in case the trip lasted more than the planned two-and-a-half weeks.

On their first day at sea, Appel said, a violent storm hit with waves as high as 15m.

The storm lashed the Sea Nymph for three days, but when it finally subsided, the women were more confident than ever in their abilities, and decided to sail on.

Tasha Fuiava clambers aboard the Ashland on the day of the rescue. Photo / AP

"The boat could withstand the forces of nature," Appel said.

From there, problems spiraled. The boat's mast was somehow damaged, and its frame was too big to dock at the tiny island of Kiribati for repairs.

So they kept sailing, hobbled and already hundreds of kilometres off their planned course.

At the end of May - long after the women were supposed to have reached Tahiti - a white squall flooded their cockpit and wrecked the engine.

Now they were simply adrift.

They began to send out distress signals, but no answer came back. Fuiava recalled to NBC's Today show that she would stand watch at night, and shoot a flare into the sky whenever she saw a ship on the horizon.

"They would turn or keep going," she said.

They did what they could to survive. The ship's water purifier broke, according to the Guardian, but they figured out how to fix it. When the dog food ran out, Zeus and Valentine made do with the women's provisions - mostly dry goods like oatmeal, pasta and nuts.

They had packed enough food to last them a year, they thought, but the supply was dwindling rapidly.

And the ocean brought other dangers.

One day, the women recalled, a pack of tiger sharks found them. The sharks started ramming the boat, and kept at it so long it that seemed to Appel they were hunting.

"When those things would hit the boat, my own teeth would rattle in my head," Appel told reporters. She and Fuiava and the dogs all huddled on the floor below deck.

Sailors from the USS Ashland approach the sailboat. Photo / AP

"I told them not to bark because the sharks could hear us breathing. They could smell us," Appel told Today.

They spent month after month like that - "Wondering if today is your last day, if tonight is your last night," Appel told reporters.

By late October - nearly hurricane season in the South Pacific - the food had run down to the last rations. They had by now spent nearly six months on the Sea Nymph, and it seemed less and less likely that they could do so for much longer.

And then on Tuesday, a Taiwanese fishing boat found them - about 1500km from the coast of Japan, thousands of kilometres from home and nowhere close to Tahiti.

But when the fishermen tried to tow the sailboat, the Associated Press reported, they damaged it even more.

Appel managed to swim to the fishing vessel and made one last mayday call. Then she swam back to her companions and waited.

They watched the empty horizon. The day passed. It was at this point, Appel said, that she began to fear that death was imminent.

"We actually talked about how we believed we'd been left for dead," she told reporters.

But come Wednesday, she knew: the US Navy had heard her distress call.

"They see us," she told Fuiava, ABC News reported.

USS Ashland sailors help Zeus, one of two dogs who were accompanying the two Honolulu women. Photo / AP

Appel recalled shaking as the gray hull of the USS Ashland grew in the distance. She stood on the edge of the Sea Nymph and blew kisses, while the dogs barked and ran wildly down the length of the crippled sailboat.

Appel and Fuiava would spend nearly another week at sea - but they were no longer adrift, and no longer scared and alone.

As the women waited to dock in Japan, they passed the time exploring the Ashland's massive deck, Appel told the Navy last week.

And wherever they wandered, she said, seamen would rush up to help.

"'Where are you going?' they'd say. 'We know you're lost'."

Tasha Fuiava, left, and Jennifer Appel speak on the deck of the USS Ashland. Photo / AP

On Monday, a spokesman from the US Coast Guard told the AP that the two women had an emergency beacon on board their sailboat that was never activated.

The women initially said they were equipped with other communications devices but did not mention an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (Epirb), which communicates with satellites and transmits locations to authorities. They also said they had six forms of communication that all died - a claim that has also met skepticism.

"I've never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time," Phillip Johnson, a retired Coast Guard Office who oversaw search and rescue operations, told the AP.

In a briefing with the Coast Guard, Appel said she that did have the emergency beacon on board and that it was properly registered.

"We asked why during this course of time they did not activate the Epirb," Coast Guard spokeswoman Tara Molle told the AP. "She had stated they never felt like they were truly in distress, like in a 24-hour period they were going to die."

Johnson told the AP the women would have been found had they used the emergency beacon. The devices can send a location to rescuers in minutes, even if dropped in the ocean.

Appel and Fuiava also said they faced a tropical storm on their first night at sea on May 3. Records kept by the National Weather Service show no signs of such a storm around that time, according to the AP. The findings were confirmed by archived Nasa satellite images.

The Coast Guard's review of the case is ongoing but there is no criminal investigation at this point, according to the AP.