November 23, 1942. A British merchant ship is crossing the South Atlantic when a German U-boat puts two torpedoes into her. She sinks in about two minutes. One man survives. He spends the next 133 days alone on an eight foot wooden raft in the middle of the ocean. His name was Poon Lim. He was 24 years old, from Hainan Island in China, working as a steward on the SS Benlomond. He couldn't swim well. He wasn't a sailor in the military sense. He served food. When the torpedoes hit, he grabbed a life jacket and jumped overboard before the boilers exploded. He floated in the water for hours before he spotted an empty life raft and pulled himself onto it. On board were some tins of biscuits, a jug of water, chocolate, sugar, a flashlight, and a few flares. He rationed it carefully. A few sips of water. A couple of biscuits a day. He tied himself to the raft with a rope so he wouldn't be washed off in a storm. He swam laps around it every day to keep his strength up. Then the food ran out. So he improvised. He pulled the wire out of the flashlight and bent it into a fish hook. He unraveled rope from the raft for a fishing line. He used biscuit crumbs for bait at first, then the fish he caught. He caught rainwater in the canvas of his life jacket. He dried fish on a line strung across the raft. When a storm ruined his fish and fouled his water, he caught a seabird by hiding under a pile of seaweed and grabbing it when it landed. At one point he hooked a shark. It was small, but it fought back hard. He beat it off the raft with a water jug, then ate it and drank its blood when he had no fresh water left. And the worst part? People saw him. A freighter passed close enough for him to see the crew. It sailed away. American patrol planes flew over and dropped a marker, but a storm moved in and they never found him again. He even reported seeing a German U-boat. It ignored him too. He kept going anyway. He tracked the days by tying knots in a rope. After a while he stopped counting and started tracking moons. On April 5, 1943, Brazilian fishermen spotted him near the coast of Brazil. He had drifted all the way across the Atlantic. He had been at sea for 133 days. He'd lost about 20 pounds. Within days he was walking on his own. King George VI awarded him the British Empire Medal. The Royal Navy studied how he survived and added his techniques to its survival manuals. After the war he moved to the United States, where he lived in Brooklyn until he died in 1991. When someone told him nobody had ever survived that long alone at sea, he answered with one line. "I hope no one will ever have to break that record."