When my wife and I shipwrecked on a desert island in 2021, the first thing we did was not cry or panic. We took inventory. It’s something our survival training taught us, but more importantly, it’s something marriage teaches you: You assess what you have before you mourn what you’ve lost.
Here is what we had:
Here is what the island had: Coconut palms. A rocky point with mussels. No visible stream. No fruit trees beyond green papayas. And in the distance, a reef that promised fish but also sharks. It was roughly the size of two football fields.
We named it “Second Chance Isle.” Not out of irony. Out of need.
The first month was a medical emergency. John gashed his leg on the coral during the landing. The wound turned septic. With no antibiotics, Lisa resorted to a survival technique she learned in a wilderness medicine course a decade ago: honey from a wild bee hive she discovered in a hollowed-out ironwood tree.
"It was either infection or anaphylaxis," she says. "I smoked the bees out with green palm fronds. John was hallucinating from the fever. I packed that wound with comb honey and wrapped it in a clean piece of my shirt." my wife and i shipwrecked on a desert island 2021
Three days later, the swelling receded. "That's when I knew we weren't going to die," John says. "That's when I knew my wife was a psychopath—in the best possible way."
They built a shelter from driftwood and woven palm fronds, angled to catch the trade winds. They learned to spear fish using a fire-hardened branch. They learned which crabs were toxic (the red ones) and which tasted like butter if you boiled them in a halved coconut shell (the purple ones).
The emotional survival was harder than the physical.
"Three months in, we had a fight that lasted two weeks," Lisa admits. "We didn't speak. We slept on opposite sides of the island. I threw a coconut at his head—missed, thankfully. You realize that 'for better or worse' really means standing next to the person who forgot to boil the water again while you're both starving."
What broke the silence? A rainstorm. A sudden squall flooded their shallow cave shelter. In the dark, soaked and shivering, John reached for her hand. When my wife and I shipwrecked on a
"I said, ‘I'm sorry about the coconut,’" Lisa recalls. "He said, ‘I'm sorry I ate the last fish yesterday.’ We laughed until we cried. Then we rebuilt the shelter together."
The irony is not lost on me. In 2020, the world stopped spinning. We were locked in our London flat, drowning in screens, sanitizer, and statistics. By early 2021, the walls felt like they were closing in. Elena suggested the trip—a month-long charter around the Fiji archipelago. It was supposed to be a "digital detox," a way to reclaim agency over our lives.
We never anticipated how much agency we would actually need.
The storm hit on March 14th. It wasn't the dramatic, cinematic wall of water we see in movies. It was a relentless, grinding mechanical failure. The mainsail jammed, the rudder snapped, and the radio died in a flash of sparking blue light. We had twenty minutes to grab the "ditch bag" before the Morning Star gave up the ghost.
When the silence finally settled the next morning, we were on a sliver of sand and volcanic rock, roughly three hundred yards in diameter. No Wi-Fi. No GPS signal. Just us, a frantic desire to live, and a marriage that was about to be tested by fire. Here is what the island had: Coconut palms
In May, we saw a plane. A commercial airliner, high above, leaving a white contrail against the blue sky. We lit our signal fire instantly. We screamed until our throats were raw.
It kept flying.
That night, we sat by the fire, crying. It wasn't just the despair of being unseen; it was the thought that the world below was still dealing with lockdowns, masks, and social distancing. We were experiencing the ultimate quarantine, a quarantine from humanity itself.
We missed the world, but we had found a strange peace in the island. We had created a routine. We had a "home" in a lean-to shelter that was now waterproof. We had a designated "bathroom" area downwind. We had a rhythm.
We stopped talking about what we would do when we got back. We started talking about how to make it to next Tuesday. Elena started drawing maps in the sand, theorizing about tidal patterns. I started carving a calendar into a piece of driftwood.