She had spotted what appeared to be land: a shape on the horizon that she interpreted as one of the Hawaiian Islands. She maneuvered toward it. The shape disappeared. She concluded, correctly, that she had seen a low cloud formation or a visual anomaly, not land. The experience of believing you have reached safety and then finding you have not is well-documented as one of the most psychologically devastating events in survival at sea.
A low-flying military aircraft passed over. She did not have flares functional or did not get them deployed in time. The aircraft did not see her. Two distant ships did not respond to her flares or signals, or did not detect them. She was invisible, 41 days into a voyage that no one knew to be looking for her, on a dismasted yacht in the middle of the Pacific.
She went below. She loaded a rifle. She put the barrel in her mouth.
By her account — described in *Red Sky in Mourning* — something stopped her. She describes hearing a voice, clearly enough that she looked around to find its source. The voice told her to get back on deck and keep watch. No source was visible. She put the rifle down. She went back on deck.
Whether the voice was an auditory hallucination produced by her head injury and the extended physiological stress of 41 days at sea, or something she experienced as more than that, is a question she leaves open. She does not present it as a clinical phenomenon; she presents it as something that happened, that saved her life, and that she cannot fully account for. The film adaptation of her story does not depict this episode.