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## The Ships That Didn’t See Her
In the final days of the survival period — around days 38 to 40 — multiple vessels passed near enough that Ashcraft attempted to signal them. None of the attempts succeeded.
A low-flying military aircraft passed over. Military aircraft routinely patrol the central Pacific for a variety of purposes, and in the waters approaching Hawaii they may be flying surveillance patterns, training exercises, or other missions. The specific aircraft is not identified in any of the sources consulted. Ashcraft saw it, attempted to signal — the specific method is not described, as her flares may have been in questionable condition after 40 days at sea — and watched it continue past without acknowledgment.
Two distant ships also failed to respond. The visibility of a small disabled sailing yacht from a commercial ship’s bridge is limited: a vessel without masts, with minimal freeboard, sitting low in the water, is a small radar target and a visually inconspicuous object at any distance greater than a few miles. Commercial ships maintain radar watches, but the radar reflection of a small fiberglass hull is easily missed against the cluttered background of ocean surface returns. At night, without running lights, the Hazana was essentially invisible.
The sequence of near-misses — the false island, the aircraft, the ships — in the final days constitutes one of the more psychologically brutal aspects of the account. She was close enough to civilization that military aircraft and commercial shipping lanes were present. She was not close enough for anyone to see her. The gap between proximity and contact was the specific shape of her isolation.