Canned fruit cocktail provides sugar, water content, and vitamins — particularly important on a voyage where scurvy and other nutritional deficiencies become theoretical concerns after weeks without fresh food. The historical sailors who developed scurvy did so over months; the 41-day duration of Ashcraft’s solo survival was within the range where vitamin deficiency could begin to manifest in someone who entered with depleted reserves, though there is no indication from her accounts that nutritional deficiency beyond general caloric restriction was a significant factor.
She rationed everything. The rationing was not complex nutritional planning; it was the basic survival arithmetic of dividing a finite supply by an uncertain number of remaining days. Each day’s allocation was set to provide something without exhausting the supply before she expected to reach Hawaii. If she arrived sooner than planned, there would be food left over. If she arrived later, she would need to cut the allocation further.
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## Why the Jury Rig Worked
The improvisational mast and sail that Tami Oldham Ashcraft built from the surviving half of the Hazana’s spinnaker pole and the vessel’s storm jib was not, by any standard of yacht design, a good sailing rig. It was a good enough sailing rig, in the specific conditions and for the specific purpose she needed it.
A spinnaker pole is a spar used to hold the clew — the lower forward corner — of a large downwind sail called a spinnaker away from the vessel’s centerline, allowing the sail to fill with air at angles when the vessel is sailing downwind or at a broad reach. The pole is designed to be removable; it is not a structural member of the rig in normal use. Its strength is sufficient for the lateral loads of holding a sail out, not for the vertical and lateral loads of serving as a standing mast in a seaway.