The flashlight was among his first resources. He removed the wire spring from its interior and bent it into the shape of a fishhook — small, rudimentary, but functional as a first tool. Hemp rope from the raft’s own construction served as fishing line. He baited the improvised hook with pieces of hardtack, letting it trail in the water behind the raft. The equatorial South Atlantic is not a place of sparse marine life; the warm water supports a significant food chain, and with patience and the basic hook-and-line system he had built, Poon Lim began to catch fish.
The canvas cover of the raft became a rainwater collection system. He rigged it to funnel rainfall toward the container he was using for fresh water storage, extending the life of his initial water supply by supplementing it with precipitation. The equatorial Atlantic receives rainfall from the Intertropical Convergence Zone — the atmospheric boundary where the trade winds of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres meet, producing the heavy, frequent rainfall that characterizes the region. Rainfall was not guaranteed or reliable, but it came, and when it came he was ready for it.
Around day fifty-five, his food supply ran out. Approximately fifteen days later, his water supply was exhausted.
The five days without water that followed — documented in the testimony that Poon Lim provided after his rescue and incorporated into the subsequent accounts — were the closest he came to dying from a cause other than exposure or starvation in the early period of his ordeal. The body’s tolerance for dehydration is extremely limited; five days without water represents a threshold beyond which organ function begins to fail. He was, by his own later account, close to losing consciousness.