Each missed rescue was, in practical terms, a reset: the hope that had accompanied the approach was replaced by the need to re-establish the psychological and practical equilibrium that survival required. That Poon Lim maintained this equilibrium across multiple such resets — without falling into the passive despair that such repeated disappointments could generate — is one of the most remarkable features of the documented account.
He tracked time. He maintained his fishing. He rebuilt after the storm. He kept going.
## Toward the Coast
After more than one hundred days at sea, something changed in the water around the raft.
The deep blue of the open South Atlantic — the color of water far from any continent, where the depth is thousands of meters and the ecosystem is that of the open ocean pelagic zone — gave way to a lighter, greenish hue. For someone who had grown up around the sea on Hainan and spent years as a merchant seaman, this color change was recognizable as the signature of shallowing water. The ocean changes color as the depth decreases, as sediment from rivers and the coastal shelf alters the light-scattering properties of the water column. The lighter color meant that he was approaching a continental shelf. Land was nearer.
He had drifted approximately 750 miles west from the point of the sinking, carried by the South Equatorial Current — one of the major ocean current systems of the Atlantic, which flows westward across the equatorial region from the coast of Africa toward South America. The current had carried him toward the northeast coast of Brazil, a coastline defined at its most prominent point by the vast outflow of the Amazon River — the largest river by volume in the world, which deposits enormous quantities of fresh water and sediment into the Atlantic over a front so wide that its effects on ocean color and salinity are detectable hundreds of miles from shore.