A SHIPWRECK SURVIVOR'S TALE:
Letters to His Grandchildren
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DAY 5 Monday, July 3rd, 2006 Dear Family, This will be a short, preliminary note. We have been shipwrecked on a rocky island! Five days ago! Three of us survived: Harry O’Toole, Melanie Pickett, and me. We are bruised and battered, cold, and wet. I will write more later, but for now I want to briefly record what we have been struggling with these past few days. We have limped about gathering anything we could find from our wrecked sailing ship, surviving on four loaves of bread, tied in a white trash bag, that somehow floated ashore intact, and a large, half empty plastic jar of peanut butter. We drink water from the many pools of rainwater in rock hollows. Harry had a dislocated shoulder, which Melanie “reduced” as she called it; she then made a temporary sling for his arm, using a shirt taken from a dead shipmate. Our sprains and bruises impede our work, but we feel we must cobble together a primitive shelter from the chilly wind, rain showers, and fog. Melanie has a sprained wrist, which we have wrapped and splinted as best we can. Today we struggled in the lee of a four foot tall boulder to make a simple lean-to out of driftwood. Although it only provides minimal protection, it gets us out of the worst of the wind and some of the rain. This is a personal tragedy beyond imagining. We are cold, in shock, and scared. I am able to write this note because a footlocker from our boat washed up on the rocky shore! Believe it or not, it had pens and lined pads of paper in it! We spotted it bobbing in a somewhat sheltered inlet, if you could call a gap in the boulders where the surf ran in with a little less violence than elsewhere, “an inlet!” It’s almost as though God delivered the footlocker in Person, as though He knew we would need to do something to repair our devastated morale. It was Melanie who suggested we can now write letters, which seems kind of like an exercise in futility. Not much else we can do today.
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About the Book
When retired U.S. Army chaplain Greg Sponney left for a three-month sailing and hiking adventure cruise, he never could have imagined that he would one day be shipwrecked and stranded on a small, rocky, uninhabited island in the northern Pacific Ocean.
This is his story, in the form of 64 letters to his seven grandchildren, in which he describes his survival adventure. He also seeks to share with them what he believes is important in life…hoping that somehow, someday his grandchildren will have the chance to read them.
Torn between despair that he will never be rescued, and hope that he will, he and his two fellow-survivors, a retired carpenter and a retired nurse, make the best of a desperate situation.
About the Author
Donald Vedeler is a retired U.S. Army Chaplain, who has written three iUniverse novels about chaplains who find themselves in unusual and hazardous situations. In Moles in the Eagle’s Nest, Army Chaplain Eric Lovejoy stumbles onto a secret organization that is trying to narrow the gap between the earnings of corporate executives and their workers. In Tainted Hero, Army Hospital Chaplain David Huffnor finds himself in the dangerous position of trying to rescue a former WAC who is trapped in a life she didn’t expect. In this new novel, A SHIPWRECK SURVIVOR’S TALE: Letters to His Grandchildren, being published by iUniverse this fall, Retired Army chaplain Gregg Sponney, stranded on an uninhabited island, details his adventure and shares his views on what is important in life. Chaplain Vedeler, has sailed the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine for some 40 years, and that experience led him to consider a novel in which stranded survivor’s struggled to stay alive. He has, for many years wanted to publish a book of his religious and philosophical views about what it important in life. He is a member of the Gulf Coast Writers’ Association, and the Fort Myers Ministerial Association. He lives in Estero Florida with his wife Linda, and has two daughters, Janice and Laurie, and three grandchildren, Katie, Andy and Chris, to whom his third book is dedicated.