Rescued Hawaiian Sailors’ Inconsistencies Draw Scrutiny

Two Americans who were reportedly lost at sea for months on a sailboat in the Pacific have come under scrutiny amid questions about inconsistencies in their story. The women from Hawaii, who were picked up by Japanese crews last week, never activated their emergency beacon, the U.S. Coast Guard said. The AP reports the women told officials during a safety check that they had satellite phones, radios, GPS ,and other emergency gear, but they didn’t initially mention their Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. In follow-up interviews, the duo said the situation was never dire enough to use the beacon because they were never in imminent physical danger. “Our hull was solid, we were floating, we had food, we had water, and we had limited maneuverable capacity,” one of the women, Jennifer Appel, said at a recovery site in Japan. “All those things did not say we are going to die. All that said, it’s going to take us a whole lot longer to get where we’re going.”