Sunday Herald, The: OPEN WATER In 1972 a Scottish family spent 40 days adrift at sea,

ON their 22nd night adrift in the Pacific, Douglas Robertson turned to his father and said, "Dad this is hell on earth. We have come to hell now." There were six of them, crammed naked into a dinghy built for three. Lightning sheeted on all sides.

Swells reared above. The dinghy yawed from side to side, seemingly on the brink of capsize. A canopy built from an already abandoned and disintegrated raft kept the rain off those at the back, the 10-year-old twins, Neil and Sandy, but it didn't stop it crashing in at the front as wave after wave washed over the gunwales. It was at this point that, yet again, young Douglas thought they were going to die. They no longer needed to worry about the thirst and starvation that had preoccupied their every waking hour for the last three weeks.

They would be electrocuted, fried. It seemed they were involved in a game of Russian roulette. They were waiting to meet their end.

But they survived that storm, weaving their way through the dark waves under the flashing lamps of lightning, and, when the calm came again, clung on for another two weeks, living off turtles, flying fish and dorado dolphins and catching rainwater in their canopy. Then, on the 38th day, a Japanese trawler, the Toka Maru, spotted a flare from the tiny vessel and picked up the huddle of skeletal human forms. By then they had given up hope of being rescued and were resolute in their plan to sail all the way to America, a trip they had calculated would take them another 37 days. Though they hung, as Douglas says, by tenuous threads, always at the risk of capsize or destruction of their small dinghy, they had learned, against the odds, to survive in this environment and were fitter then than they had been on the 17th day of their ordeal. They had become "citizens of the sea".

As a tale of survival theirs is a remarkable story. Though some have survived longer - solo yachtsman Steve Callaghan endured 76 days alone on an inflatable raft, Maurice and Marilyn Bailey drifted for 117 days - this was a family, four adults, two children, who all emerged from the experience alive. The ordeal began when in 1972, 18 months into their round the world sailing trip, the family and crew member Robin, heard a crack rip through their 43ft schooner, the Lucette. A pod of killer whales had charged the hull, splintering a hole in the planking. The Lucette sank in minutes and they were forced to take to the sea in a life raft to which they attached the small dinghy, the Ednamair.

With only these two vessels, a packet of onions, oranges and lemons, enough vitamin-fortified bread and glucose for four days, 18 pints of water, eight flares, four fish hooks, a fishing line, a first aid box and a bulbous ended knife, they would survive the next five and a half weeks. It was a journey that was recorded byEdinburgh-born Scot Dougal Robertson in Survive The Savage Sea, made into a film starring Ali McGraw.

Now, following his father's death, the story been retold by Douglas Robertson in The Last Voyage Of The Lucette. It was also a journey that would mark all its survivors.

In all the books and films the one story that has not been told is what happens to a family after it has been through that. This is the story Douglas tells me now.

Robertson sits in a cafe, clearing leftover chips in polystyrene from the table, and recommends to me the best coffee in London. Now 52, it is a long time since he was forced to make that rapid vault from boy to man. He was just 18 years old when he jumped from the sinking Lucette. Up until the age of 16 he had grown up on an isolated farm, no telephone, no electricity.

Then, one day his brother Neil had said, "Daddy's a sailor, why don't we sail around the world?" Dougal, who had always had an unorthodox attitude to how to bring his children up, ran with the idea, deciding this would be the best education they could have. Perhaps it was.

After they were rescued Robertson thanked his father for the experience. He does so, even now. "I thank him every day of my life, " he says, "because he was successful. Suddenly you look back on it and it's an adventure. But it's not an adventure when it's happening. It's a fraught, horrible experience. Every day you are waiting to die and you are wondering when it will come and how it will appear."

Friends, he says, say that he is different from most people. He knows no fear. He will take risks most people won't. "They're scared of me because I will do things that other people wouldn't do. If you come across a situation I'll go that extra step. I will do, rather than not do. I always take the opportunities and if you throw the balls in the air, they'll land. Somewhere, something will happen." But he works as an accountant - hardly a risk-taker's career. "I'm not a normal accountant, " he says. "I throw the balls in the air and I do things with gusto. Even in accountancy I can do it in such a way. You can do anything in that way."

The Last Voyage Of The Lucette is in some ways a righting of wrongs. Following his parents' death, Douglas decided to rewrite the story of Survive The Savage Sea, taking his father's account as his starting point and weaving in other people's perspectives. In particular, he felt his mother, Linda, was never given a voice and that the one non-family crew member, Robin Williams, a Welsh economics student who joined the family at Panama hitching a lift to New Zealand, was portrayed - unfairly he felt - as inept.

"I always felt he treated us very unfairly.

Of course it was him in a lot of ways. He did save his family. There's no doubt about that. His courage and tenacity was in extremis. He never gave up for one minute in his efforts to get us home. He was so determined. At times we'd give up. Dougal was still going. But we were all there."

Reading The Last Voyage Of The Lucette, I found myself swinging between anger at a despotic father willing to take his children into such high risk circumstances - at one point, while sailing into a storm he suddenly realises he hasn't finished fixing his engine - and admiration for his dogged, unbending will. When they set off in January 1971, Dougal took his family to sea, heading into an Atlantic storm, without any training. The son of an Edinburgh music teacher, he had been to sea himself with the Merchant Navy and had in fact even been shipwrecked in 1942 when Japanese bombers attacked his ship, the Sagaing.

But the family had not once been out to sea together.

"It was incredible, " says Robertson, "but you know what was even more incredible?

We didn't even go for a practice sail round the bay just to test the boat out, or test us out really. We just set off. I never dared ask him why we did that. He was a hardliner.

You did what he told you when he told youtodoit."

In the end it was not Dougal's mismanagement or unorthodox methods that got them into trouble. The attack of the killer whales was an act of nature, as unforeseeable as a lightning strike.

Robertson remembers it as the worst moment of the experience. As he teetered on the sinking Lucette about to plunge into the water, he thought they had little chance. They were going to be eaten alive.

"I kept thinking, how am I going to know whether they've bitten me or not? You had to keep feeling for your limbs. I had these visions of myself being eaten in the water and thought, this is how I'm going to die. I can remember that fear, that panic rising in my breast."

It was the worst moment, but it was also just the beginning. For the next few weeks they would fight a continual battle to keep their raft afloat, before transferring to the dinghy. Holes kept appearing, water had to constantly be bailed out. Sores developed where their salt-water soaked clothes touched their skin. Water was scarce and they took the frightening decision to head away from the nearest land into the doldrums where they believed there would be rain. Lyn, Douglas's mother, administered enemas from the dirtied water inside the boat to help hydrate them.

There were times, when Robertson had had enough, was so tired and exhausted by the struggle to survive that he longed just to lie down and die. "It's bloody hard work, you know, surviving. My father made that point and I make it in Last Voyage Of The Lucette. The business of survival is a tyranny to which you had to bow your head. You had to work, you had to keep getting food, you had to keep getting water, you had to keep bailing the boat out. You had to do it night and day, when you were up to your chest in water, when there were boils all over your body."

They would talk about food. They would imagine setting up a cafe, Dougal's Kitchen, running through the dishes on the menu: a lamb stew, coddled egg and cheese pasties, minced beef pasties. "I tell you when you get hungry that's what you think about. Read other people's accounts of being short of food. Your mind plays tricks on you like you wouldn't believe and food appears out of the sky and the taste of it the memory of the taste of the food is so real that you can't escape it. And you talk food all day. I had this apparition about roasted rabbit. And I've never tasted it but by god I needed to have some."

Often, in the middle of their struggle, they would look around them and be stunned by the vast beauty. "It was ironic, " says Robertson, "We lived in nature at its most beautiful. I said, 'Dad, how can it be so dangerous in all this beauty?"

Sometimes too, it seemed, as they adjusted to their life at sea, that nature was providing for them. It was as if the dorados were as easy to catch as they were fit. "It was as if someone had told them, 'Oh, I don't need these people up here yet.

You have to go and feed them.'" He remembers at one point saying that he couldn't go on. His father turned to him and said, "Douglas we need you. I can't get back without you." That, Robertson says, was his way of telling him he loved him. Dougal didn't talk about feelings. He was as tough in his thinking as he was in his physicality. His wife prayed but he refused to. Robertson remembers once trying to encourage him.

"He said, 'I don't believe in God and there's no point to praying now.' And I said to him, 'Dad how can you say a thing like that at a time like this? You might need God in two days.' He said. 'Well I don't believe in God Douglas, and I'm not going to start now.' I said to him, 'Dad can't you just pretend?' He said, 'Do you think if there was a God, God wouldn't know I was pretending? What's the point?' I thought well, okay, I'm going to pretend."

I ask him what he thinks his father would think of the book.

"Oh, he would say, 'Bloody rubbish'. But it isn't, it's the truth, and it's the real truth, warts and all." And his mother? "She would have loved it because it gives her a voice and Dougal didn't give her a voice."

Robertson believes he made his first decision as a man when on that raft. His father had asked him if he would get in the dinghy and row to the nearest land.

Believing that he could not, and would die alone in the attempt, he said he wanted to stay on the raft. He has never shirked from making a decision since. Recently he was faced with a difficult one. Last year his son, Joshua, was involved in a quad bike accident, so serious that his ex-wife initially told him he was dead. "He can't be dead, " Douglas said. "He hasn't come to me yet." In fact, Joshua was still alive, but on a life support machine. "Robyn and I had to decide about switching his life support machine off. We decided against it. That kind of decision is as deep as the decisions we made at sea. The difference was that we all got out alive and well from it, so it had a happy ending. Josh is still alive but he's completely paralysed."

He thought of what his own father must have gone through on that raft. He had been determined to get them home.

Robertson, too, was determined that his son would survive. "I said to Robyn, I'm going to treat it like he hasn't had an accident. He's coming everywhere I go. And that's what I did. He's made tremendous progress since those early days."

Robertson was not the only person changed by his experience on the Ednamair. Almost everyone was. None more so than Dougal himself. After the rescue he resolved to live an uncompromising life. "He changed, " Douglas says. "He was never our Dad again after that. I did write a poem about it, about the way the Lucette knew that she took Dad from me. He had already decided by the time he got back home that things were never going to be the same again. He was going to live his life.

He left us. He left us. Him and my mum got a divorce."

He believes the guilt and the indignity helped take him away from them. "When you lose your dignity you've got nothing else left. And my parents lost it together.

They got us home but they felt so guilty about what had happened. And I used to say, 'Dad, without you we wouldn't have made it.' He said, 'I don't care. I should never have put you in that position and I'll never forgive myself.' And this incredible guilt that Dougal and Linda both felt, manifested itself most when they were together. I was my parents' child, so I couldn't lose my dignity. Already they had changed my nappies, smacked me, sent me to bed. But for two adults it's different, especially a man and a wife, when the very thing that makes you tick is exposed.

And Dougal and Linda felt like that. Their fear, their blame of each other tacitly for what had happened was in their every word."

Dougal went on to have another family.

He wrote a few books, got a yacht and bought a farm in the South of France.

Three years before his death, when he was diagnosed with cancer, he and Linda were reunited. She nursed him through those final years, sharing a room with him up till his death. And Robertson himself was shipwrecked for a second time in 1975 while in the merchant navy (he joined at 18 straight after his rescue). For Robertson it's these patterns that intrigue him most.

One twist in the tale which his father only confessed not long before his death was that he had had a previous family, a girlfriend and son, whom he lost when the Sagaing was sunk. He had never even told Linda. Yet in some ways it explained the grit he applied to ensuring this second family survived.

For Robertson, there are things he cherishes and misses from his 38 days adrift. "If you asked me, " he says, "what I miss most about that experience, it is the quality life has when death lies around the corner waiting for you. It makes it seem like life is worth living. You're not worried about mortgage, work and career. That's all crap. We're talking about life here. Am I going to be alive tomorrow? The things I do today are going to make sure I'm alive tomorrow. That gives what you are doing today a very real quality. I am honing this spear and there's a real quality to that action because it means tomorrow I will be able to eat a fish. That's what I miss most."

The Last Voyage Of The Lucette is published by Seafarer Books, pounds-13.95