Highlights

It's a great story: Two women and their two dogs, adrift at sea for more than four months after storms damage their sailboat, are rescued by a U.S. Navy ship 900 miles southeast of Japan.
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The sailors had an emergency beacon, but they never turned it on.
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They describe a harrowing storm that rocked their boat. But National Weather Service records don't show major storms at that time.
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Things apparently started going wrong on the very first night of their voyage.

"We got into a Force 11 storm, and it lasted for two nights and three days," Appel said in the interview...
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But the National Weather Service in Honolulu told the AP that there was no organized storm system near Hawaii on May 3 or the following days.

"Archived NASA satellite images confirm there were no tropical storms around Hawaii that day," the AP reports. "Appel expressed surprise that there was no record of the storm. She said they received a Coast Guard storm warning while sailing after sunset on May 3."

The Coast Guard told the AP that it made radio contact with a boat that identified itself as the Sea Nymph in June near Tahiti. But the boat's captain said they were not in distress and expected to make land the following day, though that would have been after the boat had lost its engines and had damaged rigging and mast. - NPR