Acts 27 Shipwrecked But Not Wrecked

I like to introduce the topic for the morning and kind of read through the text and walk through what we're going to be looking at from God's Word. I do that most every Sunday. And we are in the second to the last chapter of the book of Acts this morning, Acts chapter 27.

If you want to turn there you can. But that is actually on page 801 in the Bible that's in the seat back in front of you, 801. So if you grab that Bible out of that seat back. If you don't own an English Standard Version of the Bible, which is the one I preach from, you can take that.

That's a free gift from us to you. Or if you don't own a Bible, we want everybody in our community to own a Bible. And so there's a box full of those in the back room to replenish those. But we are in the second to the last chapter of Acts.

It's been a long series. Basically since we started Recast, I started Acts 1, our very first Sunday. We've skipped around a little bit here and there and taken some breaks from it. But we're going to be wrapping it up in the next couple of weeks.

Awesome. Hopefully you've grown as we've studied through the book of Acts. And you've grown in your understanding of who God is, this God who has started his church through the gospel of Jesus Christ and through the people that he called.

And we've gotten to know in the last couple of months really the life of Paul. Does anybody here who's been through this series feel like you've got a handle on Paul better than when you started? I hope so.

I know that I have. Just in my study, I feel like I know the guy. And a lot of bad things happen to Paul. I've begun to kind of see him as kind of the Job of the New Testament. There's like a laundry list of difficulties that he went through.

And actually, although I'm preaching on Acts 27, I want to read another portion of Scripture. This portion of Scripture where Paul literally lists out some of the hardships that he faced for the cause of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And if you're taking notes, you can jot this down. 2 Corinthians 11, 23 -28. Again, let me just set the context for this. There are some people who have moved into Corinth and have basically tried to discredit Paul and said, Paul is just nobody and we're the real apostles.

And so Paul is writing to the church in Corinth in response and kind of bragging about his ministry, basically verifying or validating that he genuinely is an apostle, that he's struggled for the cause of Christ.

And so this is where he starts, 2 Corinthians 11, 23. Speaking of these others who are calling themselves apostles, I'm a better one. Now I'm talking like a madman, says Paul. Danger from my own people, danger from the Gentiles, danger in the city, lots of danger here, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers, in toil and hardship through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure, and apart from all other things there is the daily pressure on me of the anxiety for all of the churches.

Like Job. Okay, did Paul go through some hardships? Like how many of us have a laundry list like that from our lives? For the cause of Christ, for the gospel, these are the things that he endured. Anybody overwhelmed by that list?

Like you look at that and it's like, whoa, the dude like endured a lot. And so that's who we're talking about today. And so what we're going to look at is, he identifies, by the way, that passage was written five years prior to the text we're going to look at today.

He penned that, he sat down with a pen in hand and wrote that five years before. So how many shipwrecks is he going to endure? At least four, because we're going to see another one in our text. That's what we're going to be looking at.

We're going to be looking at a shipwreck here. And a recurring theme in the book of Acts is the sovereign hand of God, watching him move behind the scenes to get his church planted. He's in control, and yet in our text we're going to see that storms still happen.

Can any of you testify to that in your life? That although God is sovereign, although he sits on the throne, there are still storms that hit us, and we have to account for those somehow, right? Like why do bad things happen to us?

You can be like plugging along just thinking that your life is going well, and all of a sudden you get that news from a doctor or car wreck or whatever it might be, and things can go bad pretty quick.

He is guiding and directing Paul in our text. And yet the ship still gets wrecked. Sometimes the best thing for us, I would say, is the shipwreck. Does it feel that way? When you're in the storms of life, are you like, yeah, thanks God, this is awesome, bring it on?

Probably not. Now, you might have that attitude before it hits, and then all of a sudden it hits, and you're like, oh, maybe just dial this back just a little bit. But he never ceases to be God, despite our circumstances.

And the fact of the matter is, he is always good. And we can trust that what he is doing will, in the end, prove to be exactly what we needed to reflect more of Jesus Christ, to be more Christ-like. And he brings those storms and those hard things into our lives for the sharpening of us, that we might be more useful to him.

So, is everybody to Acts 27? I'm going to read this. It is a longer passage, but I think a bit of a riveting account just in understanding this whole ship travel, this wreck that happens. So follow along as I read Acts chapter 27, and take this in.

And when it was decided that we should sail for Italy, they delivered Paul and some other prisoners to a centurion of the Augustan cohort named Julius. And embarking in a ship of Adramitium, which was about to sail to the ports along the coast of Asia, we put to sea, accompanied by Aristarchus, a Macedonian from Thessalonica.

The next day we put in at Sidon, and Julius treated Paul kindly and gave him leave to go to his friends and be cared for. And putting out to sea from there, we sailed under the lee of Cyprus, because the winds were against us.

And when we had sailed across the open sea along the coast of Cilicia and Pamphylia, we came to Myra and Lycia. There the centurion found a ship of Alexandria, sailing for Italy, and put us on board. We sailed slowly for a number of days and arrived with difficulty off Canidas.

And as the wind did not allow us to go farther, we sailed under the lee of Crete, off Salmone. Coasting along with difficulty, we came to a place called Fairhavens, which was near the city of Lycia. Since much time had passed and the voyage was now dangerous, because even the fast was already over, Paul advised them, saying, Sirs, I perceive that the voyage will be with injury and much loss, not only of the cargo and the ship, but also of our lives.

But the centurion paid more attention to the pilot and to the owner of the ship than to what Paul said, which makes sense. And because the harbor was not suitable to spend the winter in, the majority decided to put out to sea from there, on the chance that somehow they could reach Phoenix, a harbor of Crete, facing both southwest and northwest, and spend the winter there.

Now, when the south wind blew gently, supposing that they had obtained their purpose, they weighed anchor and sailed along Crete, close to the shore. But soon a tempestuous wind, called the northeaster, struck down from the land.

And when the ship was caught and could not face the wind, we gave way to it and were driven along, running under the lee of a small island called Kata. We managed, with difficulty, to secure the ship's boat, and after hoisting it up, they used supports to undergird the ship.

Then, fearing that they would run aground on the surtis, they lowered the gear, and thus they were driven along. Since we were violently storm-tossed, and they began the next day to jettison the cargo.

And on the third day they threw the ship's tackle overboard with their own hands. When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on us, all our hope of being saved was lost.

All our hope of being saved was at last abandoned. Since they had been without food for a long time, Paul stood up among them and said, Men, you should have listened to me, I told you so, and not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss.

Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. For this very night there stood before me an angel of God, to whom I belong and whom I worship. And he said, Do not be afraid, Paul, you must stand before Caesar.

And behold, God has granted you all of those who sail with you. So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. But we must run aground on some island. When the fourteenth night had come, as they were being driven across the Adriatic Sea about midnight, the sailors suspected that they were nearing land.

So they took a sounding and found twenty fathoms. A little further on they took a sounding again and found fifteen fathoms. And fearing that we might run on the rocks, they let down four anchors from the stern and prayed for day to come.

And as the sailors were seeking to escape from the ship and had lowered the ship's boat into the sea under pretense of laying out anchors from the bow, Paul said to the centurion and the soldiers, Unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved.

Then the soldier cut away the ropes of the ship's boat and let it go. As day was about to dawn, Paul urged them all to take food, saying, Today is the fourteenth day that you have continued in suspense and without food, having taken nothing.

Therefore I urge you to take some food, for it will give you strength, for not a hair is to perish from the head of any of you. And when he had said these things, he took bread, and giving thanks to God in the presence of all, he broke it and began to eat.

Then they were encouraged and ate some food themselves. We were in all 276 persons in the ship. And when they had eaten enough, they lightened the ship, throwing out the wheat into the sea. Now when it was day, they did not recognize the land, but they noticed a bay with a beach on which they planned, if possible, to run the ship ashore.

So they cast off the anchors and left them in the sea, at the same time loosening the ropes that tied the rudders. Then hoisting the foresail to the wind, they made for the beach, but striking a reef, they ran the vessel aground.

The bow stuck and remained immovable, and the stern was being broken up by the surf. Now the soldier's plan was to kill the prisoners, lest any should swim away and escape. But the centurion, wishing to save Paul, kept them from carrying out their plan.

He ordered those who could swim to jump overboard first and make for land, and the rest on planks or on pieces of the ship. And so it was that all were brought safely to land. Let's pray. Father, we hear this account, and sometimes it can be a little bit, you know, like a historical account about a ship.

But, Father, this is your word to us this morning, and as we've marched through the book of Acts, we've recognized that you have something to say to us at each section and each path along the way, and we recognize that this storm came up, and Paul was your servant, and Paul was serving you diligently, and yet the storm comes, and we know that for the apostles, you stilled the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and you had the power to do so in this case, but you chose to bring Paul through this, ultimately for some other glory, for some other purpose.

And so, Father, as we come to you this morning, and some are coming from storms of life, either storms they have faced in the past that haunt them, storms they are in now, or storms that are yet to come, Father, I ask that you would teach us that your sovereign hand and your goodness go hand in hand.

Father, that you are in control, and you are working your plan for our betterment, and sometimes, even as we sing this song, if we lost it all, would we still raise our hands and worship before you because of who you are, not because of what you give us, not because of what you do for us, not like you're some magic genie who's going to fix everything for us, but because you carry us through the storms of life.

So I pray that as we come before you and worship that you... Amen. You can be seated. Big thanks to the band for leading us. Some mornings it just feels like the spirit is moving, and I just love that.

I love to hear people clapping and getting into it and engaged, and that's awesome. I'm going to set the stage a little bit, just kind of context. I introduced the topic primarily, just kind of read the text, and so you've got some of that.

But setting the stage for those of you who weren't here, Paul has been brought into protective custody by the Romans. They haven't figured out what he's done wrong, but the Jews were going to kill him, literally ready to slaughter him in the temple grounds when one of the Roman leaders brought down a bunch of soldiers and rescued Paul.

Still, the Romans don't know what he's done wrong, but Paul had appealed to Caesar. In the middle of a trial, he's like, this isn't going to go fair. I'm going to end up getting killed in this process.

They're going to hand me over to the Jews. So he appeals to Caesar, and so he is bound for Rome, and that's where we pick up our text. So we start off with these words, and when it was decided that we should sail for Italy.

So for whatever reason, the timing is right on the mind of the governor of Judea to send Paul to Rome, and that's where we're going to get all the shipwreck business going on, and there's going to be a lot of history and a lot of different things that we need to understand about the culture and the times in this text in order to tease out what God wants for us here in 2012 in this text.

But for whatever reason, the timing is right, so the governor gives Paul over to the custody of this Roman centurion named Julius, and he's part of a cohort, that is a group of about 1 ,000 troops, so he's one leader of 100 of 1 ,000, and he's part of that cohort that we actually know was stationed in Syria from historical documents.

Now, you can actually find, by name of cohort, you can actually look back in historical documents and tell where they were stationed, what they did, what their primary function was. This is an auxiliary group.

Many of the soldiers who might have been retired but are still able to be called up in force and things like that, and they actually, historically, we know that this particular cohort put down a rebellion about 20 years after this text in Syria during the entire Jewish revolt and all of that in the city of Damascus, so this group that he was a part of is actually well-known in history.

I want you to notice, too, that as you look down through the text, you see the use of the pronoun we and us frequently. That means that the author, Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, is engaged and involved in these events, and so, therefore, did you notice as I was reading how detailed the account is?

Did you notice that as I was reading it? There's a lot of detail that's given, and it's really cool to kind of see how, because Luke was an eyewitness to these events, I believe that he writes with more clarity, with that way of actually seeing.

He's not hearing from somebody that these things happened. He lived it. How many of you know, if you live through a shipwreck, you might be able to recall that fairly well, like actually see it in your mind a little bit, and that's what's going on in the text, so we have a very detailed account of this entire journey that begins in Caesarea and is gonna end on the island of Malta, and eventually we'll pick up the text next week and find that he does eventually get to Rome, but for our text purposes, we're gonna end up on the island of Malta by the end of the text.

The ship that they board comes from Adramitium, so I'm gonna have some slides here for you. Mediterranean Sea there. Everybody kind of get the gist of where we're at on that map, kind of a little bit.

Adramitium, so that's where the ship is from, and the ships were designated according to their port of origin. That's where it started, but that's not where they're gonna pick the ship up. They're gonna pick up at Caesarea down here in the south, and their first layover, first stop is gonna be up here in Sidon.

So Adramitium is on the west side of the modern day country of Turkey. Paul is not only accompanied by Luke, but he's also, the text tells us, accompanied by a friend named Aristarchus. Now we've seen Aristarchus a couple of times in the book of Acts.

He's a friend from Macedonia, probably likely from the town of Philippi. He went to Jerusalem with Paul to carry gifts, and now he is going back, likely, probably gonna end up, hoping to end up in Macedonia, but could potentially accompany Paul all the way to Rome.

We don't know for sure. Paul has friends who are willing to go along with him. I think that that's kind of a key. If you think about that, okay, he's been imprisoned, and he's on his way to trial, and he has friends who accompany him.

How many of you think you would have friends that would follow you to jail? Okay, I don't think I have friends that would, okay, a couple of people, one or two of us have friends who would follow us to jail, but I think very few would in reality.

So he has these friends, and they're willing to go along, and how many of you might be kind of confused, like, okay, he's a prisoner, and why is Rome gonna allow friends to go with him? Like, what's the deal there?

And then we're gonna see Paul get kind of some special treatment along the way, and it could be confusing, but the reality is Paul is a Roman citizen. That is a big deal in this era, okay? So the fact that he has citizenship, not every sailor that is on board this ship has Roman citizenship.

Not every soldier on that ship. People are envious of Paul's Roman citizenship. Now Julius the Centurion has Roman citizenship, and that's shown by his first name. If the first name represents a Caesar, is the name of an emperor, then that designates that that person received citizenship under that emperor.

It was such a big deal, when you became a Roman citizen, you changed your first name. Is that a big deal? Your first name was known as the emperor who basically gave you your freedom and gave you your citizenship.

And so we saw Claudius earlier, now Julius. Paul is obviously a Roman citizen, and he actually had, most likely, a given name to him for his citizenship. And some people debate back and forth what his first name was known as in Roman circles.

But that's the way that it went. And this guy, so Paul gets special treatment because of his citizenship, and then also, we're gonna see the Centurion actually likes him. And so they have a layover in Sidon on the first day, and Julius the Centurion treats Paul kindly and literally lets him leave the port, leave the ship, and go visit friends.

Does that seem strange? As a prisoner, that seems a little bit strange. I think you have to have in your mind that it's quite likely that Paul was accompanied by a soldier or two, and that you might just have in your mind that he was just free to go, just go wherever you want.

I think he was accompanied, but the implication is that he goes and visits some friends, and would you imagine that that's probably a church in Sidon that's been established? And he goes and he visits them, they encourage him, probably even provide him with some supplies for the journey, because he would be responsible for that.

There wasn't a free lunch in the Roman Empire, and even prisoners were responsible for providing their own provisions, pretty big deal. So it's likely that the church there in Sidon helped him. Now verse four, they're gonna take off from there, and we get the first indication that there's gonna be some problems.

If you can just advance that slide for me, this thing works about 50 of the time. So you can see that they're gonna, it says in the text that they are gonna sail to under the Lee of Cyprus. Now is anybody as confused as me when you read the word Lee in that text?

Maybe, nobody? Everybody knows what the Lee is? Okay, about seven of us didn't know what that meant. It means to sail on the wind protected side of something. You can have the Lee of a mountain, you can have the Lee of an island, and it means that you sail on the side that the wind is not coming from.

So you're using the land mass as a buffer between you and the wind so that you can sail more easily. Because the wind is coming at you, and it's coming from the west in this case, so they sail on the east and the north of Cyprus to basically allow them to fill the sails the direction that they wanna go, and they're protected in that way.

So that's what's going on when you talk about sailing to the Lee. We see that a couple of times here. But we see indications that the weather is kinda not so great right now. And I haven't done much sailing.

Have any of you here done some sailing before? A handful of you? I don't like the idea of being at the mercy of the wind in this situation. Now if you think about it, you had some pretty common trade routes here and some common shipping lanes, but you're not guaranteed to make it in that shipping lane.

Do you see what I'm saying? I mean here in modern times when you've got engines and motors and huge impellers and things like that, you can pretty much designate your course. You got GPS, you got all kinds of things.

You know where you're at at all times and such. This right here is scary to me. The thought of being, and I'm saying something about myself, but the thought of being out of control out on the ocean and not really knowing how you're gonna get to where you're gonna get in the weather, you're just at the mercy of the wind and you might just end up floating a few days not knowing where you're going.

If the wind dies down, you're just gonna have a slow trip. You don't know when you're gonna get to your port and you don't even know how. You don't know necessarily the direction you set up, plot a course, you might end up making it, you might not.

Anybody else think that's a little bit scary? The idea of control? Tacking into the wind can be really hard too. It's hard work. You got the ship, it's got 276 people we're gonna see later in the text.

It's a large ship and you have to adjust the sails, bring sails up, bring sails down in order to attack. If I wanna go from point A to point B, I might have to go zigzag this way, zigzag that way, zigzag this way just to get there.

Does that make sense? Every time that you change, the zig or the zag is pulling down all kinds of sails, readjusting the rudders and putting up different sails and all that. It's a lot of work. They're working to try to get from Sidon to Myra and eventually they make it and safely arrive there.

Once they're there, they connect with a grain ship from Alexandria, Egypt, which is just directly south of there. That's where the port of call is for this next ship that they're gonna join in Myra. It's likely that that's a grain ship and it's interesting to note we see that the last thing that they throw out of the ship is what?

Anybody remember from the text? The wheat. Okay, so one third, it's amazing how accurate the Bible is on things like this, that they would be on a wheat ship from Alexandria to Rome is amazing because one third of all grain supply to the Roman Empire came from Alexandria.

So Egypt was a primary provider for grain and that would be very common. And not only that, but the intensity with which they're willing to travel at bad times, when the weather is bad, shows, because there was a famine going on during this time, everything just lines up to why the sailors would make the decisions that they make and the historical accounts seem to be pretty watertight in what was going on here.

It's kind of amazing how Scripture and history come together to show us an accurate picture of what was going on during that time. It almost appears as though an eyewitness that lived during this time wrote this.

You know what I'm getting at here? Like maybe Luke actually was the real guy who wrote this and he was there historically and when we're looking at the Bible, we're looking at an accurate reflection of what history was.

So they board the ship from Alexandria. They set off again and with much difficulty, the text tells us, they make it to Canidas. Anybody like, you know, just that you can put a C and an N at the beginning of a Greek word and call that a word?

But they did in that time. And so Canidas, they arrive there and it's not very far. It takes them a long time to travel that little distance and it's hard work and that's where they end up. So look at Myra to Canidas and they're like, westward travel is not working very well for us right now.

And so they decide they can't head westerly anymore and so they head south for the refuge of the island of Crete and end up at this place called Fair Havens, which is not a great haven for wintering. They're looking for a place to kind of settle down for the winter.

It actually says that they arrived after the fast, which is the Jewish day of atonement. The one day in Jewish history where the high priest would enter into the center of the temple, the Holy of Holies, and make sacrifices for the entire nation of Israel.

And we have very well documented, we can point this down to within five days in history when Paul landed in Fair Havens. It's kind of amazing how accurate we can get with looking at when was Festus governor over Judea, who was the emperor during the time, all of these different things.

King Agrippa was still in reign. When you put together the book of Acts, you can get a very good pinpointing of history with some of these events. And sometime between October 10th and October 15th of AD 59, Paul landed in Fair Havens.

We can pinpoint it to the month within a five-day span because we know when the day of atonement fell in 59. We know that it was that year because of the transfer between Festus and Agrippa. I mean, Felix and Festus.

So Paul, who's already been shipwrecked three times, you know, like once bit and twice shy kind of thing, he's been shipwrecked three times and he's got some advice for the sailors. Now remember, what is his role on the ship?

Prisoner. But it's not like Paul to keep his mouth shut, is it? So Paul's gonna share his opinion and his thoughts here in verse 10. And he suggests that things might not go so well if they press on. I'm kind of thinking, you know, the weather's not great and so I'm thinking things aren't gonna go very well.

We're talking loss of income, loss of property, loss of life. This is not going to go well. Now a point of fact is that travel was very dangerous on the Mediterranean between September and October. Those were considered the most, well, considered dangerous months to be traveling.

But after November 11th, the shipping lanes closed. Only the most crazy, I mean, you'd be on a suicide mission to travel, try to travel from the east to the west in the Mediterranean from the month of November on.

And so November 11th, it's just like all over in Roman documents and histories, whatever, I don't know, I guess you gotta pick a date, right? November 11th was the day they shut everything down. So Paul's predicting bad stuff happening.

Now I say predicting because he hasn't received some revelation. It's not like the spirit came down on him and said, everybody's gonna die or everything, because we're gonna see him change his tune here in a minute.

So where he says, people are gonna die if we keep going, you're gonna lose the ship, you're gonna lose all this, what's gonna happen later? He's gonna say, no, everybody's gonna survive. Don't worry about it.

Okay, so something's gonna change and we'll see what changes when we get to that part of the text. The centurion consults, by the way, the centurion is the lead. Notice that it's not the captain of the ship anymore.

This ship has been commandeered by the Roman military. So now they're in charge because they've got prisoners on board. The way that travel happened during this era in time, there weren't passenger ships, there weren't cruise liners, there weren't ferries.

It was all about cargo ships and you would just pay a fee to jump on a cargo ship and hey, as long as there's one bound for the direction I'm going, I'll jump on that piece together or cobble together a trip and eventually you'd get to your destination, but you might end up going out of the way to get there.

And so even the Roman military would commandeer ships like this. So the centurion has the final call, but he consults the pilot who's the captain of the ship and the owner who likely, by the text, may or may not have been the owner.

Owner might have been the representative of the owner. Most ships had the representative on board. Either way, if it's the owner himself, it kind of seems unlikely, but he consults with these two and he takes their advice over Paul's, which I said makes sense, right?

Are you going to listen to the prisoner or are you going to listen to the captain, the owner? And so they take their advice and they say, Fair Havens is not a good wintering port. It's too exposed to the elements and too exposed to the wind and so we're going to try to make for a better port that's about 40 miles west on the same island.

So it's not like they're trying to get to Rome tomorrow or something. They're trying to take off a small chunk, just say let's get to a better port and we're going to head for Phoenix, not Arizona, but Phoenix, Crete, and just basically hunker down there for the winter and make it through the winter and then we'll carry on to Rome.

Do you ever notice who's in charge of the weather? If you think about that. They're making plans to go 40 miles. It doesn't seem like much to take on, does it? Considering the journey that they've done so far, they're just going to cover a little bit of that island, but I kind of have the impression that somebody else is in control of what's going to happen here.

Somebody else is kind of driving this thing. They get a favorable gentle wind out of the south, the text tells us, so they take off hoping to just kind of hug the coast, just stay in as close as they can to Crete, not do anything wild or crazy or try to make good time.

They're just out there. They're like, okay, we're going to go. Kind of like when we've got icy roads here, but you still need to go get something from the store. You're like, okay, I'll just go slow and I'll go to Wagner's.

I'm not going to make a run to Meyers. I'm not going to try to get to Walmart. I'm just going to go local, right? I'm just going to go slow and take my time, and that's what they're trying to do here.

But within that 40 miles, a hurricane-force wind begins to blow down. Now, it's coming from the south, and they're like, oh, that's good, because that'll keep us hugged up against the coast so we can make it that 40 miles.

But all of a sudden, the wind shifts out of the northeast and comes down from the mountains. And in verse 14, if you look at that, the word tempestuous there is in Greek typhoon. It is like a typhoon or a hurricane-force wind that comes down out of the central mountains of Crete and drives the ship.

If it's coming out of the northeast, where is it going to drive the ship? Out into open sea, and that's where they're headed. Out of control. They have no recourse but to go with the wind. They're a sailboat.

They're out of control, and like I said, I don't like the thought of being out of control out in the middle of the sea with a hurricane-force wind coming down. They get a moment of respite because there's a little island right by the bottom of that star there called Cauda.

It's a very small island, but as they come on the lee side of that, so they cut to the east, the wind takes them to the east, and they've got just a moment where the wind dies down so they can begin to make preparations for the storm, because this is a storm coming on.

They reel in the boat that they've been towing. Now, I kind of like to call it a lifeboat, and I might accidentally call it a lifeboat throughout, but please forgive me. It's really a boat used for shuttling people.

This is a big enough ship with a long enough keel that went down far enough, because it's a sailboat, it has to have a big keel on it. They can't get in too close to shore. So this is the kind of boat that you picture like the Spanish galleon or something that sits out in the harbor and people have to shuttle back and forth to land.

So they have this other boat that's attached to it that maybe holds 12 to 15 people, and they take that back and forth. Are you picturing what I'm talking about? Picture a pirate movie or something. You get where I'm coming from.

Now, don't picture that attached to the side like you picture a cruise liner in your mind and it's got the lifeboats attached to the side. You know what I'm talking about, hanging off the side? That's not the way they did it back then.

This would have been literally towed from behind. Well, if you've got, in a storm, you've got another boat attached by rope to the back of your boat, that's not going to go too well if those two meet each other.

So they're going to pull that in, and while they're on there, they pull that in and take that on. And apparently even Luke says, we with much effort did this. He uses that word meaning that even the medical doctor on board was taking part in this.