Amazing story of women rescued after six months at sea . . . a little too amazing?

This is one of those stories where I wondered about it at the time, but hey, I didn't say anything so I can't prove it. But in addition to all the reasons cited in the excerpt below, I'll add these: They had nine months' worth of food on that little sailboat, not only for the two women but for the two dogs?

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Did they look like they'd been stranded at sea for six months? No one sees you? At all? No other boats? No planes? No one? These women are missing for six months and we never hear anything about it from family or friends? No one does? Those are the questions I had, but I didn't write anything about it so I'll leave it up to you whether you believe my skepticism predated what we're hearing today. I'm really skeptical now:

A retired Coast Guard officer who was responsible for search and rescue operations said that if the women used the emergency beacon, they would have been found. “If the thing was operational and it was turned on, a signal should have been received very, very quickly that this vessel was in distress,” Phillip R. Johnson said Monday in a telephone interview from Washington state. EPIRBs are solid and built to be suddenly dropped in the ocean. “Failures are really rare,” Johnson said, but added that old and weak batteries also could cause a unit not to work.

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It’s not clear if the pair had tested it before the journey. The women also said they had six forms of communication that all went dead. “There’s something wrong there,” Johnson said. He knows of cases in remote Alaska where a ship in distress just using one form of beacon brought a fairly quick response from nearby fishing boats and the Coast Guard. “I’ve never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time,” he said.

In their favor, the hull of the boat does look like it's gone months without being scrubbed. Then again, if you watch the video of the rescue itself, something is . . . off. I suppose this is strictly my instincts but is that how you'd expect someone to be acting while being rescued from six months at sea that could have ended in death?

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My BS meter is going crazy

The bit about all the communications failing is the big red flag for me, though. These systems are designed to have multiple failsafes, such that this many things going wrong at once is about as likely as the Secretary of Agriculture becoming president because all six people ahead of him in the line of succession happened to die on the same day. Maybe not quite that unlikely, but along those lines. Yet supposedly Appel's mother did report her missing to the Coast Guard a week-and-a-half after she left, so it seems unlikely that they were sitting around in Honolulu the whole time. And you don't get from Hawaii to the Sea of Japan overnight, so they must have been at sea for awhile. I'm not saying this wasn't an ordeal, and if it turns out I'm doubting these women without justification then I'd gladly apologize profusely to them. But my BS meter is going crazy.

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