This man spend 35 years trying to save people lost at sea

In 2014 Joe and some friends spent a weekend fishing in the Long Island Sound.

One evening, as the boat headed back to shore, Joe walked to the back of the boat to clean some fish. But as he grabbed a bucket to scoop some water from the ocean he was pulled overboard.

No one heard Joe fall in and he wasn’t wearing a life vest. All he could do was watch the boat sail into the distance.

Joe was lost at sea.

For most of human history that’s where the story ends. There was nothing else to say, if you’re lost at sea you die.

But of course, Joe didn’t die, he’s very much alive. And he’s alive because of Art Allen

Art worked for the US Coast Guard for 35 years. His whole career was focused on one problem: How do we find people lost at sea?

Art spend a lot of time figuring out more accurate ways to measure winds and the currents of the ocean, then he realised that wasn’t enough. We needed to understand drift.

Throw 100 objects in the ocean, and 10 hours later they will all be in very different places. Someone wearing a life jacket drifts differently than someone without one. A small boat turned over in a storm drifts differently than a large boat.

Art spent years throwing all sorts of objects into Long Island Sound to see how they drifted.

Without asking anyone, Art turned himself into the world expert on how different objects float at sea.

He created maths equations that describe how different objects drift and installed them into a software program. All someone had to do was plug in the weather conditions and what they knew about the people missing and it would spit out an area to start searching.

Art’s software program is used all around the world

Art has saved thousands of lives in the US and around the world. Yet no one knows who he is. Even the people whose lives he’s saved.

Every day, 10 Americans on average are pulled from the ocean thanks to Arts software. One of those people was Joe.

A few months after being saved Joe flew back to the Long Island Sound Coast Guard station to thank the people who rescued him, the Coast Guards. As chance would have it, Art was in the back of the room. He watched as a camera crew filmed Joe pinned medals on the heroes.

Art said nothing.

No one mentioned Art or what he had done. Art stood there unnoticed by almost everyone. Until a colleague leaned over and whispered

“Nice job”

Lesson: Experts can be invisible. Sometimes their signals of progress are so woven into our lives, that we forget they are there

Source: Against The Rules: The Art of the Untold Story: By Michael Lewis:

Cheers,