also dug a nail out of the boards on the wooden raft and bent it into a hook for larger fish. When he captured a fish, he would cut it open with a knife he fashioned out of a biscuit tin and dry it on a hemp line over the raft. Once, a large storm hit and spoiled his fish and fouled his water. Lim, barely alive, caught a bird and drank its blood to survive. When he saw sharks, he refrained from swimming and sought to catch one, using the remnants of birds he had caught as bait. The first shark to pick up the taste was only a few feet away from his raft. He gulped the bait and hit the line with full force, but in preparation Lim had braided the line so it would have double thickness. He also had wrapped his hands in canvas to enable him to make the catch. The shark attacked him after he brought it aboard the raft, so he used the water jug half-filled with seawater as a weapon. After subduing the shark, Lim cut it open and sucked the blood from its liver. Since it had not rained, he was out of water and this quenched his thirst. He sliced off the fins and let them dry in the sun. On several occasions he was passed by other vessels. The first was an unidentified freighter whose crew saw him but did not pick him up or even greet him despite his proficient shouts in English. Lim contended that they would not rescue him because he was Asian and they may have assumed he was a stricken Japanese sailor, although another explanation is that German U-boats often set a "survivor" on a raft as a trap to get a rescuing ship to stop which made it a sitting duck to be sunk. A squadron of United States Navy patrol seaplanes did see him, and one dropped a marker buoy in the water. Unfortunately for Lim, a large storm hit the area at the same time and he was lost again. He was also once spotted by a German U-boat, which had been doing gunnery drills by targeting gulls. At first, he counted the days by tying knots in a rope, but later decided that there was no point in counting the days and simply began counting full moons. Land On