Mr. Parker was sharing a boat with Natale Albanese, 72, of Inwood, on Long Island.
We got to know each other very quickly because we were sharing a boat for weeks with no other company [during the 2005-2006 Atlantic Rowing Race].
In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost.
Travelling from England to France a week before the outbreak of the First World War, he shares a boat with Rodin, who, on parting, delivers the cinematic line "Until next Wednesday, chez la Comtesse".
Lifeboat was an anomalous project for the "Master of Suspense", a largely static film about an ill-assorted group of American survivors who end up unwittingly sharing a boat with the Nazi officer who torpedoed their liner.
If the thought of sharing a boat with that many people has you climbing the walls, that's just fine: each ship has a rock-climbing wall (as well as a skating rink).
Anyway, isn't there at least a little fun to be had with the notion of these eclectic animals sharing a boat, and the nature of their journey itself?
Pi's terror, when he realises that the ship has sunk, his family are surely dead and he is sharing a boat with a growling tiger, gives way to pity as his soaked companion paws pitifully at a raft to get back into the boat, and then to wild-eyed dominance when, in a moment of starving madness, he stares the animal down.
Ultimately, Brewster and Wilson rightly circle around the common humanity of those who shared a boat and unimaginable tragedy: the conflict of whether or not to risk swamping by returning for survivors who pleaded for rescue as they succumbed to hypothermia; the pain of death; the price of survival.
