Hey, I'm Steph, and this is not today. Hello and welcome. I'd like to start our episode off this week with a little thought experiment.

So imagine you're 15 years old. You're hanging out with your best friend on one fine spring afternoon, you decide to spend the afternoon fishing,

and then you find yourself stranded in the middle of the ocean on a small boat with no way

to get out.

Sounds like a nightmare, right? That's my personal nightmare. But that was the reality

for the two people we're going to be discussing today. Troy Driscoll and Josh Long.

And I don't know, I've told a lot of these stories and every time something like this happens to someone, it's terrible. It's always terrible. Of course, I mean anyone in a survival situation is going to have a bad time. But there's something a little extra to me

about having it be a 15 year old and a 17 year old. That sounds like an extra layer of nightmare

because you're a kid you barely know how life

works and you're just at that age where you're like starting to be a real person not

to offend any 15 or 17 year old listeners because obviously you are real people but you

know what I mean like you're just starting to become like an older teenager and going into your young adult life. So there's still a lot to learn at that age

and you're still for most people at least for me I was relying a lot on my parents.

So to imagine being put in a really intense survival situation

that most people wouldn't even survive, that just gives it an extra layer of

terrifying. In some regard being that age might give you a leg up because you're young, you're probably healthier than you would be in your older age, so that would definitely help. But but to me being a teenager and being put

into a situation like this for whatever reason in my mind makes it worse. So our story is going to take place just off the coast of South Carolina in the spring of 2005.

17 year old Josh Long and 15 year old Troy Driscoll were best friends who spent a lot of time together

Josh said Troy was like a younger brother to him.

Troy stayed almost the whole summer at Josh's house.

The two were inseparable.

One thing Troy appreciated about Josh was that once he was your friend, he was your friend

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