The island was so tiny that only one coconut palm has grown on the sandy ground. It provided only a weak shadow under the tropical sun, which was heating the air and the sand to untenable temperatures. And heat was the last thing the two castaways blocked on the island needed. They were in need of water, food, clothes... but not wine : dozens and dozens of bottles boxes were floating on the sea all around them, as far as their eyes could look.

The two unfortunate men were respectively the captain and the machinist on a cargo ship carrying Australian wine to Japan which encountered an unreported coral reef. They rapidly suffered from lack of potable water : the ocean water is salty and a lonely palm can provide only small accounts of coconut milk. The problem was partially solved when wines bottles began to float from the ripped cargo to the island. At the way the captain stared at the recuperated bottles, the machinist who has always suspected the other man to pick into the payload for his personal beverage thought he was right. But the problem remained : the following day, the captain suffered from an awful hangover whereas the machinist did not touch a bottle because he cannot stand wine in general, and specially low quality booze.

Finally, the latter found a solution by building a solar distillery with some materials which were floating around the island : a black plastic awning, a large cook plate and a small one. The sun hits the black plastic which covered the cook plates and heats the wine placed in the central small plate. The evaporated alcohol arises, condensates on the inner face of the plastic awning then drains off and fails in the second cook plate surrounding the small one. With this method, the machinist was able to give to his drunkard of captain all the strong wine he could want and keep for himself the alcohol-lowered solution.

When you are on a desert island, you want to call for rescue. The machinist also solved this snorter. 'How ?' you will ask me, 'there are no communication means on this island.' It is false, you can find paper here, more precisely on the bottles. He unglued the stickers and wrote on their inner white face with residues of evaporated wine, then put the messages in empty bottles and threw them out in the sea. But the oceanic stream which brought out the bottles from the cargo did not allow them to leave the surroundings of the island.