In 1993, Bob Allphin and a team of 11 other men took a boat to remote Howland Island, an uninhabited slip of coral that is officially part of a group called United States Minor Outlying Islands located in the Pacific Ocean.
It’s not a place where tourists tend to gather, save a very specific breed. “If that rings a bell,” says Allphin, “It’s because that’s the island Amelia Earhart was looking for when she ran out of gas and disappeared.”
The trip was going according to plan, but as the week progressed, the waves offshore grew larger and larger.