can't see how, for the life of me, that they couldn't get some power to the batteries. It's all about voltage regulation. If your batteries are flat you don't need regulation. You just need to watch them and turn the engine off when they get full. They could do that with a hand held voltmeter. They could have ran a wire from the alternator direct to the battery and they could have at it. With the engine running you would just try to keep the charge just high enough not to boil the water out of the batteries. If they didn't have a volt meter then they could have just watched for bubbles. When the battery got full you would have to shut the engine down. A bit more sophisticated way would be to get into the alternator and rig a external field wire that you could turn on and off. That way you wouldn't have to shut the engine down. Also, as I said in another post, that they could have removed the starter from the engine that was running and installed it on the engine that had the bad starter. Once the good engine was running they don't need the starter on it. It's connected by two bolts and a wire! Take it off the good engine, put it on the other engine, run some kind of a jumper cable over to the starter and hold it to the post until the engine starts. You don't need the start button. All you need is to get the engine running. It's a diesel, once it running you don't need electricity to keep it running. You might not have any instruments or tack but who cares? It's not like they didn't have time to do any of this stuff or it was to rough. They were sitting around in the solon taking pictures of each other. I'm sorry but abandoning that boat was just nuts. IMHO.