motivational_raven
I never assumed that they didn't try that, why do you assume that they didn't?

Matthew
Their fishing boats wouldn't have saved them anyway..

Jeff
There are a thousand holes in the flood story and this is what you get hung up on? One that doesn't even make sense? (Yeah, you're in a fishing boat...with no food or shade for 40 days, and depending on the salinity level, you might not have any water either.)

Thunder From The South
Good point, I'm sure a lot of people could have survived for 40 days. Proof: Three teen boys survived 50 days stranded at sea

james o
Tee hee! I've often thought the same thing. But you gotta remember, it's not a literal thing; it's just a way of explaining various ways of the world. In the case of the Flood, it's fairly obvious that there was a lot more tradition involved, which we now only see a tiny taste of at the very beginning, about giants in the earth who mated with the hottest human chicks and produced some kind of master race which it may well be that in the old traditions, God wanted to kill off. Interesting, since these smae folks get reported when the Israelites are leaving Egypt in the Exodus. They supposedly didn't survive the flood, but the writers didn't remember that -- or care?

NDMA
Probably the same reason they did not just hop into their blimps and float away -- fishing boats had not yet been invented.

ANDRE L
Indeed. It would be absurd to imagine that, in so many sea side towns, that where wouldn't be one boat that could set sail. After all, sea borne transport was very important back then. And, fihermen could easily manage to get food. One isue would be fresh water, but that would have been a far bigger issue on the ark.

scrubbag
I think that a lot of them probably did find a way to survive the flood.... The bible only states that Noah was in the Ark, with the animals...but it does not say that there couldn't have been others, doing the same thing. I really think it was two things, One, it was a local flood...not the whole earth. Two...there were others who did the same thing, used boats and helped save animals and other creatures. You see, not long after the flood, Noah's great grandson, helped to build the tower of babel, and it was said that many people came from all over to help build this tower....but I wondered, just where did these people come from, if the world had been flooded? So that leads me to believe that some parts of the world was not, in fact, flooded.