Leap of Faith - August 19, 1963 - S3-E3
Revealing mistake: The newspaper Father John holds up has the headline "Youth Hit By Train", but the article text under it talks about Diane Feinstein's election race against John Van de Kamp for California governor in 1990, the year the episode was filmed. Other article texts do not match either. The text under the Bangladesh Flood article talks about Germany's reunification, which also happened in 1990, after the Soviet collapse. The paper is a copy of the Los Angeles Times with the titles and date changed. (00:05:10)
Answer: Sam threw items off the raft to lighten the load, so it wouldn't sink, in doing so he made the raft less heavy. Which made easier to float with the currents, if it was heavy the raft would have moved slower and not moved so far.
Except that Al said that immediately after throwing stuff out of the boat four hours passed and it was shown that they didn't really move from where they were. They were still in the same spot. Forgot to ask this too. When Sam and Vanessa are stranded on the island, one of them, can't remember who, did something and when Al appears, he tells them that because of it, time had suddenly skipped several more hours and if the event hadn't been interrupted, they would have been rescued by a boat. So, what happened on the island that once again caused time to speed up? It seems kind of strange that time could move so quickly on the island, especially since it was still day time and it never showed any sort of changes like the sun or clouds moving.