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Three teenagers have been rescued after 50 days adrift in a small boat in the Pacific Ocean, surviving on coconuts, seagull and seawater.
Samuel Perez and Filo Filo, both 15, and Edward Nasau, 14, disappeared from Atafu atoll, north of Samoa and part of the New Zealand territory of Tokelau, on 5 October. An extensive search by New Zealand air force Orion found no trace of them. Some 500 people on Atafu had held memorial services for the boys.
They were rescued by chance when a New Zealand fishing boat ventured into an area where it would not normally go. The boys had drifted 1,300 km (808 miles) and were west of Uvea in the French territory of Wallis and Futuna and north-east of Fiji when a tuna boat heading for Auckland found them.
"Yesterday we saw a small vessel, a little speed boat on our bows, and we knew it was a little weird," the first mate, Tai Fredricsen, told stuff.co.nz. "We had enough smarts to know there were people in it and those people were not supposed to be there."
About a mile out the boys started waving to them. "I pulled the vessel up as close as I could to them and asked them if they needed any help… they said very much so, they were ecstatic to see us … They were very skinny, but physically in good health, compared to what they have been through."
Fredricsen, the ship's medic, put them on an intravenous drip, but the boys were able to sip water and soon wanted real food. "They are in incredibly good shape for the time they have been at sea," he said.
The boys had a couple of coconuts on board but no water. "Somehow they caught a bird, I don't know how, but they caught it. They ate it; that is what is recommended."
It rained occasionally, but in the days before the rescue it was dry, so the boys took sips of seawater. Fredericsen said the trio couldn't have survived much longer. "It was a miracle we got to them in time," he said.
A Chinese sailor is thought to hold the record for survival at sea. Poon Lim spent 133 days alone in the south Atlantic after a British merchant ship, SS Ben Lomond, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in November 1942.
GUARDIAN
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