Getting lost at sea presents perhaps the most difficult survival challenge. Survivors’ tales, however, reveal their amazing ways of sourcing food and water while waiting for rescue.
When 15 Indian fishermen from Thengapattanam, Tamil Nadu state sailed to fish in the Arabian Sea on 27 November, they failed to return on Christmas Day as promised. Their families agonized at the thought that they were already dead until the men returned home on 2 January.
Two of the fishermen, Edison Davis and Augustine Nemus, narrated their ordeal to BBC. They said their boat stalled and drifted for five days until a Sri Lankan boat appeared and helped tow their vessel to a temporary anchoring spot. After three more days, another boat passed by but it also wasn’t big enough to pull them to shore.
One of them decided to take the boat’s gearbox to shore for repair, leaving the other crew still anchored somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Strong winds then cut the anchor ropes and sent the boat drifting, so the fishermen decided to transfer to a small uninhabited island in the British territory of Salomon Islands after spotting it on GPS.
On the island, they drank coconut water and collected rain, according to Nemus. They ate sparingly of their little provision. After five days, crew members of a passing British ship saw their red cloth from a tree and rescued them.
In another case, Elvis Francois, 47, of Dominica, was making repairs to a sailboat near the Dutch part of the island of Saint Martin last month when bad weather pulled it out to sea, CNN reported.
Not knowing how to operate the boat, Francois spent weeks aboard the drifting vessel. The pilot of a passing plane then saw the word “help” engraved on the hull of his sailboat leading to his rescue by Colombia’s navy 120 nautical miles northwest of the South American country’s Puerto Bolívar, according to CNN.
In the 24 days Francois was lost at sea, he told rescuers how he survived.
“I had no food. It was just a bottle of ketchup that was on the boat, garlic powder and Maggi (stock cubes) so I mixed it up with some water,” Francois said in a video provided by the Colombian army, according to CNN.