Hot and dizzying, a sailor on board a cargo ship in the South Pacific feels a little air to the deck.
He would later, his son told local media, spend at least the next 14 hours fighting the waves desperately and clinging to an old fishing buoy to survive.
Lithuanian engineer Vidam Perevertilov, 52, was working a routine night shift in the engine room of the “Silver Supporter” earlier this month as it sailed between New Zealand’s Tauranga port and the Pitcairn Islands, a small British overseas territory.
But around 4 a.m. on Feb. 16, he fell overboard after apparently fainting.
Download the NBC News app for news and politics
Driven in the darkness and without a life jacket, his hopes were lifted when the sun rose.
“He could see a black dot on the horizon, a few more miles away,” his son, Marat, told New Zealand news website Stuff. So he starts swimming there.
“It turned out to be an old fishing buoy … It was not anchored to anything or a boat, it was just a piece of sea debris,” Marat said.
“His will to survive was strong,” he added.
NBC News could not reach Marat or his father for immediate comment.
The engineer’s son said that as soon as the crew noticed his father was missing, they withdrew their movements and sent emergency alerts to ships in the area, including the JRCC Tahiti of French Polynesia.
“What happened next was almost inexplicable,” Marat told the New Zealand news website.
‘The Silver Supporter used search patterns and one of the passengers said he heard a faint, human scream on the starboard side of the ship’ about 400 nautical miles south of the Australian islands of French Polynesia.
According to Marat, the crew, dehydrated, tired and 20 years older, threw a lifebuoy, lowered a ladder and pulled him back on board – half a day after he left them.
His son calls the rescue ‘incredible’ and acknowledges his father’s survival that he is fit and healthy.
A statement from the High Commission of the French Republic in French Polynesia confirmed that the JRCC had responded to calls from Tahiti for assistance in the search.
It said it had warned French naval aircraft in nearby Tahiti, as well as its meteorological agency, Météo-France, that it had begun calculating the sailor’s possible winds.
A happy ending for the man and the entire crew of the Silver Supporter, a relief to all who contributed to the search, reads the statement.
The incident illustrates ‘how dangerous life and work at sea are even in the 21st century’, as well as the benefits of modern naval technology, said Dr Chris Ware, a senior lecturer in naval history and director of the Greenwich Maritime Center in London. .
“The fact that the buoy, which was in progress, would be seen as marine pollution on any other day appears to be a lifesaver in this case,” he added.
Britain’s High Commissioner to New Zealand and Governor of the Pitcairn Islands, Laura Clarke, tweeted that the rescue was an ‘extraordinary survival story’, adding that it would impress even Captain Bligh, the famous skipper of the ‘HMS Bounty’.
The ship had a mutiny in 1789, which was popular in a 1962 Hollywood movie starring actor Marlon Brando.
The majority of Pitcairn’s islanders have European and Polynesian roots and are descended from nine mutiners of the British vessel. Most residents move to Australia and New Zealand for school and work.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, all tourism to the remote sandy Pitcairn – the only inhabited island in the group, about 2 kilometers long and 1 kilometer wide – was stopped.
While the Silver Supporter was allowed to transport supplies to the island, its schedule was significantly reduced to ‘protect its approximately 50 inhabitants’, according to a tourism website for the Government of the Pitcairn Islands, which leases the ship.
Matthew Mulligan and Yasmine Salam contributed.