Five fishermen rescued after huge marlin sinks their boat
It reads like a modern day take on The Old Man and the Sea – five Filipino fishermen cast adrift for days on a makeshift raft after a huge marlin sinks their boat.
The men were fishing in the South China Sea last week when a 1.8m marlin punctured their boat’s wooden hull with its giant bill, vessel master Jimmy Batiller said on Wednesday.
Their 12m boat quickly dipped beneath the waves in the early evening of October 3, leaving the crew with little drinking water or food until their eventual rescue by the US Navy on Monday.
“It [the fish] hit the bottom of our boat, leaving two big holes,” Batiller said.
“We suspect it was chasing a smaller fish. It swam around the sinking boat for a while, apparently disorientated.”
The fishermen salvaged what they could, removing the outriggers, planks and barrels to create a makeshift raft.
“Our water ran out after two days. We waved at passing commercial vessels but no-one came to rescue us.
“But we did not lose hope,” the 42-year-old father of one said, adding the crew ate raw rice and drank some seawater.
“When we were rescued, that was when our tears fell,” Batiller said.
The US Navy said the men were lucky to survive, especially given that the crew said they had drunk seawater.
“On average, death results two to three days after a diet of drinking undiluted sea water or urine in survival-at-sea events as it takes more water than is consumed for the body to process the waste and salt out of the kidneys,” Leon Hadley, the civilian chief mate from the ship which conducted the rescue, the USNS Wally Schirra, said.
“Luckily, we were going at a slow enough speed to have spotted the fishermen,” the Wally Schirra’s master, Keith Sauls, said.
“The individuals were waving their arms and a flag in the air. They were also flashing a white light that was previously thought to be fishing buoy,” Sauls said. –