Vidam Perevertilov, the Lithuanian chief engineer on board the Silver Supporter, was hauled back on deck nearly a full day after falling overboard on 16 February as his freighter made a supply run between New Zealand’s Tauranga port on the country’s North Island and the isolated British territory of Pitcairn.
It took the ship's crew about six hours to notice that their engineer was missing, at which point the captain turned the ship around. The crew determined his approximate location by looking at Mr Perevertilov's work logs, which showed that he was last onboard at 4AM. The ship's coordinates at the time was about 400 nautical miles south of French Polynesia's Austral Islands.
Distress messages were then radioed out to ships in the area. French navy aircraft joined the search from Tahiti, and France's meteorological service studied the winds to calculate possible drift patterns. But it would be his own vessel which would find him in the end.
“He doesn’t remember falling overboard. He may have fainted,” Perevetilov’s son Marat told New Zealand’s Stuff. Soon after he found himself struggling to survive in the water, Vidam, 52, swam towards a "black dot" kilometres away. Vidam discovered that the "black dot" was an abandoned fishing buoy and he held onto it until he was rescued.
Vidam left the fishing buoy in the sea, rather than taking it as a souvenir. “It’s funny. He said he wanted to leave it there, so it could save another person’s life.” Marat concluded.
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/25/sailor-survives-for-14-hours-in-pacific-ocean-by-clinging-to-abandoned-buoyhttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56191818https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300237273/saved-by-sea-rubbish-a-sailors-incredible-survival-story-of-16-hours-adrifthttps://www.indiatoday.in/trending-news/story/sailor-survives-14-hours-in-pacific-ocean-by-clinging-to-sea-rubbish-1773050-2021-02-25https://www.yerepouni-news.com/2021/02/25/647139/
