By admin Russian authorities said Tuesday that a Russian man had been rescued after 67 days adrift on a small boat in the bitterly cold Sea of Okhotsk.
According to Russian state media RIA Novosti, which reported that the survivor was 46-year-old Mikhail Pichugin, the man’s brother and his teenage son, who died in the ordeal.
Video of the rescue released by Russian prosecutors shows a bearded man in an orange life jacket floating on a small catamaran-style vessel with a red flag raised on its mast as rescuers try to reach him.
The Sea of Okhotsk is mostly surrounded by Russia’s eastern Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula. It usually freezes between October and March and is the coldest sea in East Asia.
The prosecutor’s office reported that on August 9, two adult men and the 15-year-old son of one of them set sail on the catamaran.
“After some time, contact with them was lost and their location remained unknown,” said Elena Krasnoyarova, spokeswoman for the Russian prosecutor’s office for Far Eastern transport.
“On October 14, around 10 p.m., the catamaran was spotted by a fishing boat passing in the Sea of Okhotsk near the settlement of Ust-Khayryuzovo in Kamchatka,” she added.
Prosecutors said they were still working to establish the circumstances of the incident and investigate allegations of water traffic safety violations that resulted in the negligence of at least two people.
The rescued man’s wife told Russian state media that his weight may have played a role in his survival, considering he weighed about 220 pounds (100 kg). She told RIA that Pichugin, his deceased brother and nephew had enough food for about two weeks.
According to RIA, Pichugin will be transported for treatment to a hospital in the city of Magadan in the far east of Russia.
He is “in a serious condition, emaciated but conscious,” the director of the fishing company that came across the drifting boat told RIA.
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