KHABAROVSK, NOV 01 – A 46-year-old Russian man was recently rescued after spending 67 days adrift in Russian waters in an inflatable boat.
According to Oddity Centralon August 9, Mikhail Pichugin together with his 49-year-old brother Sergey and his 15-year-old nephew Ilya left for Sakhalin Island from the far eastern Khabarovsk region in an inflatable boat.
A few days later, their families reported them missing and a search and rescue operation with planes and helicopters was launched.
All efforts to find the inflatable boat failed, hope of finding them was fading. But on Monday, October 14, the inflatable boat was spotted in the Sea of Okhotsk, about 1,000km from where it had set off 67 days earlier.
Miraculously, one of the three men was still alive.
Mikhail Pichugin was really lucky because the boat he was on for 67 days was spotted by a fishing boat at about 10:00 pm by chance.
The 46-year-old barely had the strength to speak and struggled to catch a rope thrown by the fishing boat’s crew.
Unfortunately, Pichugin’s brother and nephew were not so lucky.
15-year-old Ilya was the first to die after about three weeks on the boat.
At one point, Sergey was trying to wash his wounds from bed sores from sitting too long and suddenly fell into the icy water. Mikhail tried to save him, but his brother didn’t last long after that.
As the only survivor, Mikhail Pichugin tied the two bodies to the boat so that they would not be overturned by the strong waves and also hung their jackets on the side of the boat to attract attention in case of passing ships or airplanes.
No one knows exactly how the 46-year-old Russian managed to survive for so long in the freezing sea, but his wife told the media that his weight may have saved him.
Pichugin reportedly weighed around 100 kilograms before the incident, but weighed only 50 kilograms when rescued. Food supplies such as dry noodles, nuts and water that were brought were only enough for two weeks.
Russian media reports that Pichugin is currently in a ‘less stable’ condition as he is still in shock and most likely suffering from hypothermia.
However, he now faces the risk of being prosecuted for breaching safety regulations and could be jailed for up to seven years. – Agency
