After 67 days adrift at sea, man found alive in tiny boat next to bodies of brother and 15-year-old nephew
A Russian man was rescued in the stormy Sea of Okhotsk after surviving for more than two months in a tiny inflatable boat that lost its engine, but his brother and nephew have died, officials said Tuesday.
The prosecutor's office in the far east of Russia said that the man was rescued Monday by a fishing vessel off the Kamchatka Peninsula.
It didn't name the survivor, but Russian news reports identified him as 46-year-old Mikhail Pichugin, who in early August set on a journey to watch whales in the Sea of Okhotsk together with his 49-year-old brother and 15-year-old nephew. Their bodies were reportedly found in the boat when the Angel fishing vessel rescued Pichugin.
Media reports said the three men traveled to the Shantar Islands off the northwest shore of the Sea of Okhotsk in early August. They went missing after setting off on their way back to Sakhalin Island on Aug. 9. Family members alerted authorities and a rescue effort was launched but failed to locate the men.
The survivor's wife told Russia's state-run RIA Novosti news agency that the trio had taken enough food with them for about two weeks, as well as warm clothes, life jackets, flares and about five gallons of water. Their boat engine apparently failed, leaving them adrift.
Pichugin weighed just about 110 pounds when he was found, having lost half of his body weight, news reports said.
He didn't immediately say how he'd managed to survive in the Sea of Okhotsk, the coldest sea in East Asia and known for its gales, or how his brother and nephew had died. The local prosecutor's office reportedly opened a preliminary criminal investigation into the deaths.
When the crew of the fishing vessel spotted the tiny inflatable boat on their radar, they initially thought it was a buoy or a piece of junk, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper said, but they turned on the spotlight to make sure and were shocked to see Pichugin.
He didn't immediately say how he managed to survive in the Sea of Okhotsk, the coldest sea in East Asia and known for its gales, and how his brother and nephew died. The crew of the ship that rescued Pichugin found their bodies tied to the boat to prevent them from being washed away by the sea, news reports said.
When Pichugin was rescued, his boat was drifting about 11 nautical miles off Kamchatka's shore, about 540 nautical miles from their departure point on the other side of the Sea of Okhotsk.
A video released by the prosecutor's office showed an emaciated man in a life jacket desperately shouting "come here!" and the crew working to pull him back to safety.
"I have no strength left," Pichugin said as he was taken to safety.
Pichugin was rushed to an emergency care unit at the Magadan hospital. Chief doctor Yuri Lednev told reporters that he was suffering from dehydration and hypothermia but was in stable condition.
Alexei Arykov, the owner of the fishing boat that found the survivor said he was "in a serious condition, thin, but conscious," RIA Novosti reported.
The boat docked around 0830 GMT in the far eastern city of Magadan and the survivor was carried off on a stretcher, the news agency reported.
The survivor's wife Yekaterina told RIA Novosti: "It's a kind of miracle," adding that the men had taken enough food and water to last only two weeks.
An expert questioned by RIA Novosti recalled that in 1960, four Soviet soldiers survived 49 days adrift on a small boat in the Pacific Ocean that was found by the U.S. aircraft carrier Keersarge.
Prosecutors said that they launched an investigation into the incident on charges of violation of safety rules that resulted in deaths.
Last year, an Australian sailor said he survived more than two months lost at sea with his dog. Tim Shaddock, 51, and his dog Bella were sailing from Mexico to French Polynesia when rough seas damaged their boat and its electronics system, leaving them adrift and cut off from the world.
CBS News' Haley Ott, Dariia Symonenko and the AFP contributed to this report.