Miracle at sea: sailor left floating in the Pacific Ocean clinging to floating garbage

A sailor who was clinging to an old fishing buoy spent nearly 24 hours floating in the Pacific Ocean after watching in horror as his ship sailed into darkness without him.

Chief Engineer Vidam Perevertilov fell off the deck of the Silver Supporter without a life jacket around 4 am on February 16 as the vessel was conducting its routine supply between Tauranga and Pitcairn Island.

Perevetilov later told his son that he had felt dizzy after finishing his night shift in the engine room and went on deck to recover, only to fall into the drink.

“He doesn’t recall falling overboard. He may have passed out,” Perevetilov’s son Marat told Stuff.

Perevetilov regained consciousness when he saw the Silver Supporter sailing into total darkness.

It took six hours for the ship’s crew to realize that he was missing.

By declaring an alarm and radioing relief to the Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Tahiti, the crew calculated that Perevetilov had been on board at 4 a.m. because he filled out a report log at 4 a.m., Stuff reported.

French navy planes joined the search from Polynesia, while France’s national meteorological service helped by calculating probable drift patterns.

Meanwhile, Perevetilov, exhausted, struggled to stay afloat on a difficult night.

In the dawn light, he noticed a black patch on the horizon and swam towards it.

“It turned out to be an old fishing buoy,” Marat told Stuff.

“It was just a piece of marine litter.”

However, it floated and Perevetilov was able to hold on to it and survive.

As he bobbed in the water, his hopes of being rescued were fulfilled.

The Silver Supporter found Perevetilov about 17 hours after he had fallen on the deck.

He had been performing an established search pattern when a passenger on board the ship heard a faint voice from the side of the ship and was brought on board, tired but alive.

British High Commissioner in New Zealand Laura Clarke, who also serves as governor of the Pitcairn Islands, told Stuff that everyone was “enormously relieved” to learn of the rescue.

“We all feared the worst, given the magnitude of the Pacific Ocean and its strong currents,” he said.