LOS ANGELES, Sept 25 (AFP) - A castaway sailor has been rescued by the US Coast Guard after surviving nearly four months adrift at sea in a crippled boat by drinking rainwater and roasting turtles and seagulls, rescuers said Wednesday.
Vietnamese immigrant Richard Van Pham, 62, drifted for almost 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) after his 7.8 meter (26 foot) sailing boat got caught in a storm during what was supposed to have been a simple 35-kilometer (22-mile) pleasure cruise.
The thin but healthy survivor, who set out from his home in Long Beach, California to the nearby resort island of Catalina in early June, was rescued by the US Coast Guard on September 17 off the coast of the central American state of Costa Rica, officials said.
"It's a three-hour cruise gone bad," Coast Guard Captain Terry Bragg told reporters, adding that he had never heard a story survival like Pham's.
"This amazing survivor subsisted during this time only on rain water and the fish he caught," said the crew of the US Coast Guard frigate McClusky in their online logbook.
Pham's short jaunt went wrong when his boat, the Sea Breeze, got caught in a squall which snapped its mast. Both the outboard motor and the radio then failed, leaving the unwitting endurance sailor adrift at sea with no means to call for help.
Because Pham has no family and had not filed a float plan, nobody reported him missing and no search was launched for the ultimate survivor.
The Robinson Crusoe-like survivor, who returned to California on Tuesday, told reporters he had survived by roasting turtles, tuna fish and seagulls, which he lured by tying fish to his broken mast and then cooking them on the deck of the small boat.
"If you travel at sea, you take what you find," the resourceful former furniture store owner, who came to the United States after fleeing war-ravaged communist Vietnam in 1976, told reporters after arriving in Los Angeles.
Pham was saved when he was spotted by the crew of a US Navy reconnaissance plane on a drug-busting mission about 350 miles off the coast of Costa Rica. The Coast Guard frigate McClusky was sent out to rescue the tough sailor from his high-seas ordeal.
"I (could) see nothing (on the horizon)," he said of his ordeal at sea. "Then one day I see a plane. I know I'm close to people. They tip their wings to say hello. Two hours later a ship comes to my boat. I am very, very happy."
When rescuers reached Pham, he had lost about 18 kilograms (40 pounds) but was in good spirits after spending the daylight hours below deck to escape the sun. Instead of asking to be rescued, Pham asked Coast Guard officers if they could simply help him repair his mast.
"When we got to him, he was grilling a seagull on a (small) grill that he had, the fuel that he was using to cook was the wood from his own boat," said Lieutenant Ron Flanders of the US Navy in the California city of San Diego.
"He had turtle meat and he had used some of that meat to lure cormorants and other birds (to broken the mast of the boat) and then he clubbed them over the head and cooked them," Flanders said, adding that Pham had also caught fish off the side of the boat.
"Not only that but he was able to evaporate sea water and use the salt to preserve the meat."
Although Pham wanted to return home in his boat, the Coast Guard scuttled it after deeming it to be unseaworthy and dropped him off in Guatemala after organizing a whip-round among the sailors of the McClusky, which raised 800 dollars to help Pham get home to Los Angeles.
"During the course of several days that he was (on the McClusky), the sailors took a real liking to him and adopted him," Flanders told AFP. "This guy has a tremendous resourcefulness, he's a remarkable person, he really earned their respect."
Link to article HERE
