Sailor survives 14 hours in Pacific Ocean clinging to ‘sea rubbish’

A sailor who fell overboard without a lifejacket survived by clinging to a “piece of sea rubbish”, his son has revealed.

Vidam Perevertilov spent 14 hours in the water after he fell off a cargo ship into the Pacific Ocean in the early hours of the morning, according to the BBC News.

The 52-year-old credits his decision to swim towards a “black dot” several kilometres away with saving his life. It turned out to be a fishing buoy, which he held onto until his rescue.

“He looked about 20 years older and very tired but he was alive,” his son Marat told StuffNZ.

Perevertilov, the chief engineer on board the Silver Supporter, fell overboard on 16 February as his freighter made a supply run between New Zealand’s Tauranga port on the country’s North Island and the isolated British territory of Pitcairn. According to The Guardian, he later told his son he had been feeling dizzy after finishing a night shift in the engine room, and had walked out on to the deck to recover, before falling.

Unaware that a man had fallen overboard, the ship sailed away, with the crew not noticing he was missing for six hours.

Once the alarm was raised the captain turned the ship around.

According to BBC News, the crew determined his approximate location by looking at Perevertilov’s work logs, which showed that he was last onboard at 4am. The ship’s coordinates at the time was about 400 nautical miles south of French Polynesia’s Austral Islands. 

Distress messages were then radioed out to ships in the area. French navy aircraft joined the search from Tahiti, and France’s meteorological service studied the winds to calculate possible drift patterns. 

But it would be his own vessel which would find him in the end.

When Perevertilov finally saw his ship in the horizon, he waved and called out. Remarkably, one of the ship’s passengers heard the “weak, human shout”.

A lookout spotted a raised hand later on, and eventually pulled the sailor to safety on board.