Two people died in this incident
A man has been found alive after more than two months adrift in an inflatable boat in the waters of the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian Far East, in an incident that left two dead.
Pictures released by Russian judicial authorities on Tuesday showed a bearded man in an orange life jacket, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for rescuers to approach.
On August 9, the two men and the son of one of them, a 15-year-old boy, left for Khabarovsk on Sakhalin Island in a Pykat 470” catamaran boat.
After some time, they lost contact, although the reasons for the incident are still unknown.
The boat is 4.7 meters long and 2.2 meters wide, according to the dealership website.
On October 14, the boat was found in the waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, 1,000 kilometers from the starting point, off the coast of a village on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The survivor was rescued by emergency crews (Associated Press).
According to Russian authorities, the sole survivor, who is receiving ongoing medical treatment, was found by the fishing vessel “Angel”.
According to Russian news agency RIA Novosti, the survivor, Mikhail Pichukin, and his brother Sergey, 49, and his nephew Ilya, 15, died on the boat, where their bodies were found during the rescue.
“The survivor is in serious condition, emaciated, but conscious,” Alexey Arikov, the captain of the fishing boat that rescued him, told RIA Novosti.
“It’s kind of a miracle”, the survivor’s wife Ekaterina commented to the same media, believing that her husband’s overweight might have saved him.
“He weighed around 100kg,” he revealed, with Russian media reporting that the man now weighs 50kg.
Mikhail Pichukin worked as a driver on Sakhalin Island and invited his brother and nephew to visit him, according to tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, which cited family sources as saying the trio planned a whale-watching cruise.
Judicial officials added that an investigation has been opened into the reckless violation of maritime traffic rules that led to the death of two people.
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