– Found at sea after two months on his inflatable boat
A man has been found alive after spending more than two months drifting on an inflatable dinghy in the waters of the Sea of Okhotsk with his brother and nephew, who died.
Published today at 2:40 p.m.
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In a video released by the prosecution, we see a bearded man in an orange life jacket, in the middle of the night, wrapping himself in a blanket on his inflatable boat, waiting for rescuers to approach.
According to initial information, “on August 9, 2024, two men and a 15-year-old teenager, the son of one of them, left on a Baikat 470 catamaran-type boat” heading from the Khabarovsk region on the Sakhalin Island, explains the press release.
Shortly after, contact was lost, according to the same source, which does not explain the causes of the small ship’s drift. The boat measures 4.7 meters long and 2.2 meters wide, according to the dealer website.
It was only on October 14 that the boat was found in the waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, some 1,000 km from the unfortunate people’s starting point, off the coast of a village on the Kamchatka peninsula, by a ship of fishermen called “Angel”.
Two occupants of the boat died during the drift, the third, who was found, is alive, and medical assistance is being provided to him, the press release said, without further details.
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According to the Russian agency Ria Novosti, the survivor’s name is Mikhail Pichugin and it is his brother, Sergei, 49, and his nephew Ilia, 15, who died. The bodies were still in the boat.
Excursion one more
“The survivor is in a serious condition, emaciated, but conscious,” Alexei Arykov, the captain of the fishing boat that saved him, told Ria Novosti. “It’s a kind of miracle,” the survivor’s wife, Ekaterina, commented to the same media, believing that her husband’s excess weight could have saved him. “He weighed around 100 kilos,” she said, while Russian television claims that the man now weighs 50 kilos.
Mikhail Pichugin worked as a driver on Sakhalin Island and invited his brother and nephew to visit him, tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda reported, citing family members as saying the trio had planned a sea excursion to see whales.
An investigation was opened for violation of maritime transport rules which recklessly led to the death of two people, added the regional prosecutor’s office.
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