Russian rescued alive after nearly 10 weeks adrift at sea off Siberian coast

A Russian man was rescued after 67 days adrift on a small boat in the freezing Sea of ​​Okhotsk, Russian authorities announced Tuesday.

The man’s brother and his teenage son died in the ordeal, according to Russian state media RIA Novosti, which named the survivor as Mikhail Pichugin, 46.

Video of the rescue released by Russian prosecutors shows a bearded man wearing an orange life jacket floating on a small catamaran-style boat with a red flag hoisted on a pole, as rescuers struggle to reach him.

The Sea of ​​Okhotsk is largely surrounded by Russian Eastern Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula. It usually freezes over between October and March and is the coldest sea in East Asia.

Two adult men and the 15-year-old son of one of them left on the catamaran on Aug. 9, prosecutors said.

“After some time, contact with them was lost and their whereabouts remained unknown,” said Elena Krasnoyarova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Far East Transport Prosecutor’s Office.

“On October 14, around 10 p.m., the catamaran was spotted by a fishing boat passing in the Sea of ​​Okhotsk near the settlement of Ust-Khayryuzovo in the Kamchatka region,” she added.

Prosecutors said they were still working to establish the circumstances surrounding the incident and investigate accusations of river traffic safety violations that resulted in the deaths of at least two people due to negligence.

The wife of the rescued man told Russian state media that his weight could have played a role in his survival, given that he weighed around 100 kg. She told RIA that Pichugin, her late brother and nephew had enough food to last for about two weeks.

Pichugin will be taken to a hospital for medical treatment in the far eastern Russian city of Magadan, RIA reported.

He is “in serious condition, emaciated, but conscious”, the director of the fishing company which discovered the boat adrift told RIA.

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