A sailor on board a freighter in the South Pacific felt hot and dizzy and went outside to get some air.
He would, his son later told local media, fight desperately against the waves for at least 14 hours, clinging to an old fishing buoy to survive.
Lithuanian engineer Vidam Perevertilov, 52, had a routine night shift earlier this month in the engine room of the “Silver Supporter,” which sailed between New Zealand’s Tauranga port and the Pitcairn Islands, a small British overseas territory.
But on February 16 at around 4 a.m., he fell overboard after seemingly passed out.
Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics
Adrift in darkness and without a life jacket, his hope was lifted when the sun rose.
“He saw a black dot on the horizon a few miles away,” his son Marat told New Zealand news site Stuff. So he started swimming towards it.
“It turned out to be an old fishing buoy … It wasn’t anchored to anything or a boat, it was just a piece of marine debris,” Marat said.
“His will to survive was strong,” he added.
NBC News was unable to reach Marat or his father for immediate comment.
The engineer’s son said that as soon as the crew found his father missing, they repeated their movements and sent emergency warnings to nearby ships, including French Polynesia’s JRCC Tahiti.
“What happened next was almost inexplicable,” Marat told the New Zealand news site.
The Silver Supporter performed search patterns and one of the passengers said he heard a faint human scream from the starboard side of the ship “about 400 nautical miles south of the Australian islands of French Polynesia.
According to Marat, the crew threw Vidam a life preserver, lowered a ladder and pulled him back on board half a day after he left them.
His son calls the rescue “incredible” and calls his father’s survival by keeping himself fit and healthy.
A statement from the High Commission of the French Republic in French Polynesia confirmed that the JRCC Tahiti had responded to calls for help with the search.
It said it had alerted French naval aircraft in nearby Tahiti, as well as its meteorological agency, Météo-France, which began calculating the sailor’s possible drift based on wind.
“A happy ending for the man and the entire crew of the Silver Supporter, a breath of fresh air for everyone who contributed to the search,” the statement said.
The incident illustrates “how dangerous living and working at sea are, even in the 21st century,” as well as the benefits of modern ship technology, said Dr. Chris Ware, a senior lecturer in maritime history and director of the Greenwich Maritime Center in London.
“The fact that on another day the drift buoy would be considered marine pollution in this case turned out to be a life saver,” he added.
British High Commissioner to New Zealand and Governor of the Pitcairn Islands, Laura Clarke, tweeted that the rescue was an “extraordinary survival story,” adding that it would impress even Captain Bligh, the famous skipper of “HMS Bounty”.
The ship suffered a mutiny in 1789, which was popularized in a Hollywood movie starring Marlon Brando in 1962.
Most Pitcairn Islanders have European and Polynesian roots and are descended from nine mutineers of the British ship. Most residents move to Australia and New Zealand for school and work.
As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, all tourism to remote sandy Pitcairn – the only inhabited island in the group, about 2 miles long and 1 mile wide – has stopped.
Although the Silver Supporter was allowed to transport supplies to the island, his schedule was greatly shortened to protect “the approximately 50 residents,” according to a tourist site for the Pitcairn Government, which charters the ship.
Matthew Mulligan and Yasmine Salam contributed.