Bear Grylls doesn't have anything on this teen. An 18-year-old teen once survived for almost two months at sea with almost no water or food. He became lost for almost 50 days on a raft/fishing hut.
The incident happened in 2018. The teen was on a rompong, a floating fishing hut, when its tether to the seabed snapped. 18-year-old Aldi Novel Adilang ended up floating out into the unforgiven sea. The incident happened off the coast of Indosesia's Sulawesi Island. Aldi had no way to navigate or steer the fishing hut. He was essentially at the mercy of the sea.
With no way to navigate, he had to wait for help to arrive. The teen only had a limited supply of rice, clean water, and spices. In order to survive, the teen caught fish. He tore off pieces of his wooden hut to cook the fish. As for clean water, Aldi sadly didn't have a filter. He ended up using his T-shirt as a makeshift filter to try to reduce the salt in saltwater.
Teen Trapped At Sea
The teen said 10 ships passed him while he was out there. But no one stopped until August 31. That's when someone finally stopped. By that time, he had drifted 1,200 miles to Gaum. The crew pulled him on board and gave him food, water, and fresh clothes. He ended up staying with them a week until he reached Japan and flew back to Indonesia.
That's a pretty wild story, right? But it wasn't his first time getting stranded at sea. It happened to him two times before for shorter periods of time.
"The first [time], I was afloat for a week and helped by the owner of the raft," he said. "The second time, I was afloat for two days and also received help from the owner of the raft."
It's all been a part of his job. He was supposed to light the lamps on the rompong. It's designed to attract fish. He had signed a one-year contract to fish commercially. He decided to pursue another profession. One social media user said of the teen, "Even if I had the survival skills, I would have gone crazy being alone, on that raft, in the middle of the ocean, for that long!"
