A dramatic video shows the rescue of a whale watcher who spent more than two months adrift at sea. The man battled the elements in the Sea of Okhotsk, floating on just small inflatable boat.
Sadly, the man also dealt with the trauma of floating alongside the bodies of his brother and nephew. Rescue crews pulled 45-year-old Mikhail Pichugin from the ocean. He had loss 100 pounds during his voyage at sea. The whale watcher was a pale imitation of the man he once was — very weak from his ordeal. He had been out on a whale-watching expedition. That's when their engine failed.
"All right, hold on," a fisherman tells him, according to a translation of the clip. "Just sit tight for now." The whale watcher was still clutching the bodies of both his brother, Sergey, and his nephew, Illya. Both died during the two months that they were adrift at sea.
Russian whale watcher survives 67 days at sea in inflatable boat with brother and nephews' corpses.
Mikhail Pichugin, 45, set off from Okha on Russia's largest island Sakhalin, to the remote Shantar Islands in Russia with his older brother and nephew on August 9. pic.twitter.com/gQTpjbloxP
— RDT (@RDT2587) October 15, 2024
Whale Watcher Survives
"When they said [Mikhail] was alive, I thought we were waiting for a miracle, and it happened," his 38-year-old ex-wife Ekaterina Pichugina told KP-Irkutsk.
The fishermen got Puchugin appropriate medical assistance, but he appeared stable. The whale watcher finally headed home on a multi-day journey. Authorities had search for more than a month for a ship, but they finally gave up search for the missing boat. They believe no one could have survived.
The inflatable boat ended up drifting 625 miles away before someone finally spotted it.
"There are two real miracles here," Dmitry Lisitsyn, head of Sakhalin Environment Watch, said.
"The first is that such a small, uncontrolled boat was not capsized in the stormy autumn Sea of Okhotsk after more than two months of drifting. I can't wrap my head around how that is possible. The boat certainly went through several strong storms and remained afloat - this is something incredible.
"The second is that someone on this boat survived," Lisitsyn continued. "The fact that two people died — a father and son — is very sad, but not surprising. But how the third person - their uncle and brother — could survive in the icy, stormy sea for more than two months is simply beyond comprehension. It truly is a miracle."
