Three Teens Survive 50 Days Adrift in Pacific

[crash1371]

(Nov. 25) -- Three teenagers given up for dead nearly two months ago have miraculously turned up alive -- albeit with a bad case of sunburn -- adrift in the South Pacific 800 miles from where they got lost.

The boys survived on coconuts and rainwater and by slaughtering a seagull they managed to catch while bobbing along in their tiny tin dinghy. Their families held funerals for them weeks ago, after a massive search by sea and air failed to find them, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

But then a tuna fishing boat spotted them Wednesday in a remote part of the Pacific north of Fiji -- waters the vessel normally doesn't venture across."We drew up next to them, and we asked if they needed any help and their reply was a very ecstatic 'yes!'," the fishing boat's first mate, Tai Fredricsen, told the BBC. "We immediately deployed our rescue craft and got them straight on board and administered basic first aid.""In a physical sense, they look very physically depleted, but mentally ... very high," Fredricsen told New Zealand Radio, according to The Associated Press. A bit thin and dehydrated, the boys' worst ailment appeared to be severe sunburn, he said.

The boys -- Samu Perez and Filo Filo, both 15, and Edward Nasau, 14 -- set off Oct. 5 from their home in the Tokelau Islands, a remote archipelago that's part of New Zealand. They were attempting what some called a foolish teenage challenge, trying to row nearly 60 miles between two remote islands, just for the adventure of it.

Over 50 days, they drifted some 800 miles from their starting point. And their rescue came not a moment too soon: Fredricsen said the boys told him that for a while, they managed to capture rainwater with a tarp from their boat. But two days before their rescue, they began drinking salty seawater -- which could have dehydrated them to death if they'd continued much longer.

"It's unbelievable. Had we been a kilometer either side of that course, we would have missed them," the fishing company's managing director, Eric Barratt, told the New Zealand Herald. "An amazing story."

The boys gave the tuna fishermen phone numbers for their families on the Tokelau Islands, and Fredricsen put in a call to one of the boys' grandmothers from a satellite phone aboard his tuna boat.

"I didn't understand what she was saying," he told the Herald. "But I could tell she was ecstatic and over the moon to find out they were still alive."

Wow good for them dumb move but glad they made it.