Captain and 10 sailors float on lifeboat on the Arabian Sea for nine days

Captain and 10 sailors float on lifeboat on the Arabian Sea for nine days
D.V. MAHESHWARI

BHUJ, SEPTEMBER 23: It's a tale of high drama on the rough seas, of a sinking ship and sinking hope, of despair and reprieve. Of a captain and his 10 sailors who spent nine days floating on hope on a lifeboat in the Arabian Sea with no food, no water. Sounds familiar? Any resemblance to a story of a shipwrecked sailor by one Garcia Marquez is purely coincidental.

All's well that ended well for 42-year-old Captain Adam Mohammed Chauhan and his crew. At his plush bungalow at the all-seamen's Salaya village near the ancient sea-port of Mandvi in southern Kutch, Gujarat, memories of those days in June seem far away. But tinker around and he readily unspools the saga of courage and endurance on the high seas.

Captain Chauhan and the sailors were rescued by Pakistani fishermen of Pasani village, Baluchistan, 1,200 kms from Mandvi. ``We had been without food or drinking water for nine days and nights in a 12 feet-long life boat. We were so weak that a day's delay would have killed half of us.''

Chauhan and 12 crew members, from Kutch and Saurashtra, were headed for home from Dubai when the sailing season closed between June and August. They set sail in their 500 tonne wooden vessel, Jan Kalyan, from Amariya Port on June 19. On June 21, just 25 to 39 nautical miles away from the Oman coast, an LPG cylinder exploded and in minutes, their ship was engulfed in flames.

``All we could do in those 15 to 20 minutes was lower a lifeboat into the sea without any provisions, not even drinking water. I asked my crew members to jump onto the boat. However, two of them failed to reach the lifeboat and drifted away.'' Perched on the lifeboat, the crew could see Nathu Kala (68) from Diu and Dhirajlal Keshavji (32) from Veraval drowning.

Soon after midnight, the shipwrecked sailors saw their burning ship go down. Their journey had only just begun.

The sailors didn't even have oars with which to navigate their boat. The winds and sea current did the job. The sailors lay still on the boat, waiting for rescuers. They would occasionally spring to life to wave their clothes at some ships on the horizon. ``On June 24, at around 11 am, we saw a container vessel passing by. It was so close to us that we could read its name, `MV Greater Kailash'. We vigorously waved our clothes, yelled for help. We could see that the ship's crew had noticed us, but it didn't stop. The next day, there was another ship in our vicinity, but it too ignored us,'' Chauhan says.

That day, they ate nothing. There were no small fish to catch from the deep sea; they didn't even have anything to catch them with. ``In fact, we weren't hungry. But we were terribly thirsty. We were ready to pay lakhs for a just few drops of water, but there wasn't even any rainfall that day. Three of my crew members tried to drink sea water against my advice and they were soon ill. I was thirsty beyond words, but I avoided expressing my agony in front of my crew.''

Then, as if in a dream, a mineral water bottle floated by. One of the men plunged into the sea to retrieve it, but there were just a few drops in it.

The despair increased with each passing day: the crew members started munching on sea grass. Then, on the eight day, they saw a whale rushing towards their boat and lost all hope of survival. They shut their eyes, offered their last prayers, opened their eyes and the whale had sped by.

If they survived this, perhaps they were destined to survive anything, they reasoned. That night, they saw lights on the horizon. When dawn broke on June 30, they found themselves on the Pasani coast of Baluchistan. Soon, fishermen came to their rescue, gave them water and food and informed Pakistan's Marine Security Agency (MSA). The MSA recorded their statements and then informed the Indian High Commissioner's office in Islamabad.

The three sick crew members were admitted to Pasani hospital. They were all handed over to the local police, and were later shifted to Landhi jail in Karachi. Here, they were lodged with 111 other Indian fishermen until their travel documents and air tickets were arranged for by the Indian High Commission. They flew from Karachi on September 13 to Mumbai, from where Chauhan and four others reached Kutch on September 14.

Despite the brush with death, Chauhan's affair with the sea continues.His wife's warning him against it, but he's already planning to buy a new boat. And the youngest crew member, 19 year-old Abdul Hussain who was on his first sea voyage, is also raring to go. ``Since my travel documents were destroyed in the fire on the ship, I have applied for a new identity card,'' he says.