General Boat Articles

Man Falls Overboard and Survives Clinging to a Buoy

After falling off a freighter, a man clung to a fishing buoy like this one until he was rescued.

Vidam Perevertilov spent 14 hours in the water after he fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean in the early hours of the morning. The 52-year-old, who was not wearing a life jacket, credits his decision to swim towards a "black dot" several feet away with saving his life.

Man Overboard

That dot turned out to be a fishing buoy that Perevertilov held onto until his rescue. "He looked about 20 years older and very tired but he was alive," his son Marat told New Zealand news site Stuff.

Perevertilov is the chief engineer of the vessel, Silver Supporter, that was making a supply run between New Zealand's Tauranga port and the isolated British territory of Pitcairn. On February 16, following a shift in the engine room pumping fuel, he reportedly felt "hot and dizzy" and walked out on deck to recover at around 4 a.m. Marat, who got details of his father's survival tale via message chats, believes he may have fainted, as he does not remember going over.

 

The crew of the Silver Supporter didn’t realize a crewmember had fallen over in the middle of the night.

Unaware that someone had fallen overboard, the ship sailed away. After struggling to stay afloat until the sun rose, Perevertilov noticed a black speck on the horizon and decided to swim towards it.

Sounding the Alarm

It took ship’s crew about six hours to notice that its engineer was missing, at which point the captain turned around the ship. According to reports, the crew determined his approximate location by looking at Perevertilov's work logs, which showed that he was last onboard at 4 a.m. The ship's coordinates at the time were about 400 nautical miles south of French Polynesia's Austral Islands.

 

The Austral Islands are in the South Pacific ocean 300 miles south of Tahiti and are uninhabited so the man was lucky he found that buoy.

Distress messages were then radioed out to ships in the area. French navy aircraft from Tahiti joined the search and France's meteorological service studied the winds to calculate possible drift patterns.

But his own vessel found him. When Perevertilov finally saw his ship on the horizon, he waved and called out. Remarkably, one of the ship's passengers heard the "weak, human shout." A lookout spotted a raised hand and eventually pulled the mariner to safety.