A police officer told today how a shark guided him to a
rescue boat after he had drifted helplessly in the Pacific Ocean
for 15 weeks.
Mr Toakai Teitoi’s brother-in-law had perished from
dehydration and the 41-year-old policeman knew it was only a matter
of time before he, too, succumbed to the elements.
But he said today that two unexpected events led to his
eventual rescue – a tropical downpour that provided him with
drinking water and the extraordinary encounter with the
shark.
Trouble in paradise: Mr Teitoi and his brother-in-law were
travelling from the Kritibati capital to their home on a nearby
atoll when their boat went adrift
‘Just as I was giving up all hope of being rescued after one
boat had passed me by in the distance something very strange
happened,’ Mr Teitoi said after being brought ashore in the
Marshall Islands by the fishing boat which found him.
‘I was cowering from the sun under a piece of cloth I had
stretched across the front of the boat when I felt a big bump,
followed by some scratching.
‘I looked over the side and saw a six-foot shark circling my
boat, but it was mainly bumping against the hull.
‘It definitely caught my attention because I had been fast
asleep. Then, because I was now awake, I looked around me and saw
the stern of a ship.
‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. I could just make out the crew
who were looking at me through binoculars.
Of course I was able to wave frantically at them and they
came and picked me up. If that shark hadn’t nudged me awake the
crew of the boat might have thought I wasn’t in trouble and might
have carried on sailing past me.’
Mr Teitoi told his extraordinary story after being treated
for exhaustion and dehydration in Majuro in the Marshall
Islands.
He and his brother-in-law had flown from their home on the
island of Maiana to the Kiribati capital of Tarawa so that Mr
Teitoi could be sworn in as a policeman.
By a curious coincidence, following the swearing-in ceremony,
he watched a film depicting a true story about four men from
Kiribati who had been lost at sea, with only two surviving after
they were washed ashore in
American Samoa six weeks later.
When it was time for Mr Teito and his brother-in-law, Ielu
Falaile, 52, to return to their home they boarded a 15ft wooden
boat for what should have been a two hour voyage.
They stopped to fish along the way and then dozed off – and
when they awoke they found they had drifted out of sight of Maiana.
Soon afterwards, they ran out of fuel.
‘We had plenty of food and we could catch fish, but the
problem was there was nothing to drink,’ said Mr Teito.
As the two men began to suffer from dehydration, Mr Teitoi
turned to prayer, but his brother-in-law just lay in the boat.
After five weeks adrift, Mr Falaile died.
'I left him there overnight and slept next to him, like at a
funeral,' said Mr Teitoi. In the morning, he lowered the body of
his brother-in-law over the side.
Just 24 hours later, life-giving rains fell during a storm –
rains that fell for several days – and Mr Teito was able to fill
two five gallon containers of water.
'There were two choices in my mind at the time. Either
someone would find me or I would follow my brother-in-law in death.
I was running out of water. It was out of my control,' he
said.
He prayed every morning and several weeks later he caught
sight of a fishing boat, but the crew failed to see him. So he
continued praying, drinking water and eating raw fish he was able
to catch, doing his best to keep out of the tropical sun by
sleeping under the cloth awning he had erected.
Weeks went by – and then came that bump. The bump of a shark
which woke him and alerted him to a boat that was close enough to
see his frantic waving for help.
Shortly before leaving Majuro today, Mr Teitoi said: ‘I’m
flying home. I’ll never go by boat again.’
