Uein Buranibwe, 53, and Temaei Tontaake, 26, arrived in Majuro Sunday after spending 17 days on Namdrik Atoll in the southern Marshall Islands. Namdrik is about 350 miles northwest of their home atoll of Marakei in neighboring Kiribati.
“I don’t want to get in a boat again,” said Tontaake in Majuro as he recounted the ordeal of struggling to stay alive by catching tuna with hand fishing lines after they began their drift on October 22.
“We went to Abaiang Atoll to get fuel because Marakei ran out,” he said. After filling six 55-gallon drums with gas, the pair departed Abaiang in their 26-foot fiberglass boat that was propelled by a 45hp outboard engine.
“You can’t see Marakei from Abaiang, but it’s about a three-hour ride,” he said of the 30 miles of ocean that separates the two low-lying coral atolls. They departed Abaiang just before nightfall. “We figured we’d be fine because we had a GPS (Global Positioning System) on board,” Tontaake said. “But the battery ran low and it stopped working.” They lost their way in the darkness and started drifting.
For three days the U.S. Coast Guard mounted an aerial search for the two Marakei residents without success. “We heard the sound of a plane, but we didn’t see it,” Tontaake said. They also saw fishing boats, but none were close enough to see or help them.
As the days passed, they saw schools of tuna and caught fish using fishing lines they had on board.
“But sometimes we’d go three or four days with no food before we would see another school [of fish],” Tontaake said. It did not rain much during their drift, so the men resorted to drinking salt water.
A month later, on the late afternoon of November 23, they saw birds on the sea. “We thought it was another school of fish, but it turned out to be an island (Namdrik),” Tontaake said.
After a month of no use, their engine wasn’t working and the men were weak from not eating. They paddled to try to get into a current that would pull them into land, but the waves were pushing them around and away from Namdrik. “The sun went down and the island vanished,” he said. “We felt hopeless.”
The two men passed out from exhaustion to awake when a wave slammed into the boat hours later. It was the morning of November 24 and they’d been washed into the ocean side reef of Namdrik, a remote island in the Marshall Islands with a population of about 600. Waves on the reef buffeted their boat until it washed into shallow waters just off the island.
Though the two men said it was difficult to walk on the island after more than 30-days in the boat, the first thing Tontaake did was climb a coconut tree to get drinking coconuts for Buranibwe and himself. Rehydrated, the two men set off to find people on the island.
A few minutes later, local residents took them to meet the only person on the island who spoke their language. They were delighted to discover she is a relative of Tontaake’s uncle Bairo who was lost at sea from Marakei in the 1950s, landed at Namdrik and stayed, marrying into the community. “Now we know what happened to my uncle,” said Tontaake.
Both Buranibwe and Tontaake were able to speak to their family members on Marakei by radio from Namdrik.
With the government-run Air Marshall Islands lone operating plane grounded for repairs and no ships scheduled to visit Namdrik, the men had to wait nearly three weeks for a boat to pick them up to transport them to Majuro, the capital.
