On 27 May 2012, 41-year-old Toakai Teitoi had flown from his home island of Maiana to the Kiribati capital of Tarawa to be sworn in as a policeman. Instead of flying home he decided to join his brother-in-law Lelu Falaile, 52, on what was supposed to be a two-hour sea journey back to Maiana. But after stopping to fish along the way and sleeping overnight, they woke the following day to find they had drifted out of sight of Maiana and ran out of fuel. “We had food, but the problem was we had nothing to drink”. Mr Falaile’s health began failing and he died on July 4, while Teitoi drifted for a total of more than 100 days, until one afternoon when a shark woke him up. Read Arbroath
Mr Teitoi said he woke in the afternoon to the sound of scratching and looked overboard to see a six-foot shark circling the boat and bumping the hull. When the shark had his attention it swam off. “He was guiding me to a fishing boat. I looked up and there was the stern of a ship and I could see crew with binoculars looking at me.”
(Image courtesy of Kim Nowacki, CC BY-ND)
