A California man who went missing in the Pacific Ocean for more than a month has been found alive after surviving on scraps of food, fish, and even condensation collected from seawater while drifting far from help.
Kai Sato, 39, set sail alone from Catalina Island on June 7 bound for Hawaii, but disaster struck two weeks into the voyage when the mast on his sailboat snapped.
Stranded outside major shipping lanes with no fuel and a dead phone, Sato said he spent days overwhelmed by despair as the current carried him farther into the open ocean.
The 39-year-old said he spent hours calling out for help, meditating and even speaking to the ocean and the wind.
“I was literally like a sitting duck, just getting taken south by the current going way off course,” he told Hawaii News Now.
“I cried for a whole week, just drifting south, like miserable,” he added. “I felt like I was going to just try to turn my motor on and just suffocate, to kill myself.”
After several days, Sato began fashioning makeshift repairs with PVC pipes and kayak paddles.
Then things turned from bad to worse for the 39-year-old when he ran out of water in mid-July.
At that point, he began improvising a way to stay alive by filling buckets with seawater and sealing them with plastic bags to collect fresh water from condensation.
“I was just licking that to survive,” he said, adding that he survived on leftover oatmeal, fish and squid that landed aboard.
But amid the ordeal, Sato found an unexpected source of comfort.
He said he felt the presence of his late uncle, who had sailed from California to Hawaii with him when he was a child.
Nearly a month later, Sato drifted back into the California-Hawaii shipping route, where the crew of the container ship Pasha Hawaii spotted and rescued him after two attempts to lower a rope ladder.
After being rescued, Sato said the ship’s crew welcomed him aboard, giving him a private suite, fresh clothes and plenty to eat.
“Oh my God, yeah, like ecstatic, you know what I mean? Like I was like crying and like so happy, and then they got me fruit and water, and yeah, they were so good to me, those guys,” Sato said.
Now recovering with relatives in Hawaii, Sato is already looking ahead to his next voyage. He plans to continue his sailing adventure to the Philippines—this time in a larger boat.
