A sailor who fell overboard survived by clinging to a "piece of marine debris," his son revealed.

Vidam Perevertilov

spent 14 hours in the water after falling from the freighter into the Pacific Ocean in the early hours of the morning.

The 52-year-old man,

who was not wearing a life jacket

, attributes his salvation to his decision to swim to a "black spot" several kilometers away, which turned out to be a fishing buoy, which he clung to until his rescue, the BBC reported. .

"He looked about 20 years older and very tired, but he was alive," his son Marat told the 'New Zealand Stuff'.

Perevertilov is the Lithuanian chief engineer for the Silver Supporter, who was conducting a supply run between New Zealand's port of Tauranga and the isolated British territory of Pitcairn.

After a shift in the fuel pump room,

he felt "hot and dizzy

," his son said.

He went on deck to recover around 04:00 a.m. on February 16, before falling.

Marat believes he may have fainted.

The ship sailed without realizing that a person was missing on board.

After struggling to stay afloat until the sun rose, Perevertilov noticed a black spot on the horizon and decided to swim towards it.

"It wasn't anchored to anything or a boat, it

was just a piece of marine litter

," Marat said of the abandoned fishing buoy.

It took about six hours for the ship's crew to realize their engineer was missing, at which point the captain turned the ship around.

The crew reportedly determined his approximate location by looking at Mr. Perevertilov's work logs, which showed he was last on board at 4 a.m. The ship's coordinates at that time were

about 400 nautical miles south of the Austral Islands of French Polynesia

.

Distress messages were then sent by radio to ships in the area.

French Navy aircraft joined the search from Tahiti, and France's meteorological service studied the winds to calculate possible drift patterns.

But it would be his own ship that would find him in the end.

When Perevertilov saw his ship on the horizon, he saluted and yelled.

Surprisingly,

one of the ship's passengers heard the "faint human cry"

.

A lookout saw a raised hand later and eventually brought the sailor safely aboard.

"His will to survive was strong. I probably would have drowned right away, but he always stayed fit and healthy and that's why I think he could survive," said his son.


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