Five men and the sea

It reads like a modern day take on ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ -- five Filipino fishermen cast adrift for days on a makeshift raft after a huge marlin sinks their boat. The men were fishing in the South China Sea last week when a six-foot (1.8 metre) marlin punctured their boat’s wooden hull with its giant bill, vessel master Jimmy Batiller said yesterday.

Their 12-metre boat quickly dipped beneath the waves in the early evening of October 3, leaving the crew with little drinking water or food until their eventual rescue by the US Navy on Monday. “It (the fish) hit the bottom of our boat, leaving two big holes. We suspect it was chasing a smaller fish. It swam around the sinking boat for a while, apparently disorientated,” Batiller said. The fishermen salvaged what they could, removing the outriggers, planks and barrels to create a makeshift raft.

“Our water ran out after two days. We waved at passing commercial vessels but no one came to rescue us. But we did not lose hope,” the 42-year-old father of one said, adding the crew also ate raw rice and drank some seawater. “When we were rescued, that was when our tears fell,” said Batiller, who has since been reunited with his family in Subic, a port about 80 kilometres (50 miles) northwest of Manila.