An American Samoa-based fishing vessel “Pacific Princess” picked up the pair almost 435 miles from their island home, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.<\/p>\n
Pacific Princess skipper Alfred Canepa said he found the men after spotting what appeared to be a small flock of birds on his radar.<\/p>\n
“I went to go check on my boat and luckily I turned that way to check them and we found this small boat with two men adrift at sea, lost,” he said.<\/p>\n
Mr Canepa said the men had been fishing when their engine gave out.<\/p>\n
He said they were malnourished and would not have survived much longer in the open ocean. <\/p>\n
“It’s a hell of an ordeal, believe me,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Once they were taken on board I gave them water straight away… it was a dry spell, they weren’t getting much rain and what happened was they started drinking salt water and that’s lethal.<\/p>\n
“They wouldn’t have lasted another three days doing that.”<\/p>\n
The men were taken to the Solomon Islands, where arrangements were being made to return them to Kiribati.<\/p>\n
Stories of survival in the vast Pacific are not uncommon.<\/p>\n
In 2006, three Mexicans were found drifting in the middle of the Pacific in their stricken boat, nine months after setting out on a shark-fishing expedition.<\/p>\n
And in 1992, two fishermen, also from Kiribati, were at sea for 177 days before coming ashore in Samoa<\/p>\n
Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":25809,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[177],"tags":[406],"region":[1912],"source":[1986],"country":[],"state":[],"city":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/37866"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/newss"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/37866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37866"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=37866"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=37866"},{"taxonomy":"country","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/country?post=37866"},{"taxonomy":"state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/state?post=37866"},{"taxonomy":"city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/city?post=37866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}