14 DAY TRIAL // Australian authorities announced that they recovered on Saturday two survivors from a shipwreck that occurred on December 23rd, off the country's north coast. The two fishermen, both from Myanmar, had been seen floating in a large ice box, by a scout-patrol plane, and a helicopter was immediately dispatched to rescue them. Both men, in their 20s, where taken to a hospital on Thursday Island, in far-northern Australia. They reported spending more than 25 days at sea, after their small vessel was sunk by heavy waves, and other 16 crew members perished.
That portion of the sea is heavily infested with sharks, and how the two managed to stay alive for so long without fresh water and food is still a mystery. Doctors at the hospital announced that the two were recovering nicely, and that they had been released to police custody. Law enforcement representatives and immigration office officials will question the two more thoroughly, to find out exactly what the boat was doing in the area, and how did the boat sink.
Australian officials said that there would be no rescue operation to save the other members. "The information they provided to us was that they witnessed other crew members in the water, none of whom had any flotation device, so we've done an assessment and we don't believe anybody would be able to survive 25 days actually in the water," spokeswoman Tracy Jiggins, from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, told Reuters on Tuesday.
"It would be difficult to determine where that search should be. That's a huge amount of water they could have covered, and we have notified search and rescue officials in Indonesia," she added. Australia's search-and-rescue area is the largest in the world, and covers approximately one tenth of the planet's total area. More than 53 million square kilometers (20 million square miles) stretch across the Pacific, Indian and Southern Ocean, and authorities say there's no way of knowing where to start.
"They had no safety equipment, no beacons, no means of communication, and they'd been drifting for 25 days," Jiggins explained, saying that it was dumb luck that the plane spotted the two, crammed inside a small ice box, floating on the vast stretches of water. Their medical condition was pretty rough, as they were dehydrated and starving, but doctors maintained that their recovery would go without a hitch and that the two had been indeed very lucky.