The French coastguard has rescued a Polish yachtsman adrift in the Indian Ocean. The man claims to have spent almost seven months on a broken boat. All this time he had his cat with him, who also survived despite all the hardships of their journey.
The 54-year-old Pole's odyssey began back in 2014. That's when he flew to India from the United States, where he had been living lately, and bought this very boat. Since his green card expired, and he could not return back to America, the man on the purchased boat went to Indonesia in search of earnings. He had pre-equipped his boat with a mast, engine, and rudder.
But his voyage was short-lived. Almost immediately after entering the ocean, the mast broke and the boat drifted westwards and washed up in the Comoros, between the African continent and Madagascar. There he lived for two years. During that time, Rackat applied to the Polish embassy for repatriation, but was refused.
«They gave me 150 euros, and that's it»," the traveler complained.
In May of this year he decided to try again, but this time he headed to the south of Africa and brought with him a cat named Samira from the Comoros. He was unsuccessful again when the boat could not take the sea, as he lost control and communications.
«We drifted to the Somali coast, then to the Maldives and then to Indonesia," he said, "I saw land several times, but I was never able to turn to it. I spotted a few ships, but the battery on my radio was dead».
This, according to Rackett, went on for nearly seven months until the rescue service of the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean discovered him near its shores.
A local charity organization helped the victim and offered him to stay in Reunion as an EU citizen.
It is hard to verify the words of Polish yachtsman and after the sensational story of two Hawaiians and their dogs the public is skeptical about such stories, but the main thing is that everything ended with a happy end.
The other day a cruise ship rescued six drowning sailors in the Caribbean Sea and a fishing boat caught Australians adrift on a life raft off the Philippines.
