Alone on a wide, wide sea

By PATRICK GOWER

His eyes were wide open but they showed just white - there were no pupils. His torso was brown but his hands and legs had also turned white.

The sight was nearly enough to scare off Lai Luwaina, who had sailed out from his Papua New Guinea village to investigate a drifting boat with two men in it.

"Then I felt very sorry for him. A tear dropped," says Luwaina.

One of the two desperately weak men whispered to Luwaina: "Where are we?"

"I am Papua New Guinean. You are in Papua New Guinea," he replied.

"Are you going to kill us?"

"No. I am here to save your lives in the name of our Lord and Jesus Christ."

The pair had survived for 132 days drifting 4000km across the Pacific. Two others had died on the journey.

Their ocean epic started after they lost their outboard motors when fishing off Samoa in June. The Samoan Government had not searched for them. Their employer had not reported them missing until two weeks after they were due back.

Container ships had cruised past but had not noticed their tiny catamaran. The nine flares they let off as they drifted through the populated Fiji Islands went unseen.

But Luwaina saw them from his mountaintop garden on Normanby Island, off the eastern tip of New Guinea. His keen eyes had saved their lives. The doctor who first saw them said they resembled Nazi concentration camp victims, their medical condition so bad "they were like walking dead".

The journey by Lafaele Tofi, aged 36, and Telea Pa'a, 27, was like many during those thousands of years when the Pacific peoples were spreading across the vast ocean. But the deaths of their companions - To'o Ioani, 59, and Tofi Lauvi, 42 - were also far from unique in the modern Samoan fishing industry, which has had at least 34 men die at sea as commercial imperatives force their traditional boats further offshore.

The men had been using long-lines - huge lines with hundreds of hooks dragged behind a boat - when they pulled in a haul of yellowfin tuna weighing so much it threatened to sink the boat.

Unable to cut though the wire lines quickly enough, the men shed their two outboard motors instead. They stayed afloat but their radio equipment was drenched and useless - and so, on June 18, their ordeal began.

For the next 4 1/2 months they ate by swimming out for floating coconuts, catching fish with their remaining lines, even grabbing birds that landed on the boat.

They used their knives to stab a hovering shark and pulled it aboard; they later did the same to a passing turtle. Water was rationed from a pot on the boat but, because it rained only about once a week, the men also sipped small quantities of seawater.

With the tarpaulin roof having rotted away, there was no shelter.

The oldest of the four, Ioani, died after a month. The men say they kept his body aboard for as long as they could before it decomposed. They did the same with Lauvi, who died a month later.

The doctor tending to survivors at Alotau General Hospital in Papua, New Guinea, Australian tropical medicine specialist Barry Kirby, said the kidneys of the older men would have packed up first as they slowly died from dehydration.

Dr Kirby said he hoped the arrival of a Samoan doctor from another part of Papua New Guinea this weekend would help to elicit more details from the men.

"When they are asked to reflect, out comes the trauma and they break down. It will be a gradual process before the real story comes out and their voyage unfolds.

"At the least we know that once four men became two, the demand on the water supply and the available food was reduced, and that helped their ability to survive longer."

The men are now in a stable condition, although Pa'a still cannot walk. Both have lost their hair.

Pa'a, who is 1.8m tall and big-boned, now weighs about 50kg - half his usual body weight.

Tofi, who is able to sit up in bed, is the only one who can speak a little English. His few words were for the 45-year-old Luwaina. "From this man I have become born again because my life was lost for nearly [five] months adrift at sea. This family is my real family. His children are my children. He is my brother, like he and I are from one mother and father."

Luwaina is a father of six. He has been by the men's side since they were found on November 6, and in the Papua tradition of "wantok" - kinship - will stay with them until they are well enough to leave early next month.

In pidgin English he told how difficult their rescue was. Although their boat was just 500m from shore, choppy seas made it difficult for him to load the men into his dugout outrigger canoe and he had to make two trips out to the 7m-long, aluminium, twin-hulled catamaran, a traditional Samoan "alia".

Luwaina says once on shore, "I tell my kids: 'Not go to school, help these men.'

"One of my small kids, about 7 or 8 years old, got frightened and said, 'Daddy, if these men die maybe we will be in trouble'. I said, 'Son, don't worry, our God is with us'."

He gave the men his blanket and towel for warmth. His family heated water and cleaned their bodies, feeding them small amounts of food such as taro and tapioca from his mountaintop garden. They spent the night in his single-roomed hut, one of just six in his tiny village.

A message was run to the slightly bigger Gulegule village nearby that they were coming. Although only 3km away as the crow flies, it is across mountainous country and the route was closer to 14km as they wound their way through the rugged hills. A defence force Iroquois flew over them but was unable to find a landing space.

Despite there being no vehicles, roads or airstrip on the island, the villagers had an intravenous drip and were able to resuscitate the weakened fishermen.

Word of their arrival had reached Dr Kirby at his hospital on the mainland, and he was able to make a four-hour trip across to the island to collect them in a dinghy with a 75hp motor.

By then, the bond between the Samoans and the islanders had become strong.

Back in Samoa the Congregational Christian Church in the village of Faleasiuhad had held a farewell for the missing men just days before.

Rev Eti Tamata said there would now be a service of thanks for the miracle that at least two of the men would return. But he said joy has turned to anger among the 3000 villagers. "They don't like the Government attitude. They (the Government) never looked for these men, they took it for granted they were dead, that they had gone already."

The decision not to deploy Samoa's search and rescue boat was made by Police Commissioner Asi Blakelock. Missing fishermen being written off for dead without a search is far from unusual.

Two men were found adrift in Vanuatu in September after a month at sea where their two companions had died. They told on their return of how they had been sent out under-equipped, including being without a spare sparkplug that could have started the motor and saved their crewmates' lives.

The Australian Navy has seconded Lieutenant-commander Wayne Richards to advise Blakelock on maritime safety. He says the main stumbling block is the fishing industry. His records show 34 fishermen's lives have been lost at sea in the past five years, although other information provided by accident compensation information shows more have gone unreported.

Alia such as that used by Tofi and Pa'a and those in the September drift are widely used in Samoa. They are an advanced form of the traditional fishing catamaran, and were designed in the 1960s for subsistence inshore fishing within sight of land. Over time those inshore waters have been fished out, the boats have moved out further and owners have realised the profit that longline fishing for tuna could yield.

Richards: "These latest men were not reported missing for two weeks after they were due. The owner did not know where they were fishing. What are we supposed to do: search the whole Pacific?

"It is basic disrespect for human life by these owners. All they care about is what day the poor fishermen get back so they can sell their haul."

Richards says the latest drift voyage will eventually be investigated. The Herald was unable to reach the boat's owner, Filpo Sabine, about the work conditions he had provided.

Despite changes to legislation and both education and enforcement campaigns, Richards says just 10 per cent of the industry has willingly improved standards. Most have ignored the Government's pleas, and the latest deaths come on the heels of an editorial in the national newspaper, the Samoa Observer, castigating the attitude of the boat-owners in the September drift and calling on Samoan society to "look at ways we can make life safe for the living [by] equipping our employees with the right tools.

"How terrified their [families'] souls, broken their sleeps and painful their days in the weeks of waiting to hear from their beloved sons. A parent's hell. Their strength is these parents do not want to see other Samoan sons perish victim to negligence and left to pray for water, food and a kinder fate."

Surviving against the odds

* In the early 1860s a Cook Islander called Elikana was blown into the open seas and spent more than two months drifting until he found Tuvalu. The drift voyage had historical significance because Elikana found those on Tuvalu were "happily being heathens" and he was able to introduce them to Christianity as an "accidental missionary".

* A year or two before the Second World War, the Regina, a Japanese schooner, left the Marshall Islands for another atoll 160km away. But the captain lost his bearings and the schooner drifted helplessly for many weeks with 27 men, women and children aboard. After 65 days the schooner came across Nauru. All 27 people on board were found lying on deck unconscious.

* One of the longest drift voyages in the Pacific was that of a 24-year-old Gilbert Islander, Nabetari, who was working for the British on Ocean Island in 1942 when the Japanese captured it. In April 1944 he and six fellow islanders, who had been forced to fish for the Japanese, set out in two canoes joined by a rope to try to reach the Gilbert Islands, now the Republic of Kiribati. After several months the rope between the two canoes broke and they drifted apart. In November Nabetari hit land 3000km away from where he left.

* When the Kon-Tiki's voyage from Peru to French Polynesia reached Easter Island in 1947, boating fever gripped some of the islanders. At the end of November 1955, five Easter Islanders reached the southern Cook Islands after a 54-day trip in an open boat. They were without food for 24 days on their 4000km journey.

* At the end of October 1963, three Cook Islanders reached an island in Southern Vanuatu after a 60-day drift voyage in a 17ft open boat in the northern Cook Islands. The distance covered was about 3500km. The three men and four others had set out to make a 30km crossing with a sail but no engine. A strong wind forced them into the open sea. Their voyage became the subject of a book called The Man Who Refused to Die. Their leader, Teehu Makimare, was awarded the Royal Society's Stan Hope medal for bravery.

* In June 1964 a Tahitian man, Temanihi Tepa, drifted from his homeland to an island in American Samoa 1600km away in 155 days. He and another man, who died, had set out in February on a short trip in a skiff with an outboard motor. The motor gave out, they were unable to repair it and began to drift westward.

* In 1989 the New Zealand trimaran Rose-Noelle capsized and was adrift for 119 days after leaving on June 1 for a trip from Picton to Tonga. It washed ashore on Great Barrier Island on September 30. Its four-man crew were skipper John Glennie, Phillip Hoffman, Rick Hellreigel (died 1991) and Jim Nalepka.

(Sources: Pacific historians Robert Langdon and Hugh Laracy; Herald files)