A California man who vanished into the Pacific for more than a month has been plucked alive from the drink off Hawaii — after surviving on scraps of oatmeal, scavenged fish and squid, and desperate licks of seawater condensation.
Kai Sato, 39, shoved off from Catalina Island on June 7 for a solo sail to Hawaii. About two weeks in, disaster struck: the mast on his sailboat snapped. With no fuel, a dead phone and far from shipping lanes, the currents just kept shoving him farther into the middle of nowhere.
“I cried for a whole week, just drifting south, like miserable,” Sato told Hawaii News Now. “I felt like I was going to just try to turn my motor on and just suffocate, to kill myself.”
He eventually snapped out of the despair, jury-rigging repairs with PVC pipes and kayak paddles. For food, he scraped by on leftover oatmeal plus whatever fish and squid washed aboard. Water? He collected condensation in a bucket and licked it to stay alive.
“I was just licking that to survive,” he said.
Nearly a month later, the crippled boat drifted back into the California-Hawaii shipping lane. Crew aboard the container ship Pasha Hawaii spotted him and managed to get a rope ladder down after two tries. A rescue photo shows the wreckage — sails trailing in the water beneath the battered vessel.
Once aboard, Sato was handed clothes, fruit and water. “Oh my God, yeah, like ecstatic, you know what I mean? Like I was like crying and like so happy… they were so good to me, those guys,” he said.
Sato is now recovering with a relative in Hawaii but is already talking about hopping a bigger boat for the Philippines. Some people just can’t quit the ocean.