A 15-year-old boy survived on top of an overturned skiff in Alaska’s frigid Bering Sea for roughly two days, losing his older brother and then his cousin to the ocean after the boat capsized while they were out fishing.
The teen, identified by a relative as Derek Parker Aghnaanga, was finally hoisted to safety Monday by a fishing boat near St Lawrence Island – a remote Alaskan island closer to Russia than it is to the US. The bodies of his cousin and brother were also recovered.
The cousin had held onto the overturned boat for a while too, but did not survive until the rescue, the teen told one of the rescuers.
The captain of the fishing boat that came to his aid said Aghnaanga clung to the skiff through darkness and water temperatures around 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit).
“That’s one tough kid,” Adam White, captain of The Northwest Explorer, told KTUU-TV in Anchorage.
“Through the teeth chattering, he had mentioned that his brother was still under the skiff,” White said. “And then he said that, in the previous night, before our rescue, that his cousin had slipped away.”