Posted on 07/27/2026 2:04:57 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A California man who went missing in the Pacific Ocean for over a month has been found alive drifting off Hawaii. Kai Sato, 39, left Catalina Island on June 7 but two weeks later the mast on his sailboat snapped, he ran out of gas and his phone died, leaving him floating helplessly outside of shipping lanes.
He said he was left crying for days as he gave up and felt “like a sitting duck” as the waves pushed him further from any chance of being rescued. He told Hawaii News Now: “I cried for a whole week, just drifting south, like miserable. I felt like I was going to just try to turn my motor on and just suffocate, to kill myself.” But after five days of thinking, he snapped into action and began makeshift repairs to the boat with PVC pipes and kayak paddles.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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I've got to give him credit - he says he will make the journey again with a bigger craft.
Now he has that song Sailing stuck in his head.
Fish and squid landed in his vessel? Is that a thing?
Hey, when the children of Israel were wandering in the desert God sent quail and manna. Looks like God provided for this guy too.
...wife’s...
If that's an accurate description of his spouse, it might explain his fondness for long, solo, boat trips awzy from home.
Ginger or Mary Ann?
Mary Ann all day
'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.'”
I’m not a sailor - but relying on one’s iPhone for GPS navigation in the middle of the Pacific, with no back up - seems like a BAD idea.
LOL
An HF radio or $300 Garmin InReach would have resulted in maybe one uncomfortable night at sea before he was rescued. Dumbass.
Pretty dumb not having an EPIRB.
So the sailor, Kai Sato, went from Maynard G. Krebs to the Professor and got saved.
Yep.
Ginger is high maintenance with only marginally different positive female characteristics.
My calculus alway ends up with Mary Ann.
I don’t even like driving on a long journey and having to depend on a phone, so I have had a Garmin for years that did voice control and I really liked it, but...I could not update it for years now.
I have been out of this market and oblivious to changes, but after coming home from a 8 hour drive (to personally visit several Freepers I know!) the screen is so dim during the day it can barely be seen, and the navigation was...undependable. So, time to change.
It appears that the external GPS map devices (not the ones embedded in cars, which I won’t buy) have surrendered that market to smart phones. That I suspected would happen, but...I didn’t think it would happen so quickly.
I hate the ones built into the cars because you have to take your eyes off the road to look at them.
This is a cool survival story which might land him a book and a movie deal later. Remember the Japanese soldier discovered on Guam in the early 1970s roughly a quarter century after the war ended?
and night.
Curve ball! Natalie Schafer.
Somehow he had enough water to be alive after crying a whole week?
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