A trip to a tropical island in the South China Sea seemed an idyllic way to usher in the lunar new year for Fan Li Xia.

That turned into a nightmare for the 40-year-old from China when the boat she and a group of friends were in suddenly started listing and sank as they were heading to Pulau Mengalum.

It is a 30-hour nightmare – one that took them from the searing heat of the day to the windy, icy cold of the South China Sea nights – that she will take a long time to get over.

Fan, who is now being treated for severe sunburn, spoke of how she and the other passengers were told to gather in a group while in the water and how they tied themselves to each other using the rope on their life jackets.

As they remained adrift in the sea, Fan said the group tried to keep their spirits up by giving each other encouragement and talked about what they would do after their ordeal was over.

“However, after about a day, I started to lose hope of ever being rescued. I thought we were all going to die in the sea,” she said.

She said one of their friends, a man, became unconscious while they were adrift in the water.

“We tried holding on to him at first. Then, we too got tired so we had to let him go. There seemed to be no hope for us to be rescued,” she recalled.

Just when she thought all was lost and they were doomed, several fishing boats approached them and Fan felt relief.

The fishermen quickly pulled the survivors on board their vessel and gave them water.

Fan said many of them were so severely sunburned that their skin peeled off.

“There was a lot of blood in the fishing boat after we were rescued,” she said.

Another survivor said she was so desperate that she had to quench her thirst by drinking her urine.

“All I knew was that I had to survive through any means,” said the woman who declined to be identified.

She said they saw some boats on the horizon on Saturday afternoon and tried shouting and waving to them.

They tried to swim to the boats but the currents were against them.

“We were just too slow and the boats disappeared from view,” she said. Nightfall was initially a relief from the heat but it soon became freezing cold with the strong winds.

Source:
courtesy of THE STAR

by Ruben Sario, Stephanie Lee, Dina Murad, Ashley Tang, And Gan Pei Ling

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