The impressive story of the fisherman who spent almost two days missing on the high seas near Santa Marta

Ovidio Lesmes says that it is God's work to have returned to the mainland, after he went out on Thursday morning, April 7, as every day, to fish in the maritime area of the Tayrona Natural Park in northern Colombia, but a mechanical breakdown dragged him almost 14 nautical miles off the coast.

He was rescued on Saturday morning, after 48 hours missing. In a dialogue with Caracol News, Lesmes said that his human capacities were inferior to the challenge of surviving on the high seas, it is not explained how he managed to get safe on a cliff and said that pollution that kills the seas helped him achieve the feat.

The fisherman was, around 11:00 in the morning, in the middle of work north of Taganga, but his boat had mechanical failures and the engine shut down. He tried to fix it, but he was washed away by the water. He beckoned to other fishermen, who did not understand that he needed a trailer. He dropped an anchor that found no place to bury himself and ended up in the vicinity of the Isla de la Aguja.

“Somewhere I get there,” he thought as the current carried his boat. He tried to crash the boat between the stones, so that it would not continue dragging it on the high seas, but when a wave was going to achieve it he lifted it several meters. The boat plunged to the tip and, looking for what to hold on to the surface, he realized that he was already several nautical miles from “La Aguja”.

He found a gas tank and held on to it so as not to submerge. He told the news that the smell of fuel drove away the animals, one of the risks of keeping the body submerged. It was 3:00 in the afternoon and I didn't know what his destination would be.

He spent Thursday night on Friday morning clinging to the can. He had a blue bust that he took off to tie it around his waist with a pimpina, he lay down in the water and resigned himself to accepting the fate that would reach him adrift. “Yeah, I got here,” he thought.

At 10:00 in the morning, when his body was already burned by sunshine all morning, the day after he disappeared, he said he would not give up. “I started to take my arm,” he said.

“One dominates the mind. I resigned myself and said: if I don't dehydrate, I arrive; and I didn't get dehydrated. I avoided drinking seawater, because if I drink sea water it was. One already has the instinct that this is so,” he told Noticias Caracol, two days after his rescue.

“I swam back, that is a feat that I as a human being do not have the capacity to do. That was God's work,” he said, because he braced all day, until 6:00 in the afternoon, in what he traveled more than 10 nautical miles, about 16 kilometers.

He reached La Aguja Island, again, and climbed the rocks to safety. He managed to avoid locating himself in a place where the waves did not burst and it is not explained how he did it, exhausted, with burning skin and the despair of preserving life.

In the middle of the rocks on the beach he found dozens of plastic bottles that reach the sea due to human neglect. He found a few drops of drinking water and a piece of Coca Cola that served to wet his lips and improve his mood.

That's how he spent his second night missing. He had seen helicopters, Navy boats and fishermen, but they couldn't see him. It was well into the morning of Saturday, April 11, when a friendly chinchorrero saw him and came to his rescue with the members of the Santa Marta Coast Guard Station.

He was clinging to a rock, they put him safely on a Navy boat, gave him water, clothes and a cap and took him to Taganga where his relatives were waiting in anguish and hope. They received him as a hero “For those who didn't believe in me, I'm still here,” he said as he got off the Navy boat. He arrived smiling and anxious to tell everything that had happened to him, warning of a story that he himself did not quite believe. “Calm down, I'm all burned,” he told his relatives who filled him with hugs and kisses.

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