His drifting ended last week as he looked into the sky and saw a plane. If he not want to take me, then he must make something happen.'' ''If God want to take me, I ask him to take me right away. I think this is end of my life,'' he said. In those most dark and desperate days when the sun rained down upon him and split his lips, he did not lose his faith. Pham said he subsisted for a time on nothing. There were no mentions of DiMaggio in those old newspapers, but the New York Mets were still in contention. To amuse himself, he reread yellowed newspapers, the commander said. The shabby little boat was rusted and covered in barnacles its sail was patched with a shirt. His radio was broken, he said, and the motor's fuel was saturated with water. He kept himself occupied watching videos powered by a solar panel. Pham does not know what an albatross is, but is quite sure he did not kill one. They weighed as much as 200 pounds, he noticed, but contained as little as 20 pounds of meat. Because he had no motor, he could drift up on the turtles, he said, which are usually scared off by loud noises, and lasso them with a rope. Sea gulls, he was surprised to learn, taste tantalizingly like chicken. With hundreds of sea gulls about, he lashed fish to the broken mast and clubbed the birds when they dropped in to eat. Pham said today as a tooth dropped out of his mouth. He caught tuna and cooked it on a grill built from a metal bucket and a grate. Since he lived on the boat, he said, he had fishing tackle and firewood. He was saved by the ocean, he said, and he survived on what she provided - meals of yellowtail, tuna and roasted sea gull washed down with rainwater collected in a makeshift basin of his tattered sail. ''Sailboat with no sail, no motor, can't do nothing,'' he said. Pham said he discovered his mast snapped like a dry cattail and his main and jib sails trapped and torn beneath the hull. Pham slept below in his 26-foot pleasure craft, Sea Breeze. A southerly wind shifted to the east as Mr. Pham set sail from Long Beach on a 25-mile trip to Santa Catalina Island. Commander Parriot said the details he saw were consistent with Mr. Gary Parriot, whose naval frigate was in the area on a six-month counternarcotics patrol and plucked Mr. He has never been charged with a felony, federal authorities said. Pham, a Vietnamese citizen, checks out with officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He did not file a float plan before his trip, and no missing persons report was filed on his behalf. Pham's account is not without its skeptics.Īfter all, he was found in a highly trafficked drug corridor off the coast of Costa Rica. The story sounds like a whopper, a fish-tale perhaps, and Mr.
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