The four people — including a Hong Kong man — who were lost at sea near the Philippines for 10 days survived by eating flying fish and distilling seawater with a movie-inspired technique.
One of the missing women, Martha Miguel, told Spanish radio station COPE that the group improvised the technique based on something she had seen in a film, using a cellphone screen and a plastic bag to catch evaporating water.
By repeating the process every 15 minutes, each person was able to drink once an hour, Miguel said on Friday.
The group also survived by eating three flying fish which landed in the boat, Associated Press reports.
On the “sixth or seventh day”, having run out of fish, the resourceful survivors turned to eating clams stuck to the boat, as well as mussels crusted onto a piece of flotsam floating nearby.
Spanish nationals David Hernandez and Martha Miguel, Hong Kong resort owner Tommy Lam, and Lam’s Malaysian employee Armelia Ali Hassan went missing when their small boat was capsized by a “freak wave” on May 2 in waters just off the coast of Malaysia.
The boat was originally believed to have sunk after its motor was found tangled in a fishing boat net.
Hernandez told COPE that the quartet never lost hope of survival, despite many vessels and even a plane passing them without realising they were stranded.
The survivors were eventually rescued by two Vietnamese fishing boats off Borneo island after 10 days at sea, and were reported to be “in good health”, but weak and sunburned.
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