At around 4:30pm on Feb 25, 2016, a fisherman named Christopher Rivas and some companions were on a boat off the coast of the municipality of Barobo in the province of Surigao del Sur in the Philippines.
According to a police report, Rivas and his companions were about to head home when they saw a 40-foot white yacht with a damaged sail floating from afar. Rivas and his companions decided to get near the yacht to see if anyone was on board.
Once they got near the yacht, Rivas decided to step inside it and look around. Much to his shock, he saw the mummified figure of a man slumped over a table in what appeared to be the yacht’s radio room.
After the shocking discovery, Rivas and his companions decided to drag the boat closer to shore. However, since the tide was low, they had to leave the yacht in a much deeper portion of the sea.
Then, finally, at around 3pm on Feb 26, cops from the Barobo Police Station were brought in to take a closer look inside the yacht.
Through documents and photos that they found in the yacht, police were able to identify the mummified man as Manfred Fritz Bajorat, a German national.
The Philippine authorities soon got in touch with the German embassy in Manila to get more information on Bajorat. They are now trying to locate his friends and family members. It’s been said that Bajorat and his wife broke up in 2008 and that she died from cancer soon after that. They have a daughter named Nina.
Various reports have revealed that the last documented sighting of Bajorat was in 2009. He was 59 years old back then and was believed to have been preparing for another one of his long-haul sea trips. He had been in Mallorca, Spain.
Apparently, the high sodium content of the sea air had contributed to the mummification of his body. Cops theorized that he must have had a heart attack.
In the reports, police spokeswoman Goldie Lou Siega was quoted as saying, “We have no evidence of a second person aboard and no weapon was found on the yacht.”
An autopsy is being conducted on Bajorat’s well-preserved remains.
As for now, some questions remain unanswered. Nobody really knows yet when exactly Bajorat died, what he was doing, or where he was headed.
