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Two women and their dogs have been rescued after being lost at sea for five months.
- The two women were sailing from Hawaii to Tahiti
- They lost their way when their engine broke down in rough weather
- Jennifer Appel's mother always had hope her daughter would be found
The women were sailing from Hawaii to Tahiti when their engine broke down in bad weather in late May.
They believed they could still reach Tahiti using their sails.
The women, identified by the Navy as Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiaba, from Honolulu, were rescued on Wednesday after a Taiwanese fishing vessel spotted them about 1,500 kilometres south-east of Japan, well off their planned course, and alerted the United States coast guard.
The Navy's USS Ashland arrived early the next day.
"They saved our lives," Ms Appel said in a statement released by the Navy.
"The pride and smiles we had when we saw [US Navy] on the horizon was pure relief."
Two months into the trip, well after they were scheduled to arrive in Tahiti, the women began making distress calls, but there were no vessels close by and they were too far out to sea for the signals to be detected on land.
They told the Navy they survived because they had packed a water purifier and enough food for a year, mostly dried goods like oatmeal and pasta.
Ms Appel's mother said she never gave up hope her resourceful daughter would be found.
Joyce Appel, 75, said she got a call from her daughter early on Thursday, more than five months after they last spoke.
She answered the phone as normal, wondering who wanted to sell her something, when she heard her daughter's voice on the other end of the line.
"She said, 'Mum?', and I said, 'Jennifer!?', because I hadn't heard from her in like five months," she said.
"And she said, 'yes mum', and that was really exciting."
Ms Appel departed on May 3 but her mother said her phone was lost overboard the first day at sea.
"Various things on her boat broke, the mast broke and the engine wouldn't start when she needed power," her mother said.
"So she had several problems that caused her to end up drifting in the ocean."
Just over a week after Ms Appel left Honolulu, her mother called the coast guard, who launched a search and rescue effort.
"I waited and waited to see when I would hear from her," she said.
In the time her daughter was missing, Joyce changed her phone number and was worried her daughter would not know how to contact her.
But she always knew she would return.
"I had hope all along, she is very resourceful and she's curious and as things break she tries to repair them; she doesn't sit and wait for the repairman to get there, so I knew the same thing would be true of the boat," she said.
AP
Topics: human-interest, navy, united-states
First posted