
A California man who went missing in the Pacific Ocean for more than a month has been found alive after surviving on scraps of food, fish, and even condensation collected from seawater while drifting far from help. Kai Sato, 39, set sail alone from Catalina Island on June 7 bound for Hawaii, but disaster struck two weeks into the voyage when the mast on his sailboat snapped. Stranded outside major shipping lanes with no fuel and a dead phone, Sato said he spent days overwhelmed by despair as the current carried him farther into the open ocean. “I cried for a whole week, just drifting south, like miserable,” he told Hawaii News Now. “I felt like I was going to just try to turn my motor on and just suffocate, to kill myself.” After several days, Sato began fashioning makeshift repairs with PVC pipes and kayak paddles. He survived on leftover oatmeal, fish and squid that landed aboard, and condensation collected in a bucket. “I was just licking that to survive,” he said. Nearly a month later, Sato drifted back into the California-Hawaii shipping route, where the crew of the container ship Pasha Hawaii spotted and rescued him after two attempts to lower a rope ladder.















