Woman Survives Two Days Lost At Sea on a Rubber Dinghy

She survived using a few plastic bags and boiled sweets.

A woman survived for nearly 40 hours stranded in the Aegean Sea in a rubber dinghy.

According to the New Zealand Herald, Kushila Stein, 47 decided to take a dinghy ashore while helping a skipper named Mike transport a yacht from Turkey to Athens. At 4:30 pm, she texted Mike saying was heading back to the boat and that her phone battery was low. But then one of her oars got lost overboard and the wind swept her further out to sea.

Mike assumed she had decided to stay onshore longer after she hadn’t appeared hours later. But when he woke up the next day and she still wasn’t back, he got worried. He alerted Greek authorities about her disappearance, they sent out six Coast Guard vessels, a helicopter, and an underwater drone.

Stein was discovered almost two days later, 55 nautical miles out from Heraklion in Crete, Greece. She had wrapped herself plastic bags to keep warm and sustained herself off boiled sweets she had in her pack. Her first words to her mother after the incident were, “I still have one lolly left, mum.”

"She also told me she wrote down my name and number and attached to the dinghy so they would know who to contact if they found her and she was dead," her mother said. "She has been trained in sea survival so is quite competent. I think that might have saved her life."