JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) – An Indonesian teen has been rescued after drifting at sea for 49 days on a floating fish trap and is back safely with his family.
19-year-old Aldi Novel Adilang had been working as a lamp keeper on a remote fishing trap known locally as a Rompong.
The trap was 125 kilometers (77 miles) off the northern coast of North Sulawesi Province in Indonesia.
Rompongs, which look like small huts, are fish aggregator devices that sit upon buoys or floats and are anchored to concrete blocks on the seafloor by rope.
Adilang’s job was to light lamps powered by a generator on the trap each night to attract fish.
He was hired to spend six months on Rompongs, with someone visiting at the end of each week to drop off food, water and fuel supplies and harvest the fish.
But in mid-July, strong winds and water currents broke the rope tethering the trap to its mooring position, causing him to drift out into the open sea.
The platform made it all the way to the waters of Guam where he was picked up by a Panamanian-flagged ship, MV Arpeggio, on August 31, before it continued onto Tokuyama Port in Japan.
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