‘Brothers’ come to the rescue of fisherman

Thiruvananthapuram: Two years ago he had survived cyclone Ockhi which had claimed lives of some of his friends. Patrick Fernandez, a 63-year-old fisherman from Thumba, had a close brush with death again, while he was at the sea on Thursday.
“We had left for the sea by around 4pm and from the moment the journey began, I felt uneasy and around 6:30pm I turned completely sick with loss of balance and dizziness accompanied by headache. Suddenly, I fell down hitting the side of my head on the boat’s engine,” recalls Patric Fernandez who is currently recuperating at Medical College Hospital.
Patric along with his elder brother Basil Fernandez, 65, had gone fishing on Thursday evening. By around 6pm, they reached deep sea, about 25 nautical miles from the shore, and had laid nets and anchored the boat with no other fishermen nearby. Moments later Patric fell down after suffering a stroke. He had nearly gone over the boat into the sea but luck and his brother saved the day for Patric who was face-to-face with the terrors of cyclone Ockhi at sea when it hit the coast in 2017.
Patric said, there was a complete sense of helplessness when the events unfolded. “My brother panicked and called Coast Guard, fisheries marine enforcement, coastal police station and fellow fishermen. Hours passed and nobody came to the rescue and it was only by 9:30pm that fellow fishermen arrived and took me back ashore. Kazhakkoottam police had by then arranged an ambulance and transported me here,” he said. Even though his condition stabilized, he is unable to stand on both legs due to disorientation and lack of balance due to the stroke.
“Till now, neither police nor authorities from fisheries department have arrived to check on me and no FIR has been registered. I have fisherman’s insurance but have no idea on how to claim it without a case registered about the accident,” he said.
Patrick Fernandez was one of the ambassadors chosen by the ISRO to announce high tech communication devices ‘NavIC’ for fishing boats across the state. He attended the news conference to announce the entry of NavIC and was among the first lot of fishermen who had paid Rs 1,500 as advance to install the facility in their fishing boats.
He is yet to get the NavIC equipment and had that been installed in the boat, rescue would have been much easier as the location of the boat could have been conveyed to other boats and to the shore easily.
According to an official of fisheries department, the delay in distribution of the devices is due to the decision of supplying ‘two-way communication devices instead of the already released one-way version. “The 250 samples ISRO tested are one-way devices that can send messages from the shore. The fishermen at sea can only receive information and provide distress calls as response. ISRO was developing a two-way communication system which will be distributed soon. As of now, 450 devices have been supplied in addition to the 250 samples that were supplied earlier by ISRO,” the official said.