TOBAGO FISHERMAN: IT WAS SAD

A Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard plane touched down at Crown Point Airport around 3.25 pm yesterday bringing home two of the three Tobago fishermen who had miraculously survived a 33-day ordeal drifting at sea.

From Pigeon Point, Tobago, to the coast of Mexico where they were rescued by that country’s Coast Guard, the physical and moreso the emotional strain had taken its toll and Joseph Ramkisoon could take no more. He made this clear as he and Anil “Busshead” Ramsook sat in the Coast Guard jeep that had driven them from the tarmac to outside the Terminal Building, where his pregnant wife and other teary-eyed relatives waited. “No! we are tired; we go through enough, we go through so many different things; right now we are tired, and it make us sad to go through so many more,” Ramkisoon told Newsday through the window of the jeep as media representatives, relatives and friends crowded around. “I can go through this, but for now it’s too much for me, because we just come from Trinidad. It was sad, and just now there it’s like tears, I have to wear my ‘darkers’,” he pleaded.

Earlier on the tarmac, where they were met by Acting THA Chief Secretary Cynthia Alfred, they explained that the third survivor, Andy “Killer” White was kept in Trinidad for further medical attention. The three had gone fishing out of Pigeon Point on June 26. Ramkisoon said their troubles began when they realised that the gasoline was saturated with water which got into the filters and engine heads of the two 85hp outboard engines causing them to shut down. By the time they got them fixed, they were too far from shore with very little gas.