kindness
Divers found the lost fisherman alive after 15 days
The search had become a recovery. Then someone answered back.
A fisherman lost inside an unmapped underwater cave in southeastern Mexico was found alive 15 days after he vanished, pulled out by cave divers who kept searching long after the mission had turned into a recovery effort. Erasto Crisanto Valdez, 31, entered a cenote near San Francisco La Paz in Veracruz on July 23 while fishing with his father and became lost in a passage with visibility of less than a meter. Navy divers and local residents searched for more than a week without success. Then Harry Gust joined with fellow diver Rosalino Rivera. On his first day Gust found a spare air tank roughly 100 meters in. On the second, about 30 minutes into the dive, he found a dry chamber and called into the dark. "Yes!" came the answer. Valdez had been drinking cave water and praying, losing all sense of time. "Those 15 days felt like only three days to me," he said. Rivera shared his diving cylinder to bring Valdez back through the flooded passage. He is recovering in hospital with his family.
