Anh Nguyen Austen

And somehow they weren't in that area.

So we were the only ship that day that got out.

Well, we were hoping to get to the Philippines.

And as it turned out, what happens, because I've been able to kind of find the footage and also do a little hindcasting in historical wave data, at the time our boat was in the water, there was magnificent storms that were of a magnitude, you know, that happen every 100 years.

So we were struggling with those waves.

So by the second day at sea, these huge waves had already flooded the engine.

So we were really drifting.

So there was no way that we were going to make it to our trajectory towards the Philippines.

We were just floating.

Well, no.

What happens is this storm, you know, the waves that are forming are about like 60 meters long and then three meters high.

And so whenever those waves are coming, they would just smash into the boat and then they would flood the engine.

And so we never even hit the eye of the storm.

So it was almost as if by the magnitude of this storm, we never get to...

the core of it.

If we got to the core of it, we would have died for sure.

But then somehow the waves and the engine cutting off drifted us to the rescue point where La Goyle was, which is the rescue boat with Médecins du Monde.

I don't remember the storm.

I really kind of had to reconstruct that when I interviewed the family and my parents in Paris because most of our ship members all resettled in Paris due to the visas that were given by the French government from Médecins du Monde.

And every year the group celebrates as a Catholic mass, this miracle of rescue, and then a memorial to those that drowned and other boats that drowned.