TWO teenagers lost at sea for six days were found by fishermen clinging to their 14ft Sunfish sailing dinghy off North Carolina’s Cape Fear.

The boys — Josh Long, 18, and Troy Driscoll, 15 — quenched their thirst with sea water and shared a single wetsuit to stay warm at night. They tried to take dips in the ocean to cool off under the midday sun, but were chased back on to their boat by sharks.

They ate jellyfish and sang hymns to keep up their morale, tormenting each other with fantasies of banana splits and strawberry milkshakes. Then, Troy told a newspaper from his hospital bed: “I asked God to take me. You’re out there fighting for your life. We didn’t want to fight anymore.”

The teenagers set out on a fishing trip on their single-sailed boat from Sullivan’s Island on April 24, a blustery day when the National Weather Service advised small boats to stay off the water. They realised quickly that they were in trouble and tried to swim to shore, pulling their boat with them, but were swept out to sea.

The US Coast Guard mounted a search operation, conducting more than 40 sweeps with ships, helicopters, and a C130 aircraft across a 1,300-square- mile area stretching from Hilton Head Island to Bull’s Bay, South Carolina. It abandoned the effort on Tuesday.

The boys thought that they had drifted so far out into the Atlantic that they were close to Africa. Every time they saw a passing vessel, they stood up to wave their paddles and shout. One night, they were awakened by splashing waves to find a large freighter bearing down on them. “It was like some monster building in the water,” Mr Driscoll told the Charleston Post and Courier.

On Saturday they hailed a fishing vessel called the Renegade and this time their cries were heard.

They were picked up, sunburnt, dehydrated and exhausted, about 111 miles north of Sullivan’s Island, well outside the Coast Guard’s search grid. It has launched an inquiry into its operation to determine how the boys’ boat confounded the predictions of it computer models of weather and tide patterns.

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