It had been 52 days at sea for Jan Sayed and his crew of 17 men – it was time for them to return home to Karachi and their families.

As the Safina Abdul Wahid, a 42-meter fishing trawler, sailed back towards Karachi, there were some rumblings in the engine. Sayed and his crew tried to figure out the problem, propulsion came to a halt and the engine stopped working.

With food and fuel enough only for a few more days, the Safina Abdul Wahid was stranded on open waters in the North Arabian Sea – 196 nautical miles away from the coast and only a VHF radio to call for help.

As the next day rolled in, Sayed and his crew finally managed to get in touch with a near-by trawler, through a satellite phone on board. Within the hour Kamil Yar and Jan Mohammad, the owners of the trawler were at the Headquarters of the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency (PMSA). The PMSA is responsible, among many other things, for search and rescue operations within Pakistan’s maritime borders.

The Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) sent out a search and rescue mission, first to find the trawler by air. By 4 pm on Monday, the PMSA had their ship, the Vehdat out at sea. By Tuesday the trawler had been spotted. It was finally on Thursday that the Vehdat reached the fishermen and began towing them home.

“We found the fishermen 25 nautical miles away from where we had initially located them,” said Commander Rizwan Riaz, captain of the Vehdat. "They were lucky.”

According to Riaz, the trawler was just a few miles away from drifting out of Pakistan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and towards the east African coast.

There are almost 20,000 small to medium fishing boats out at sea in Pakistan, along the Balochistan and Sindh coast. It is the PMSA’s responsibility to protect these fishermen if in distress and to make sure they have life-saving equipment on board before they go out to sea.

Thursday’s rescue, according to Riaz, was the furthest the PMSA has had to go in recent years to rescue fishermen in distress. – Text by Sara Faruqi/Dawn.com, photos by Nadir Siddiqui/Dawn.com