Karachi, Pakistan ? The Pakistani fisherman shivered as he remembered six days floating in the Arabian Sea, clinging to a makeshift raft made of wooden planks and plastic buoys after his boat sank in fierce monsoon rains.

Mohammed Mumtaz Magsi washed ashore on Pakistan’s southern coast — the only survivor from a crew of 17. He faced high waves, hunger, stinging fish bites and a blistering sun that slowly took the lives of five other survivors of the initial disaster.

“I don’t know how I held on, the thirst was so bad,” the 22-year-old Magsi said.

Thin, with a dark scraggly beard, Magsi recalled his ordeal Wednesday as he crouched on a mattress in the two-room hut he shares with his parents and five siblings in the slums of Karachi, in southern Pakistan.

Three weeks ago, Magsi said, he and a friend, Pervaiz, were job hunting on the Karachi docks. Magsi said he used to work at a textile factory and heard that fishing paid better.

Both young men found work on a fishing boat and were told they could each make $85 to $100, a big sum for Magsi’s poor family.

Magsi said he didn’t care that the boat had no radio, life jackets or safety gear or that the most sophisticated equipment on board was a compass.

On the seventh day, the weather turned stormy, but the men kept working.

He had just crawled inside the tiny space he shared with six other men under the ship’s deck when the floor heaved and he was thrown against the wall. Cold water started pouring in as the men scrambled to get back on deck.

Mohammed Mumtaz Magsi narrates his ordeal in Karachi, Pakistan. Magsi spent six days floating in the Arabian Sea, clinging to a raft made of wooden planks after his boat sank.

The wooden boat rattled and creaked, shaken by huge waves. The rear of the boat was sinking fast and there was no sign of the 11 men who had been working on deck only hours earlier.

The six survivors fashioned a crude raft using wooden planks and fishing buoys.

“One of the men managed to bring a rope along, and we tied it around our chests and secured it to the raft,” said Magsi, raising his thin arms to show the yellow welts made by the rope.

Two days after the ship went down, the sun began burning. Parched, hungry and exhausted, the men were losing hope.

“I was the youngest. I thought I would be the first one to go,” he said.

Magsi remembered the first man to die: He could no longer endure the thirst and swallowed sea water.

“He started foaming at the mouth,” said Magsi. “He said ‘let me go.’ We tried to stop him at first but then we let him go.”

One by one the men died, and by the sixth day only Magsi was left.

“I think it was early morning on the sixth day when I saw something in the horizon,” Magsi said. He swam to land, but says he doesn’t know where he got the strength.

Villagers found him and took him to a hospital on a donkey cart.

“What happened to the crew remains a mystery,” said Khan Mohammed Peerzada of the Fishermen’s Cooperative Society. Not even the wreckage of the boat has been recovered, he said.