Wellington - Two men were hospitalized Wednesday after drifting at sea for 21 hours in a small dinghy before they were rescued 26 kilometres off the New Zealand coast, news reports said. 

Rescuers were amazed that the pair survived in an engineless, 2.4- metre fibreglass dinghy with no life jackets or emergency equipment. 

The men, 38-year-old and his nephew, 21, went Monday evening to the mouth of the Tukituki River near Hastings to check a fishing net, but the boat capsized, and they were swept out into the Pacific Ocean. 

They managed to right the dinghy, but its paddles were lost, and they drifted all night. An air and sea search launched Tuesday afternoon found no trace of them until they were spotted by a passing freighter heading into the port of Napier. 

The pair are immigrants from the Pacific island state of Kiribati. A rescue helicopter crew member told the New Zealand Press Association: "If they were unlucky, they might have kept going back to Kiribati." (dpa)