Five, including two kids, pulled from the Pacific after three months adrift

Five people are alive after spending three months drifting on the open ocean in a 20-foot skiff, authorities in Kiribati confirmed. Two of the five are children. The rescue happened in the South Pacific island nation, a scattering of atolls spread across an enormous stretch of water.

Three months is a brutal amount of time to be out there. The skiff measured just 20 feet — small enough to be tossed around by swells, with almost no room to move and nowhere to hide from sun, wind or rain. That all five made it out is the headline.

The announcement itself was short on specifics. Authorities did not lay out where the group set off from, how they ended up adrift, or where exactly they were found. Nor did they describe the condition of the five when rescuers reached them.

Kiribati's geography makes this kind of story a recurring fear in the region. Its islands are scattered across a vast expanse of the Pacific, and small boats are a routine way to move between them — which also means small boats are a routine way to vanish.

What comes next for the five is largely unspoken for now. The rescue is confirmed; the rest of the picture — how they survived, and what the first hours back on land looked like — has yet to be filled in.