After two and a half months of ordeal, eight Chennai fishermen, who were rescued by the Myanmar Coast Guard, will return to the city on Thursday. Fisheries director G S Sameeran told TOI that the eight fishermen would board a Vande Bharath’ flight from Myanmar around 5pm on Wednesday. They will reach New Delhi by 8pm. As they are returning from a foreign land, all the eight men had to undergo Covid-19 test. The results will be released within eight hours of taking the samples, he said. From New Delhi, they are expected to board a flight on Thursday afternoon and will reach Chennai around 5pm. Nine fishermen from Chennai went for deep-sea fishing on a mechanised boat on July 27. They went missing, and there had been no communication with the fishermen for weeks. In the last week of August, one of the fishermen informed the boat owner that all of them had been rescued and housed in a port town in Myanmar. One of the nine fishermen, identified as Babu, drowned while trying to help local fishermen. His body is yet to be traced. The Chennai fishermen’s boat sank in the sea off the Myanmar coast a week ago.