Two anglers whose boat sank over the weekend in the Gulf of Mexico clung to an improvised float and fought off sharks while the third swam what felt like kilometers to search for help.
The swimmer, Phong Le, managed to find a cellphone signal, and sent a Google map of his location just before his battery died, he told ABC News on Tuesday.
The three men had been in the water since about 10am on Saturday — the sharks showed up on Sunday morning, Luan Nguyen said.
Photo: US Coast Guard via AP
One bit the front of his life vest.
“And I think that’s where I caught ... these injuries on my hand,” he told the broadcaster, which identified the third boater as Son Nguyen.
“I took my two thumbs and jabbed him in the eyes, and he took off,” Luan Nguyen said.
Even as the two men were pulled from the water, they were being circled and harassed by four blacktip sharks measuring about 1.2m to 1.8m long, said Andrew Stone from the US Coast Guard boat crew that rescued the exhausted pair.
“They were too tired to even be panicking,” he said in an interview alongside other coast guard members and officials, none of whom referred to the boaters by name.
All three boaters were back home on Tuesday, the coast guard said.
“These peoples’ will to survive and their lifejackets is what saved their lives,” said Lieutenant Katy Caraway, a helicopter copilot who rescued Le, who was suffering from hypothermia.
She flew all three to a New Orleans hospital.
Caraway said that while her helicopter was pulling Le up, the man who swam for help, an airplane located the two who had to fight off sharks about 0.8km to 1.6km away.
A coast guard boat based in Venice rushed to that spot.
Helicopter rescue swimmer Richard Hoefle said both boaters had deep cuts on their hands, and one was missing the tip of a middle finger.
He said one man told him in the hospital that “I was 100 percent certain my time was up” before he saw the aircraft that spotted them.
When the group’s 7.3m boat sank, it left them with no radio in an area without cellphone service.
“We made a distress call on the VHF radio to the coast guard and let them know that we’d taken on water, and not even seconds after that, the boat was nearly halfway in the water,” Le told ABC.
They tied two ice chests together as a makeshift float. One happened to hold water and fruit, Luan Nguyen told the network.
One man’s wife reported them missing at about 10pm on Saturday, said Lieutenant Commander Kevin Keefe, rescue coordinator for Sector New Orleans.
The woman did not know their launch point, he said, and it took about three-and-a-half hours to find their vehicle in Venice, near Louisiana’s southeastern tip, so crews would know the best areas to search when dawn broke.
Le said that he swam off for help on Sunday. After swimming for what felt like lilometers, he got a signal on his cellphone and texted his Google map location to a friend.
“I see him trying to reply to me, and the phone cut off — I ran out of battery,” Le told the network.
A boater’s wife texted it to the coast guard, Keefe said.
Coast guard boats, planes and a helicopter had spent fruitless hours searching an area larger than Rhode Island.
Then the screenshot arrived.
Using coastal contours, the command center was able to figure out where it was, Keefe said.
Le was rescued first.
After the two shark-fighters were lifted into the helicopter, there was a lot of hugging, Hoefle said, adding that until then Le “had no idea if his friends were alive or dead.”
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