The captain of a commercial fishing boat who fell overboard at night without a life jacket was rescued four hours later by a good Samaritan boat about 12 miles off Panama City, Florida. The people who rescued him said he didn’t even seem to be out of breath.
The drama started at 3:47 a.m. Sunday when a crewman on the fishing boat Fiona Leone woke up and realized that the captain was not at the wheel, or anywhere else on the boat. He had fallen overboard, and the boat was on autopilot.
The crewman issued a Mayday call on Channel 16, reporting the missing captain, and said he was wearing blue shorts but not a life jacket. Fortunately, the waves in the Gulf of Mexico were only about a foot at the time.
The Coast Guard station in Mobile, Alabama, launched a 45-foot response boat, a fixed-wing plane and a cutter, Diamondback, to search for the missing captain. It also issued an emergency broadcast asking all vessels in the area to be on the lookout for him.
About four hours later, after the sun was up, passengers on the New Beginning, a 52-foot charter fishing boat also out of Panama City (see picture at top), saw something in the water. The passengers were a group of junior hockey players and their fathers from Nashville, Tennessee, out on a holiday.
As they got closer, they saw the captain waving, and they brought him on board. “He’s not tired, he’s not out of breath. Like, it was crazy,” one of the kids told WMBB News. Another said, “He wanted to go fishing with us, but the Coast Guard had to pick him up.”
The Coast Guard carried the captain back to the Fiona Leone and he returned to port. (The captain remains unnamed.)
“We’d like to commend the crew of New Beginning on their vigilance and willingness to help,” said Coast Guard Captain Cassie Kitchen, who coordinated rescue mission. “To survive in the water without a life jacket as the captain did is difficult for anyone to accomplish. The Coast Guard continues to urge the boating public to practice safe boating by wearing life jackets, using kill switches, and having the proper communication equipment such as a VHF-FM radio on board.” Read more:
