The Coast Guard rescued three missing boaters in the Gulf of Mexico last Sunday after their boat sank and they were attacked sharks.
Two of the three had serious cuts on their hands from the sharks, and the sharks had almost eaten through one of their life jackets. “Rescued just in the nick of time,” the Coast Guard said in a release.
The three men left Venice, on the southeastern coast of Louisiana, early Saturday morning for a fishing trip on their 24-foot center console. It sank about 10 that morning, leaving them in the water with life jackets but no VHF radio or other marine communications equipment.
When they did not return home on Saturday night, one of their relatives called the Coast Guard to report them missing. The Coast Guard launched an immediate search, involving two boats, two fixed-wing planes and a helicopter. The search eventually covered an area about the size of Rhode Island.
On Sunday afternoon, one of the men realized that he was receiving text messages on his cell phone. The battery was down to 2 percent, but he managed to send a screenshot of his surroundings on Google Maps to a relative at home and said his boat sank.
The relative sent the screenshot to the Coast Guard, which used geolocation to orient it to the Gulf’s contours, also from Google Maps. A Coast Guard fixed-wing plane found them less than two hours later. They were floating about 25 nm offshore, and a Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter and 45-foot boat picked them up. When the Coast Guard boat arrived, two of them were clinging to a cooler, beating back the sharks. See the Coast Guard rescue video below:
