Woman and man face camera to recount being lost at sea for 36 hours after scuba diving trip went wrong

Two experienced divers who were rescued by the US Coastguard after losing their boat and spending 36 hours adrift say they plan to dive again, but first they’ll be celebrating the US’s Coastguard’s Day this coming Sunday.

The couple became separated from their group boat while on a dive in the Gulf of Mexico.

The incident occurred after Nathan Maker helped another member of the dive group who’d lost her grip on the down wire.

“I was swimming with everything I had to get her back to the line,” Maker says. The lady he helped made it back onboard, but in the ensuing melee, both he and his partner Kim were engulfed in a swell and swept away by the current.

“The boat was getting smaller and smaller until it was completely out of sight,” he told Good Morning America. “Kim and I took inventory of what we had on us. We tethered ourselves together.”

“We needed to keep swimming otherwise we would have probably frozen to death,” Kim Maker says. “It would have been easy to give up.”

“People don’t survive that and not have a story to tell,” Lisa Shearin, a diver who was on the boat with the couple, told Koco. “The rain was so hard that you couldn’t see outside. It stormed and the winds were atrocious, the waves were atrocious.”

The couple were eventually spotted by a plane, as the US Coastguard searched a 1,600 square mile area.

The couple used their dive flashlights to signal an SOS signal to a plane, which then alerted the coastguard’s boat.

Aerial view of dark sea with two divers barely visible

‘The Ocean Sentry aircraft aircrew spotted a flashing light in the water while searching and vectored in the divers’ location to the cutter. The divers were transported to Coast Guard Station Freeport, and were last reported to be in stable condition,’ says a coastguard statement.

After being rescued the Makers went to hospital with jellyfish stings and sunburn. Family members said Nathan Maker was nearly in a diabetic coma when he was rescued, but both divers are expected to be okay.

The incident has echoes of a 21-year-old woman being rescued after being swept out to sea in a rubber ring while swimming in Japan. She was found approximately 80km off the coast earlier this month, 36 hours after she went missing.

Continue reading MIN’s latest news articles about marine rescues.

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