CNN —
Three boaters clung to a makeshift ice chest raft and fended off shark attacks and jellyfish stings in the waters off Empire, Louisiana, until they were rescued 28 hours later, all thanks to a miraculous text message.
The three long-time friends set out on October 8 to fish for red snapper, as they had done so many times before. But the rough sea soon began to disturb their fishing boat, splashing water inside the vessel.
“The moment we saw the back of the boat start taking on water, that’s when I knew it,” Fong Le said on NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday. “It was like the perfect storm for the perfect accident.”
The front of the boat was tied to an oil rig, but the waves worsened, crashing into the side of the boat. The men had about two minutes to react before their 24-foot center console boat sank around 10 a.m., according to an interview with “Good Morning America.”
The men quickly created a makeshift raft by tying two ice chests together with Le’s bandana.
“Every time I go fishing, I wear a bandana because I lose a hat every time,” Le said.
They tried to move towards the oil rig to call for help.
“Every oil rig has some kind of foam or something there, so we figured we could go up there and call for help,” Le said. But they never succeeded.
As the sky darkened, the three men clung to the coolers, the moon providing some comfort.
“Good thing there was a full moon because we had light,” Luan Nguyen told NBC. “We couldn’t see anything, so we just drifted through the night.”
Until an unwanted visitor arrives. A shark crashed into Nguyen and a fight for survival ensued.
“The shark hit the life jacket and I tried to push it off. He didn’t want to leave, so I stabbed him in the eye,” Nguyen told NBC. “I stuck my thumbs in his eyes and he took off. I have a few small scars, but you know.
Other sea creatures also made their presence known, making things even more difficult for the floating men.
“Every 15 to 20 minutes you were continuously being stung by jellyfish,” Le told NBC.
“I woke up in the middle of the night with this big jellyfish on my lap,” Le added, pointing out during the interview that the jellyfish was about as wide as he was.
The men remained almost silent through it all, bobbing in the water.
“It was very cold, so we were just trying to stay warm, just trying to hug each other and stay warm,” Le said.
Le separated from the group the next morning. He wanted to swim about five miles to a shrimp boat and call for help, he told NBC. But after about a mile, the shrimp left, he said.
Trying to find out his location, Le took out his cell phone, protected by a waterproof case – it had less than 5% battery and was on airplane mode to conserve power.
“I opened my phone and then all of a sudden all the text messages came in,” Le said. “The whole time I had no signal, but in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico I had a signal.”
Le wastes no time. He said he captured his location on a map and sent it to a friend. The phone died soon after.
The friend received the message and contacted the Coast Guard with the location of the boaters.
The men didn’t know it, but before the miraculous text message got through, the Coast Guard was on its way, Lt. Katie Carraway of Air Force Station New Orleans told CNN on Thursday. She was the co-pilot of a Jayhawk helicopter that helped rescue the men.
Five minutes into their flight, Carraway said they received a radio transmission that there was new information they could use in the search. It took them 25 minutes to reach the location sent in the text message.
After searching the waters for 15 to 20 minutes, a pilot from a Coast Guard aircraft flying at an altitude of 1,000 feet spotted one of the men waving from the water, Carraway said.
“Le, he was the first survivor that we caught, and he was actually the one that got separated from the rest of his group because he had tried to swim over to a shrimp boat to call for help,” Carraway told CNN.
A rescue swimmer jumped from the helicopter and swam over to check on Le, Carraway said.
“He didn’t talk much at all,” she said. “He was completely exhausted.”
Carraway got into position, released the rescue basket, and lifted Le up to the helicopter.
Around that time, the helicopter crew heard that the other two boaters had been found about a mile away, Carraway said. They flew to the response boat to help.
Coast Guard Seaman Andrew Stone was on a 45-foot response boat when the call came in about the other two men, he said.
“They were being harassed by sharks when we stopped,” Stone said.
Nguyen was bleeding in the water, his hands covered in blacktip shark bites about 4 feet long, Stone told CNN on Tuesday.
“His orange life jacket was torn about halfway through the fish,” Stone said.
Stone was the first to pull Nguyen onto the boat.
“I just remember him picking me up, pulling me out of the water, it was like ‘wow, I made it,'” Nguyen told Today with tears in his eyes.
Senior Officers Joshua McAnally and Cooper Butcher pulled the second man from the water, Stone said.
“These guys suffered from pretty heavy exposure. They were very dehydrated, hungry, of course,” Stone said.
The boaters were also sunburned and suffering from hypothermia when they were rescued on Sunday, he said.
“The water temperature in the bay where they were (was) 78 degrees, which sounds warm, but anything below your body temperature will start to take away heat,” Stone said.
Coast Guard crews reunited the men pulled from the water with Le, who was already on the helicopter, he said.
Coast Guard members are trained for such events, but this rescue was anything but ordinary, Carraway said.
“People like this who have been in the water for a long time, who have been displaced from their ship with no form of communication, it’s almost impossible to find them and bring them back,” Carraway said. “That takes the cake for salvation.”
“The likelihood of finding these people prior to the text message,” Carraway added, “was slim to none. It was still very thin after the text message.
In total, about 30 members of the Coast Guard participated in the search.
“To bring these people home, which is something we train for every week, and to do it in a textbook manner and actually save three survivors … was probably the best feeling you can have as a Coast Guard operator.” , Carraway said.
The Coast Guard Sector New Orleans is planning a gathering for the survivors and all responders who were part of the rescue.
“I just look at it as doing my job,” Carraway said. “I am happy that they will be able to spend the rest of their lives with their families.”
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