Friends Survive Rough Water, Sharks, Jellyfish and Hypothermia After Fishing Trip Goes Horribly Wrong
Three friends are alive and on their way to recovery today after a harrowing 28-hour encounter with nature that began on Oct. 8 and involved multiple deadly factors.
Phong Le, Luan Nguyen and Son Nguyen, all good friends, set out on that fateful day to go fishing off the coast of Empire, Louisiana. They’d tied their boat to an oil rig, but soon large waves and rough water started to capsize the boat.
Seeing their boat going down, the three men started readying themselves by donning their life vests and lashing two ice chests together with a bandana Le always brought with him when he went fishing.
“The minute we saw the back of the boat start taking on water, I knew it right then and there,” Phong Le told NBC’s “Today” show. “It was like the perfect storm for the perfect accident.”
“We made a distress call on the VHF radio to the Coast Guard and let them know that we’d taken on water,” he added in an interview with Good Morning America. “And not even seconds after that, the boat was nearly halfway in the water.”
They tried to make it back to the oil rig, figuring they would be able to use the rig’s communication devices to send out a call for help, but swim as they might with their makeshift raft, they couldn’t close the distance. They had no reception on their own phones, so they couldn’t call for help.
Thankfully, one of the coolers contained water and food, which was a saving grace. The night was long, and there was a full moon but it didn’t significantly help the fishermen.
“Good thing there was full moon out so we had light,” Luan Nguyen told NBC. “But as far as, you know … we couldn’t barely see anything, so we just drifted at night.”
And as they drifted, jellyfish started drifting into them, stinging them in the dark.
“Every 15 to 20 minutes, you were constantly being stung by jellyfish,” Le said.
“In the middle of the night, I woke up with a jellyfish this big in my lap,” he said, indicating with his hands that the creature was nearly as wide as he was.
But the jellyfish weren’t as concerning as the blacktip sharks that started to harass them.
“The shark hit the life vest and I tried to push him off,” Nguyen said. “He wouldn’t go away, so I jabbed him in his eyes … I put my thumbs in his eyes and he took, took off. Yeah. I got a couple scars, but you know.”
The three friends stayed together, barely speaking, trying to huddle together for warmth and fending off sharks. The next day, on Oct. 9, they spotted a shrimp boat about five miles away, and Le knew this might be their last chance for rescue.
So he struck out, covering four or five miles and leaving his two friends behind in an attempt to save them all. But in a heartbreaking turn of events, when he was about a mile from the boat, he saw it start moving away and a short while later, it was gone.
Left with few other options, he pulled out his waterproofed phone to check his location. He found his location, took a screenshot of the map, and then started getting a ton of message notifications.
“I opened up my phone and then that’s when all of a sudden, all of the text messages came in,” Le said. “The whole time I didn’t have no signal but out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, I had a signal.”
Somehow, he’d been able to swim to a spot in the Gulf of Mexico where he could get a signal — but his phone had only five percent battery left. This was his chance, and if he dropped his phone or the battery died before he could send out a message, it would be over.
Working quickly, he sent the screenshot to a friend. It wasn’t his exact coordinates, but it was something. It went through, but as he could see his friend was writing back the phone died.
By that time, the Coast Guard had already been informed of the missing men after they failed to return the night before. They were on their way by helicopter when they found out they had new information regarding a potential location, thanks to the screenshot Le was able to fire off at the last moment.
The Jayhawk co-pilot, Lieutenant Katy Caraway, told CNN that they found Le first.
“Le, he was the first survivor that we picked up and he was actually the one who got separated from the rest of his group because he had tried swimming to a shrimp boat to call for help,” she said. “He didn’t talk much at all. He was completely exhausted.”
The other two fishermen were picked up by boat — and just in time. Sharks were circling, darting in to bite and take off again. One of the men was bleeding into the water, and their vests were shredded — one of the vests was half gone already.
“They were getting harassed by sharks when we pulled up,” Coast Guard Seaman Andrew Stone recalled, according to CNN.
“These guys were suffering from pretty severe exposure. They were very dehydrated, hungry, of course. The water temperature of the Gulf, where they were, (was) 78 degrees, which sounds warm, but anything below your body temperature will start robbing heat.”
Exhausted, sunburned, bitten, stung and hypothermic — but alive. It was nothing short of a miracle that the Coast Guard was able to find them in time, but Caraway also applauded the men’s preparedness and ingenuity, saying that their own experience helped keep them alive, too.
“People like this who have been in the water for a long time, who have been displaced from their vessel with no form of communication, it is almost impossible to find them and recover them,” Caraway said. “This takes the cake for the rescue.
“The likelihood of finding these individuals before the text message was slim to none. After the text message, it was still very slim.”
“I just remember him picking me up, pulling me out the water,” a tearful Nguyen said of his rescue. “It was like ‘wow, I made it.'”
It’s a rescue that will stay with all involved for some time. Le added that another fishing adventure is “not in the cards” for him anytime soon.
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