A fishing boat captain who disappeared on his boat in the St. Petersburg area Wednesday night as Hurricane Milton made landfall was found floating in the Gulf of Mexico the next day with nothing but a cooler and a life jacket.
A Coast Guard Air Station Miami helicopter located and rescued him approximately 30 miles from Longboat Key about 1:30 p.m. Thursday, officials said in a news release, over 12 hours after he was first reported missing.
“As we got closer we saw the arms reach up in the air,” said Lt. Landon Klopfenstein, one of the two helicopter pilots, in a video released by the Coast Guard, “and realized, at that moment, we had found the survivor, floating, clinging to a big fishing cooler.”
According to the Coast Guard, a little after noon Monday, the boat captain, who was not identified, had first contacted Coast Guard Sector St. Petersburg watchstanders to tell them that he and a crew member were stuck about 20 miles off John’s Pass, a fishing village on the coast near St. Petersburg. A Coast Guard Station Sand Key rescue boat and an Air Station Clearwater rescue helicopter arrived and hoisted the captain and a crew member, bringing them back to Air Station Clearwater and leaving their boat adrift in the ocean to be salvaged later.
But about 3 a.m. Wednesday, the boat captain decided to return to his boat to make repairs, according to the release. When he didn’t check in by noon, the owner of the boat contacted the same Coast Guard watchstanders. They managed to reach the captain by radio, who told them his boat’s rudder was entangled with a line and had again stopped working while he was making his way back to the port.
By that time, the seas had reached 6 to 8 feet, the winds had reached 30 mph, and the weather was “quickly deteriorating as the storm approached,” the release said. The Coast Guard told the captain to put on a life jacket and stay with the boat’s radio beacon, which indicates someone’s position in an emergency. That evening, shortly before 7 p.m., crews lost contact with the captain.
Hurricane Milton made landfall about 8:30 p.m. that night.
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The two helicopter pilots said they later received a call to look for a person in the water, changed from an overdue boat. They were given a short description, according to Lt. Ian Logan, the other of the two pilots: a red life jacket, black shirt, and black pants.
When they got in the air, they were told to return to Sarasota due to confusion over multiple helicopters flying the same search pattern, Logan said. But as they were figuring out those details, they got an alert on their direction-finding equipment.
As they tracked it down, the crew’s rescue “swimmer” noticed what appeared to be a large white object, possibly debris. As they got closer, they realized it was the captain holding onto the fishing cooler. They hovered and sent the swimmer down to hoist him up.
“Man, we were ecstatic,” Klopfenstein said. “We do a lot of searches for people in the water, overdue vessels, things like that. So to have a success story like this is not as common as we’d like it. We were all very, very excited. We couldn’t believe it.”
The swimmer got to the captain, whose personal locator beacon had trapped him to the cooler, and cut him free. Then the helicopter took him to Tampa General Hospital.
Video footage shared by the Coast Guard shows the helicopter arriving and sending the crew member into the turbulent water to rescue the captain from where he floated.
Coincidentally, on the way to that same rescue, the swimmer had been telling Klopfenstein and Logan about a story in which a Coast Guard crew miraculously found a man off the coast of Montauk during the last leg of a search, towards the end of the window of time in which he was likely to survive.
“Oftentimes when you’re just staring into nothing, it’s hard to stay focused,” Logan said. “But you hear about these miracles, and it was just funny that this swimmer was talking about it during the flight.”
The fact that crews were able to find the captain in time wasn’t the only miracle. He had “survived in a nightmare scenario for even the most experienced mariner,” said Lt. Cmdr. Dana Grady, Sector St. Petersburg’s command center chief.
Grady estimated that the captain “experienced approximately 75-90 mph winds, 20-25 foot seas, for an extended period of time to include overnight. He survived because of a life jacket, his emergency position indicating locator beacon, and a cooler.”