His fate was seal-ed.
A California man thought he would die when he fell off his fishing boat and into the frigid Pacific Ocean — but a friendly harbor seal showed up in the nick of time and helped get him to safety.
Scott Thompson, a sea urchin diver, blamed a lapse in judgment for the mishap that sent him falling off his boat into the Santa Barbara Channel in the middle of the night last month.
“I thought to myself, ‘Great, this is how I’m going to die. Today is the day I’m going to die,’” Thompson, who was wearing nothing but his shorts and T-shirt at the time, told KABC-TV.
Thompson said he left the boat’s motor running and it quickly got away from him.
“That’s when I realized, like, ‘OK, we got problems,’” he said. “And I just started swimming as hard as I could, towards the boat, and it really didn’t take too long to realize like, it’s getting farther, I’m not getting closer.”
Thompson said that’s when he began to fear for his life.
“The panic set in, it was like, ‘Wow! This is a pretty heavy situation,’” he said, adding that he kept telling himself to keep swimming.
While in survival mode, he said, he kept repeating, “You gotta get home to your family.”
“I was devastating myself, through my mind, just picturing my girls and my son growing up without me, and my wife, you know, not having a husband to support her,” Thompson told KABC.
But he said all of a sudden, he heard a big splash — which he assumed was a shark.
“When I heard that splash, my heart jumped out of my chest, and I was like, F—! A shark!” he recalled in a lengthy post on Peter Maguire’s blog “Sour Milk.”
“Just then, a little seal popped its head out of the water right next to me, and looked at me like, Dude! What are you doing out here?”
With no one else for Thomson to turn to, the seal became his “best buddy,” he said.
“He was like my dog. ‘Come here, little buddy!’ I said. He’d bob up and down looking at me, then disappear under water, pop back up, and look at me,” Thompson recounted.
He said the little pup bumped him several times in the butt as if to prod him on.
“It was like he was telling me, Hey, Dude! Get your a– in gear and get going! I was starting to run out of things to say to him, so I sang him Grateful Dead songs and told him the same corny dad jokes that I tell my kids,” he wrote.
Buoyed by the cheering creature, Thompson felt determined to swim to an oil platform, which he reached after about five hours, KABC reported.
“It started getting brighter and I’m just like, I’m crying. And I’m like, shouting at the sky,” he told the station.
Crew members on the rig provided first aid before the Coast Guard got him to a hospital, where he was treated for hypothermia.
“Even putting on a wet suit, being prepared, getting in that water, and swimming to the platform was horrendous,” Paul Amaral, president of towing company Channel Watch Marine told KABC.
“I can’t imagine being in the water with shorts and a T-shirt at night. There was no moon, I mean it was pitch black,” he said.
In his post, Thompson wrote: “I’m a believer that there is a higher power now. I don’t know what it is, but there is a power greater than me. That was shown to me and I will never doubt that for the rest of my life.”
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February 18, 2022 at 12:35AM
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California man survives frigid five-hour night swim with a friendly seal as his guide - New York Post
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