An Oklahoma couple spent nearly 40 hours adrift at sea when a ferocious storm knocked them off their scuba-diving safety line — and they miraculously survived by realizing “we needed to keep swimming, or we probably would have frozen to death.”
Nathan and Kim Maker spent about 38 hours lost off the coast of Texas until their rescue Friday morning, after being swept away from their boat while diving Wednesday.
The couple, both experienced divers, had been in the water with a group of 16 others when a storm blew in and forced everybody back to the boat.
“The rain was so hard that you couldn’t see outside,” Linda Shearing, another diver in the group, told KOCO News 5.
“It stormed and the winds were atrocious, the waves were atrocious,” she said.
As the group was surfacing, another woman was tossed loose off the safety line they were all holding onto, and Nathan swam after her to help her to safety.
During that chaos, however, Nathan was unable to get ahold of the line again and Kim was also knocked off as a surge of water washed over them.
“A huge swell comes in and engulfs Kim and Nathan totally. When the swell rolls out, they’re nowhere to be found,” said a relative of the Makers, Charles Owen.
The couple quickly found themselves drifting out of sight of the boat, and before long were alone in the open water.
“The boat was getting smaller and smaller and smaller until it was completely out of sight,” Nathan told “Good Morning America,” adding that they then “took inventory of what we had on us and we tethered ourselves together.”
After initially trying to swim to an oil rig they could see in the far distance, Nathan and Kim realized they needed to keep moving to stay alive.
“Because our body temperatures were dropping, we needed to keep swimming, or we probably would have frozen to death,” Kim said.
Meanwhile, the Coast Guard had been notified about what happened and were combing a more than 1,600 square-mile area for the couple.
Around 1 a.m. Friday, as their distraught families back home were beginning to worry that the search would be called off, the Makers spotted a search plane in the distance and started flashing SOS with a flashlight — and the aircraft saw them.
A boat was soon dispatched to their location about 20 miles offshore.
“Just out of the corner of our eyes this speedboat comes just streaming in, and all of a sudden I can hear the voices of Coast Guard guys,” Kim said of the moment they were rescued.
“I really believe we saw the hand of God that day. And it was the hand of the Coast Guard,” Nathan added.
They were returned to shore — sunburned and stung by jellyfish — but otherwise unharmed.
Both told “Good Morning America” they plan to continue diving, but will probably keep shore in sight on their next trips.