1/2/2024 0 Comments Gravity guy google sitesThe second boat saw me and waved back but kept going. The first one didn’t see me, so I scrambled to a more visible spot higher up. “I found a decent sized stick and attached my t-shirt to the end of it to use a signal to flag down any boats going past. I was going to have to be rescued from here. Jagged rocky cliffs fringed by dense impenetrable jungle. “In the morning after swimming around to the next point at first light, I realised I was in no-man’s land without any way out. My body immediately shut down and I passed out asleep for what felt like 20mins. I immediately felt the exhaustion upon feeling my own weight and gravity for the first time in so many hours. “After what I guess to be about 10hrs, I finally made it to a rocky outcrop and managed to scramble up on the jagged rocks in the faint starlight. I prayed to the universe for glassy conditions and both times after a few hours the breeze died down again and the waves eventually subsided. Despite the relatively small chop they created, it made it so much more difficult to keep my head above the water. A light breeze picked up for a few hours on two occasions from my side and then from head-on. There wasn’t a strong current taking me offshore and the water was warm. Fortunately not a shark, those damned fish stayed with me, biting me almost the whole way to shore. But again I couldn’t afford to waste energy so decided I had to keep swimming at any cost. I went into a frenzy of panicked thinking it was a shark, screaming and kicking and punching in all directions trying to scare it off. ![]() “As soon as night set in I felt a nibble at my feet. Using the straight side of the moon as a navigation aid while it was above and then the stars later. “I was moving so slow it was hard to tell if I was making any progress towards the shore. So began a routine of alternating breast stroke and back frog stroke. “I knew I’d need to stay calm and conserve my energy if I was to have any chance of survival. What other option did I have? Just give up and drown. I usually wouldn’t attempt to swim 200m let alone 17km, but I was gonna give it a go. “I struggled with the realisation of my imminent death for a few minutes not wanting to accept what seemed my inevitable fate, so I decided to give up that idea and determined to swim for shore. I panicked and screamed out ‘Nooooo!!!!’ as I watched my boat sail away gaining more and more distance with every second. It was 5pm and the sun would set in an hour. I was nine nautical miles offshore – about 17km. “Having talked about this many times with fellow sailors as the worst imaginable thing to happen, suddenly I found myself in the water, my boat and home and safety sailing away from me at an alarmingly fast rate. “I had just caught a little tuna and had gotten it off the line when I turned around to redeploy the lure and somehow slipped and fell. “Towards the end of a 30hr passage to Panama from Colombia, in a moment that happened in a split second (yet as if in slow motion) I fell off the back of my sailboat while underway, on autopilot with both sails up and the motor running,” Deer explains. “There was that moment of confronting your mortality,” he says.ĭeer describes what happened in a harrowing account. While casting a line out to catch fish in early June 2022, his foot slipped and he fell – untethered and without a life jacket – into the sea, in an area known to locals as Shark Point.ĭeer was left, watching the boat he’d sailed halfway around the world alone drift over the horizon. I had solar panels so I had free electricity.”ĭeer headed down the west coast of Africa then began the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, intending to reach Panama. “I travelled for free with the wind, I ate for free, fishing from the ocean. “I didn’t want to get old and look back and go ‘oh, I worked a lot’. “It was a cheap way to live, that was a huge apart of the appeal,” he says. He bought a second-hand yacht, Julieta, in the Greek Islands and cruised the Mediterranean, learning to sail. “Then I thought ‘am I just going to float around and wait for that lung full of water? I may as well start swimming’.ĭeer was on a solo sailing trip around the world. ![]() ![]() “I kinda treaded water for a moment and I’m thinking, ‘right, I’m gonna die’,” he told 60Minutes. John Deer, an Australian solo sailor who fell off his yacht in the Caribbean Sea, and had to swim 17km to safety, has spoken of his ordeal.
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