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A rented evening ride on the water nearly turned fatal for a Long Beach, California, man who spent 16 hours floating at sea before a Coast Guard helicopter spotted him waving from the waves. Paul Carbullido Jr. was pulled from the ocean roughly 3 miles from where he had fallen off his personal watercraft, according to the news outlet The Inertia.
Carbullido and a friend had rented a pair of PWCs on the evening of August 16, the publication reported. About 10 minutes after launching, a wave knocked Carbullido off his machine. His friend tried to pull him onto her own machine, and when that failed, she jumped into the water to help.
“She jumped off her Jet Ski,” Carbullido told reporters. “Her Jet Ski, I remember, it was just going. And then she came to where I was at, and she was like, ‘Come on!’ And I was trying to tell her, ‘I need to catch my breath. I need to catch my breath.’ Because I didn’t even know what hit me.”
Unable to get Carbullido moving, his friend began swimming back toward shore. After about an hour, she reached a boat and shouted for help.
At around 10:30 p.m., a passing vessel operator dialed 911 after hearing the woman calling out near the Long Beach Breakwater.
“At approximately 10:30 p.m., a Good Samaritan aboard a vessel called 911 after hearing a woman yelling for help from the Long Beach Breakwater,” the Long Beach Fire Department said. “LBFD lifeguards responded, swam to the breakwater, rescued the woman, and brought her aboard an LBFD fire boat for assessment.”
Carbullido, however, had already drifted far from where he had gone into the water. The search stretched through the entire night.
A Long Night Alone at Sea
As hours passed in the dark, Carbullido said his mind turned to grim possibilities.
“I was telling myself, ‘What’s the best way to die? Should I just drown? Should I just bite myself? Bleed? Let something eat me?’ I was really nervous. I was really scared,” he recalled.
Rescue finally came at 10:48 a.m. August 17, when a helicopter crew spotted him waving. By then he had been in the water for 16 hours.
“I probably had just a little bit of time left, you know?” he said. “Because I knew my time was up. I was like, ‘I can’t do this no more.’ I gave all I could give. I remember seeing it. It was right above me, and I was just jumping up. ‘Help! Help! Help!’ You know? And they circled down, I saw them doing the eye contact. They threw everything down. They pulled me up, and it was just relief. And he was just looking at me, and he said, ‘People don’t survive this.’”
Luke Singer, an aviation survival technician with the U.S. Coast Guard, said the crew’s surprise was justified. “We’re not used to finding a person in the water too consistently, so that was a big surprise when we found him,” Singer said.
This article was prepared with the assistance of automated tools and human research and verified by our editorial team.