Oklahoma Diving Couple Spends 39 Hours Adrift

Not many divers carry dive lights on day dives, but if it weren't for the lights carried by Kim and Nathan Maker, a retired fireman, while diving off Texas in the Gulf of Mexico on July 24, they would not be here to tell their story.

Carried away from their dive boat, the MV Fling, in high seas and bad weather, they drifted 39 hours in the open ocean until Kim flashed her dive light at 1 a m toward an overhead Coast Guard plane While the Coast Guard was about ready to give up the search, a crew member spotted the SOS, and not long after, a Coast Guard boat plucked them safely from the water.

It all began on a dive off Matagorda, Texas, when their group of 16 divers worked their way head down the line. Nathan said, "A person who had gone in before us lost a weight pocket," That person was Lisa Shearin, who had a GoPro camera recording the entire situation. She turned around to head up the line to the boat but had to let go of it to get around other divers heading down.

"I was like a salmon swimming upstream," Shearin said. "I swam with everything I had to get back to that dive line. I was not able to." That's when the current pushed her away, but Nathan helped her get back to the line but then was unable to get himself back.

"Kim reached out for me," he said, "and we were about a foot apart. Our hands were almost there, and somebody inadvertently knocked her off the line." The current pulled them away. Not long after, when they couldn't see the boat, they surfaced.

When all the divers eventually got back on the boat as a storm rushed in, a crew member with binoculars could no longer see the couple. They began to search and, at some point, notified the Coast Guard. They continued for several hours, then returned to port while Coast Guard boats and planes continued.

Kim (44) and Nathan (49) had been diving for nine years and had made about 500 dives. They took inventory of what they had and then tethered themselves together, using a carabiner one of them carried to connect a BC ring to a ring on a depth gauge. Eventually, they saw the lights on a distant oil platform and began kicking toward it, using a compass and a dive watch to tell the time. They kicked for hours but with little progress. In the ocean, when something "looks right over there," it's often not close at all.

They wore their masks to protect their eyes from the waves and were able to catch a little rain to drink. Kim, a special education teacher, said, "It was important for us to stay safe and comfortable while we waited for rescue. After several hours, Nathan began to feel extremely cold and shivered. "Because our body temperatures were dropping," she said," we needed to keep swimming, or we probably would have frozen to death." She and Nathan made a little game out of it, counting to three before they would kick for a while. They sang songs, played goofy games, invented elaborate cocktails, and longed for a corned beef and pastrami sandwich at Kenny & Ziggy's Jewish Deli in Houston.

From time to time, they saw the Coast Guard looking for them. "I saw the white and orange color and knew it was the Coast Guard, and I was like, they know we're out here. They're going to keep looking, and we're good," Nathan said. But the planes didn't seem to notice them. "They were just south or west of us, and we're thinking, we're going to be next; they're going to check our section next," Kim said.

The second day, after they heard a Coast Guard plane that didn't see them, Nathan started regurgitating salt water. Kim said, "I had had some stomach issues, so we both knew our bodies were getting bad."

Nathan, who has diabetes, did not have his medicine and told her, "My body is shutting down. I can feel it." Their confidence in being rescued was wavering. "If I go, you need to cut the tether and let my body go, and you just gotta get home," he told her.

"I had no interest in surviving without him. I had a plan of my own that I didn't tell him about, but we were going to go together."

They continued to encourage each other, and after midnight the second night, another plane passed over. Kim said, "I hit them with my flashlight and started doing an SOS," a survival tip she learned from her Dad years ago.

Above, crew members in the plane were making their last run before calling the search over. A crew member spotted the light, and they called for a rescue.

"All of a sudden, we see a speedboat coming right toward us," Kim said.

"I hugged her," Nathan said. "We're going to live, this is it, they found us."

The Coast Guard hauled them in, got them out of their gear, warmed them up, clothed and fed them. They spent a short time in a hospital, getting checked out, treated for sunburn, jellyfish stings, and other related maladies, and were soon released.

One of the first things they did was head to Ziggy's Deli, where Ziggy recognized them from news reports, welcomed them with big hugs, and bought them lunch, matzo ball soup, that big triple-decker sandwich they had dreamed about while afloat, and plenty of pickles. It was their 12th wedding anniversary.

As for Nathan's take on their unwanted adventure, he said, "I believe I saw the hand of God that day, and it was the hand of the Coast Guard."

And, we might add, it was also the hand that held the light that flashed the SOS.

Ben Davison

PS: We prepared this story from a variety of sources, including The New York Times and a KPRC2 Houston news report that shows Lisa Shearin's video of some of the dive. We contacted the MV Fling for further details but received no response. Curiously, none of the news reports refer to the boat or specific crew members, but it's clearly visible in this news video in the footage from Sherin's camera.

https://tinyurl.com/mt5s3r75