CAPE FLATTERY, Wash. — Captain John Planes and his nephew Ryan Planes never imagined they would be part of a miraculous rescue of a fisherman who had been missing for nearly two weeks.
“I went and got the binoculars and I looked at it and I could see the guy waving his paddle around in the air and then shortly after that he lit off his last flare at us,” Ryan said.
The two said they couldn’t believe what they were seeing, a man floating in a life raft.
“Oh I couldn’t believe it, yeah we couldn’t believe it that there was even somebody on there,” John said. “That’s what I was thinking, we gotta go get him.” The two told KIRO 7 they called the Coast Guard and started toward the man.
“We set up a ladder for him and hung it off the side of the boat and then we just helped him onto the ladder and pulled him on,” Ryan said.
Once he was on board, they gave him a change of clothes and some food. He told the men he had been living on salmon that he caught and had very little water left.
“He just hugged me and started crying and I just couldn’t believe it. Tears of joy,” John said. The U.S. Coast Guard said two people were aboard the 43-foot vessel “Evening” when it departed from Grays Harbor on October 12th.
“He just told us that the boat had flipped over,” John said. “Just to be able to get, deploy the life raft on the boat after it turned over, that was a miracle in itself even getting on that and it saved his life.”
The Coast Guard searched for the vessel covering 14,000 square miles for eight hours but were unsuccessful so the search was called off.
“It just so happened that everything worked out just right like the weather was flat and calmer and if it wasn’t for that we probably wouldn’t have seen him,” John said. “He said he curled up in a ball at night and tried to stay warm because he had no blankets or anything I don’t even know how he did it.”
The man was taken to a hospital for treatment and KIRO 7 was told that he is in stable condition.
“He was just so happy and it made us all feel really well, real happy too,” John said.
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